French Foreign Legion
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In any case, the Moroccans were not defeated, and as they reformed at Bou Denib in early May, the French moved to attack them. Lefèvre found the valley of the Guir, through which the 24th Mounted Company marched on May 13 as flank guard for the French column, rich by the standards of Eastern Morocco. Small fields of wheat and barley grew beside the broad bed of the wadi, while ksour—fortified villages shaped and squared like medieval fortresses—lay barely visible behind groves of deep green date palms. To the south, the Hammada of the Guir rose up like a high wall. By midafternoon, the French came in sight of the camp of the harka at the large palm oasis of Beni Ouzien. After a preliminary artillery bombardment, the 24th was flung into an attack on the Moroccans who occupied the palm grove. However, once beneath the trees, they could no longer be supported by their artillery. “We had to carry on by ourselves, or beat a retreat, which didn't cross our minds,” Lefèvre recounted. “Numerous enemy bodies lay on the ground and money spilled out of their bags which we don't even have time to pick up.” Toward evening, they were withdrawn from the grove. “Moroccan losses must be considerable,” Lefèvre believed, “because at this late hour of the night one hears from all points on the plain the lamentations of the wounded and of the survivors looking for corpses.”27
General Bailloud, the commander of the 19th Corps, severely criticized this action as another example of a lack of interarm cooperation that was in evidence at Menabha, and of a lack of a methodical battle plan. The French commander, General Vigy, had become “hypnotized” by the struggle of the 24th Mounted Company, and had engaged in a battle beneath the palm trees where his 75-mm artillery pieces could not be brought into action.28 One might also add that, once again, the mounted company had been used as elite assault troops when there had been plenty of infantry available to undertake such actions. In the process, the mounted company had lost fifteen dead, including its interim commander. For this reason, the 24th was held in reserve on the following day when the Ksar of Bou Denib was first bombarded and then attacked by the French. However, they participated in full measure in the pillage of the town that soon began. “Our mounts are laden as much as possible with dates, barley, flour, burnouses and arms,” Lefèvre wrote. Outside the town, five hundred men and three hundred women were under guard. “One of [the women] makes me understand that she has lost her child in the fight and pleads with me to find it. I am lucky enough to put my hands on it and bring it to her. She makes me a gift of her glass necklace from the Sudan.”29
Though the Moroccans had been badly mauled at Bou Denib in May, they had not yet been so badly defeated that they had given up. The mobile troops organized to pursue the retreating harka failed to find it. Therefore, the French could not have been surprised when it reappeared before Bou Denib in August. From the Moroccan viewpoint, however, it proved to be a mistake. Assaults upon the Ksar of Bou Denib, newly fortified and garrisoned by the 24th and supported by artillery, and upon an outlying blockhouse also held by legionnaires, were costly failures. The arrival of a relief column allowed the French to march out of Bou Denib on the night of September 6–7 with five thousand men and eighteen artillery pieces onto the Plain of Djorf, where the harka had made camp. “The sunrise offers an impressive spectacle,” wrote Lefevre. “Before us stretching for at least six kilometers are all the tents of the harka.”30 What followed was a massacre. The Moroccans attacked the French square and were blasted from a distance by the artillery, which, after a time, then turned on the camp, which disappeared in pillars of smoke. The Moroccans, or rather those still alive, fled up the pass that led out of the plain, pushing donkeys laden with what they could salvage of their possessions. The mounted company was launched in pursuit and discovered a trail of wounded and dying, “lying in every corner and we still find human debris at more than ten kilometers from the battlefield.” The scene at Bou Denib was worse, where the inhabitants had been impressed to bury the dead, “but the job was carried out too quickly, for one sees feet, hands and heads sticking out.... Pestilential odors permeate everything.”31
