Szajkowski charges that the harsh treatment of the Jews was the result of anti-Semitism, and that news of the executions stimulated a campaign by anti-Semitic groups in France to force those foreign-born Jews who had not yet enlisted to join the Legion. These had become even less eager to step forward for service after the news of the executions reached the Jewish community in Paris.40 As this author was refused permission to consult the justice records for the Legion in World War I, it is impossible to know for certain if the Jews of the Legion suffered more as a group than did others, such as the Greeks, for instance. Nor can one know for sure the motives of the protesters. Schwartzbard recorded that French officers blamed the protests upon Jewish revolutionaries, when in fact they had been motivated simply by a desire to transfer out of the Legion. According to the anti-militarist journal he Crapouillot, which claimed to base its figures upon official statistics, 442 French soldiers were executed by firing squads in 1915, higher than for any other year of the war except for 1917, the year of the great mutinies in the French army, when 528 were shot.41 Therefore, seven or eleven men shot out of one battalion would appear to be very high and suggest that the Jews were indeed treated with particular harshness— for instance, American historian Leonard V. Smith, who has studied the justice records for the 5th Infantry Division in World War I, discovered only five executions in the entire division of almost ten thousand men between the outbreak of war and the mutinies of 1917.42
There is also anecdotal evidence that anti-Semitism was prominent in the Legion and that it distorted perceptions about the causes of the 1915 mutiny. Part of this, as noted, was a product of North Africa, where popular anti-Semitism was endemic. The experience of the Dreyfus Affair also did little to ease acceptance of the Jews in the military environment, a condition that became more evident after 1914 when the army was removed from the restraints of diplomatic behavior imposed in peacetime. However, even many new Legion recruits, including the Americans, appear to have disliked the Jews. This came in part, no doubt, from the fact that many of them spoke Yiddish, which was taken for German by the uninitiated, and therefore made them suspect in this period of exalted anti-German feeling. Some were also part of the intellectual diaspora from Russia, and therefore were confirmed political radicals. However, the major charge against the Jewish legionnaires was that they had enlisted to avoid being sent to internment camps and having their goods sequestered. This appears to be the commonly accepted motive for the enlistment of many of the Jews by legionnaires who subsequently castigated them because they served indifferently. “The Second Foreign Regiment was afflicted with a battalion composed almost entirely of Russian Jews and political exiles, which was permeated from the start with a spirit of revolt and anarchy,” Rockwell wrote. “Many of its members had enlisted with no idea of ever going to the front.”43 Even the Historique of the RMLE claimed that many volunteers had only come into the Legion “to save the furniture.”44
The charges against the Jews appear to be largely unfair. Perhaps some, even most, of those whose situation as foreign residents opened them to the threat of internment camps and the sequestration of their goods did join to avoid these fates. But coercion was the major source of recruitment for all European armies in this period—after all, without conscription, how would armies have amassed huge numbers of soldiers? The atmosphere of chauvinistic hysteria that gripped France, as well as other belligerent countries in World War I, forced groups of foreign nationals who otherwise slipped through the conscription net into uniform. No doubt some of them did make indifferent soldiers. According to Cendrars, the Jews tried to be included with the Polish formations of the Legion, but when the Poles rejected this, “... they started to intrigue to be posted to the rear, and those who had no contacts began all sorts of tricks to get out.”45 But in this they were not alone. Indeed, few national groups appear to have been exempt from this, including the French. Cendrars noted that the first “deserters” and those who set the worst example were the French cadres, especially the Paris firemen, who fairly bolted for the exit when they learned that the Legion was to be sent to the front.46 When those from Alsace-Lorraine were given the opportunity of volunteering for the heavy artillery, “which sent them for several months far to the rear for their classes in the training camps and which exempted them forever from returning to the front lines,” few turned it down.47 If the Jews pushed to be released from the Legion, they were in numerous company, for everyone, including most of the Americans who were allowed to transfer into metropolitan regiments in 1915, petitioned to get out.
Nor is there any evidence that they faltered in battle, as did the Greeks, for instance. Therefore, the “mutiny” of the Jewish legionnaires cannot be put down to the fact that they were battle-shy from the beginning. On the contrary, when considered in the context of the large-scale discontent that churned the Legion in June 1915, the mutiny appears to be the result of the fact that foreign volunteers were consigned to the Legion in the first place and that they were poorly treated when they arrived there, and as a protest against the high command's wasteful methods of making war.