The performance of the mounted companies at Menabha, Bou Denib and Djorf in 1908 considerably strengthened their reputation, even though, as seen, there they had been used as line infantry rather than in reconnaissance and cavalry support roles. This reputation was enhanced still further in 1910, when a mounted company singlehandedly held off a furious Moroccan attack on the Moulouya River in Eastern Morocco. Such was the performance of the mounted companies that in 1913 General Trumelet-Faber could report that “. . . this unit occupies almost by itself half the history of the Regiment in the pacification of the Sud Oranais.”32
In fact, Trumelet-Faber was so enthusiastic about the mounted companies that he believed that they should form the basis for a complete reorganization of the Legion. “Mounting the entire Legion would perhaps be going too far,” he believed, but he suggested that each battalion could furnish a 200-man mounted company and three “light companies” of 150 men each. A mounted company came fresh into combat, and could put 160 rifles on line (discounting the 40 men detailed to hold the mules): “One must witness the agility and vigor with which the 160 men come into action. These 160 rifles have a first class aggressive capacity.” Furthermore, it would allow the French to cut down the number of European troops used on campaign, because the mobility of the mounted companies and their lower rate of attrition permitted them to support four times their number of native troops. Trumelet-Faber cited the Moulouya campaign of May-October 1912 as proof of the endurance of the mounted companies, when only 12.9 percent or 29 of 225 men dropped out, compared to 23.5 percent or 129 of 548 men lost to sickness and exhaustion in the Legion infantry battalion that took part.33
But this solution to the high attrition rate in the Legion was perhaps not as simple as Trumelet-Faber believed. In the first place, despite double pay and an aggressive, elite image, volunteers failed to come forward in large numbers for the mounted companies. Raimond Premschwitz believed that “One does not go willingly into the mounted company, because one has no rest and is always on the road.”34 And those who did volunteer seldom planned to make it a career. In 1902, General Fernand O'Connor agreed that the mounted companies were indeed an elite, but no one was willing to serve in them for longer than a year.35 When Lyautey came to the Sud Oranais in 1903, he discovered that so great was the turnover in the mounted companies that they were completely disorganized for a great part of the year. One of his first reforms was to stagger the replacement schedule to limit the effects of this periodic disorganization.36
The high turnover in the mounted companies came as a great shock to General Bailloud when, in September 1910, he sought out the 24th Mounted Company to congratulate those who had fought so bravely two years earlier, only to discover that none were left: “There had been a complete turnover in two years,” he reported.37 However, he simply betrayed how little he understood the mentality of the mounted companies. When, in September 1908, Lefèvre was sent back to Algeria, he announced that “I left the infected post of Bou Denib with no regrets. For with the glory of our arms we have above all collected misery. Often, not to say always, badly fed, badly quartered, paying top price for everything with no compensation, that's OK for awhile. But one ends up by becoming fed up, and we are all very tired.”38 English legionnaire A. R. Cooper, who served in the mounted companies in the interwar years, found the life desperately hard: “The officers of the mounted company were old legionnaires and very severe,” he wrote. “The hardships and monotony of life were terrible. It was perhaps my hardest time in the Legion. I lost all count of time and did not care about anything, least of all what happened to me. I was hopeless and desperate.” Even in garrison, there was nothing to do but “stare at sand and grumble.”39
So while the attrition rate on campaign in the mounted companies was less than in regular infantry units, legionnaires did not therefore prefer to serve on muleback, at least not indefinitely. The mounted companies owed their lower attrition to a more rigor
ous selection and to the fact that the men were not obliged to carry heavy packs. Nevertheless, the fact remained that the long route marches, while punishing, occurred only periodically in the infantry, and alternated with perhaps tedious but not especially onerous garrison duty elsewhere in Algeria, Tonkin or Madagascar. The mounted companies, by contrast, were given little leisure, which made them an unattractive prospect for many.
And while those legionnaires who longed for the active life, who disliked the monotony and petty restrictions of the barracks, sought out the mounted companies, even they found the life too rigorous to endure indefinitely. Already the shortage of volunteers for the mounted companies had forced the Legion to designate the unwilling, so that Trumelet-Faber's plans to expand them would have met resistance, and probably a higher attrition rate. Also, there were already complaints that, as in the Legion overall, there were simply not enough officers and NCOs to staff the mounted companies as constituted, much less in an expanded version.40
It is also perhaps ironic that at almost the very moment that Trumelet-Faber was suggesting an expansion of the mounted companies, other generals, including Lyautey, were debating whether to withdraw them from the Sud Oranais. The reason for this was simple—desertion had become a serious problem in the mounted companies there. In fact, in the decade before World War I, desertion had become a serious problem in the Legion generally. Of course, the problem was not a new one—desertion in Mexico and during the passage to the Far East has already been discussed. But the question of desertion in the Legion became a far more important one with the approach of World War I for two reasons: first, because it became a serious issue that sharpened tensions between France and Germany before the war. And second, because it caused many French officers to doubt the loyalty of legionnaires and consequently discouraged operational and tactical experimentation in the Legion.
The main problem lay with the perception of what desertion in the Legion was about, and what was really behind it. As was suggested in the chapter on Mexico, much desertion was on impulse, not surprising given the nomadic disposition of many legionnaires. French psychologist Roger Cabrol found that each legionnaire harbored “the almost permanent intention [to desert] whatever his seniority,” even though they seldom acted on it. Legionnaires were inherently unstable men. As their enlistment was an expression of a desire to travel, “to purify themselves,” to “find a new beginning,” so desertion was a continuation of the same quest for change.41 General Daudignac agreed that desertion was inherent in the nature of Legion recruitment, “troubled spirits, wanderers motivated by the taste for adventure, the thirst for money or the need to change.” Whenever he asked legionnaires why they deserted, he always received the same answer: “To see some country. There is nothing else to do here.”42 Merolli pointed out that many deserters had already deserted from the German army, and so found it easier to desert a second time.43
“One could see very clearly how the men who assembled [in the Legion] behaved,” Junger wrote.
Hardly had they achieved this goal, often at the price of great difficulties, than their covetousness gave way to an equally acute disillusion, and they set out with an equal determination, to flee again. All had sought something very vague, perhaps a place where there was no law, perhaps a fabulous world, or even equally an island of forgetfulness. But they quickly saw the absurdity of their attempt, and homesickness took over like a breakdown of the spirit.44
Desertion might be triggered by thoughts of home, by resentment caused by the use of the Legion as a work detail rather than as a fighting unit, or simply by the feeling among legionnaires that youth and opportunity were passing them by.45
The Legion expected that many young recruits would attempt to desert, quickly rounded them up and, after fifteen days in the cells, put them back on the barrack square. “Desertion is more common among young soldiers who, homesick, regret their enlistment,” General Muteau wrote in 1910.46 But by the turn of the century, if not before, desertion had become such an integral part of the Legion experience that it was considered almost a rite of passage for a new recruit. Ernst Junger found that desertion was a sort of Legion game at which he resolved to demonstrate his mastery: “... I imagined that I only came here to show the others how such an enterprise should be carried out.”47 Both Flutsch and Premschwitz discovered that they were much better accepted by older comrades after they had attempted to desert. 48
In fact, the point of desertion was not so much to succeed, but to make a personal statement, usually in the most imaginative way possible. Desertion was part of a legionnaire's existential search for satisfaction, a flight from reality, encouraged by the tendency of legionnaires to fantasize, something that the mournful garrisons of southern Algeria probably did little to hold in check. Flutsch met a legionnaire who attempted to enlist him in a plan to escape en masse from Algeria and march across Morocco to Agadir on the Atlantic coast, where they would hijack a boat and sail to Malaysia. “As long as the mother of fools is not dead,” Flutsch was told by one of his more experienced comrades, “the one that dreamed that one up won't be an orphan.”49 But the mother of fools had other, more successful offspring in the Legion: On December 13, 1908, fifty German legionnaires of the 2e étranger, led by a Bavarian named Pal, commandeered a train at Aïn-el-Hadjar in the Sud Oranais and tried to get to the coast. They were stopped, and surrendered quietly. The investigation discovered that Pal had already deserted from the 1er étranger, where he had served under the name of Kadur. He had convinced the legionnaires that he was a member of Prussian war minister Count von Waldersee's staff and had been sent on an official mission to get them to Tangier. He confessed that his escapade had been inspired by a report in a German newspaper in which a worker disguised as a captain had ordered the military guard to arrest the mayor of a small town and had made off with the municipal strongbox. Pal was given twenty years hard labor.50
In this situation of instability, fantasy and regret, it might take little to trigger a departure “en bombe”—bad news from home or a rough word from a superior that might normally be taken in stride—among an assemblage of men already predisposed toward dramatic gestures.51 The problem this caused for the Legion was that, on the outside, desertion was attributed to the brutal conditions of Legion service. The Legion argued that, on the contrary, the sense of loyalty to the Legion sprang from a stern but fair discipline, a comprehensible set of rules that contrasted sharply with what legionnaires perceived to be the arbitrary, often unjust, nature of the life that most had experienced before enlistment. Yet the fairness of Legion discipline was not universally acknowledged. Trumelet-Faber complained that many punishments in the Legion sprang from the fact that foreigners, Germans especially, did not understand orders and were punished when they were slow to carry them out.52 For instance, Pfirmann was given a hefty fifteen days in the cells after he mistakenly signed a chit ordering eight coffee rations when there were only seven men present in the room: “I did not speak enough French to justify myself,” he wrote.53 And while this certainly did not produce desertion in his case, in men less well disposed, confronted with more weighty cases of injustice or an accumulation of smaller examples of arbitrary or unfair discipline, the cards in the Legion might appear to be as stacked against them as they had been on the outside, perhaps more so. Indeed, the complaint about Legion punishments was not so much their severity, but their frequency. The tendency of Legion NCOs to distribute days in the cells for the most minor infractions could, and indeed did, create an atmosphere of unfairness, especially among foreigners.
This was important, for, as has been argued, the traditional notion of morale and discipline as something defined and imposed by the military hierarchy upon the ranks fails to take into account the role played by legionnaires in delineating their own definitions of permissible behavior. It is fairly clear that legionnaires considered desertion under certain circumstances to be acceptable conduct, a viable remedy for depression or injustice, real or imagined,
and that this behavior was tolerated within limits by the military hierarchy. It was a recognition of the special psychology of their men, and the character of the regiment.
Although desertion became almost a hallmark of the Legion, it was seldom a problem in Algeria. For instance, desertion statistics for the 2e étranger for the first decade of the twentieth century show that, in Algeria, between 108 and 219 men deserted each year, a small percentage of regimental strength.54 Yet the primary reason that the desertion rate was so low in Algeria was that there was simply no place to desert to. To get out of Algeria successfully, a deserter invariably had to have money to buy civilian clothes and a ticket out. Rosen claimed to have pulled it off because, riding first class in a new suit of clothes bought with money sent by his girlfriend, he looked too much the gentleman to be taken for a legionnaire, and therefore no one asked to see his passport.55 Flutsch was told that Jews, because they would be given aid by their numerous co-religionists in North Africa, and madmen, because the Arabs treated the deranged with great reverence, enjoyed the greatest success rate: “Don't you worry about him,” Flutsch was told of an Italian who escaped completely naked from the hospital where he had been confined for strange behavior. “He can go without problem from douar to douar, from Morocco to Tunisia. He speaks Arab. He's loony. They will treat him everywhere like he was Mohammed. Anyone who can play the fool will be listened to on all fours, and will never lack for couscous or grilled mutton.”56 Most deserters, like Ernst Junger, were rounded up in a matter of days, if not hours, walking down the high road or following the railroad tracks between Sidi-bel-Abbès and Oran, so that they might not even have the six days’ absence required to be classified as a deserter.57