Therefore, on the surface at least, it appears as if the Legion were going through a major crisis on the Western Front in the summer of 1915, and that this crisis occurred because legionnaires had begun to thwart the wishes of the command, whose goals they no longer shared. But evidence of low morale was lacking when the Legion was pitched into Joffre's September offensives in Champagne. Beneath a heavy rain, the Legion attacked the Butte de Souain on September 25. The 2e régiment de marche of the 2e étranger seized a battery of German 77-mm guns and several machine guns before allowing successive attack waves to pass through it. That night, it heard a confusion to its front and prepared to receive a German counterattack, only to discover that the noise was that of French troops who had panicked. The sight of the legionnaires with fixed bayonets convinced the Frenchmen to return to their forward positions.
On September 28, two Legion regiments participated in the attack on the strongly fortified Navarin Farm. “Making such time as we could, we finally arrived at the summit of the little ridge,” American legionnaire Edward Morlae wrote of this battle.
Then we left the cover of the trench, formed in Indian file, fifty meters between sections, and, at the signal, moved forward swiftly and in order. It was a pretty bit of tactics and executed with a dispatch and neatness hardly equalled on the drill-ground. The first files of the sections were abreast, while the men fell in, one close behind the other; and so we crossed the ridge, offering the smallest possible target to the enemy's guns.48
The most difficult thing to explain is why the Legion waited until Navarin Farm to employ this particular tactic, as according to Seeger this had been practiced in training as early as October 1914.49 Possibly the rapid turnover of cadres helps to explain it. However, its effect was somewhat spoiled, according to Morlae, by the insistence of his captain that the file progress at the regulation 180 steps per minute, despite the desperately heavy shelling.50 Morlae also suggests that the Legion, as well as other units, had learned from the experience on Hill 140 that their first task on taking the forward German line must be to reverse the trench: “In what seemed half a minute we had formed a continuous parapet, twelve to fourteen inches in height,” he wrote.
. . . Next, each man proceeded to dig his little individual niche in the ground, about a yard deep, twenty inches wide, and long enough to lie down in with comfort. Between each two men there remained a partition wall of dirt, from ten to fifteen inches thick, the usefulness of which was immediately demonstrated by a shell which fell into Blondino's niche, blowing him to pieces without injuring either of his companions to the right or the left.... Soon the order came down the line to deepen the trenches. It seemed we were to stay there until night.51
But they were still two hundred yards short of the main German position, which continued to shower them with machine-gun bullets and artillery. The battle at the Navarin Farm was a costly one fo
r the Legion. But their frontal assault, while unsuccessful, was credited with allowing other French units to take the position from the rear. Both regiments were cited in army orders.
The Champagne offensive was the final event that forced the Legion to restructure. Many of its recruits of the first year of the war had either been released to their national armies, redistributed to metropolitan units or to North Africa or were pushing up poppies. The 4e régiment de marche, made up of Italians, had been dissolved on March 5, 1915. The 3e de marche had followed in July 1915. The 2e de marche went down from four to two battalions after cannibalizing all available troops from the 3e. The Champagne offensive had reduced numbers still further. On November 11, 1915, what was left of the Legion in France was fused into the régiment de marche de la Légion étrangère. Therefore, Legion strength plummeted from a high in early 1915 of 21,887 men to 10,683 by 1916, of which 3,316 served on the Western Front.52
Of course, this hemorrhage of soldiers out of the Legion in 1915 was not invariably caused by discontent. Part of the crush to get out was motivated by a desire to stay alive, to put distance between themselves and the front lines as much as to escape from the Legion per se. Also, these transfers probably expressed a desire common among soldiers to change, a belief that things might be better elsewhere. The army might also have done much to lessen the discontentment: Quite apart from the constant turnover and often poor quality of cadres assigned to the Legion, Cendrars complained that low morale came from the policies of constantly rotating soldiers to different sections of the line, after they had learned the lay of the land and put their trenches and dugouts in order. The filthy state of the cantonments, which, though in the rear, were often still within artillery range, also upset the men, and became a major complaint of the French army mutineers of 1917.53 But the combination of high casualties and widespread discontent in the Legion would force it not only to restructure, but also to reforge an identity more in keeping with the traditions of the regiment. This would transform the Legion on the Western Front from a gathering of reluctant foreigners to an elite regiment.
Chapter 18
“THE GREATEST GLORY WILL BE HERE”
IN ONE RESPECT, the crisis, both in manpower and morale, that the Legion weathered in the summer of 1915 proved a great blessing. The Legion had never been comfortable in its role of assimilating large numbers of reluctant foreigners. Though its courage on the battlefield had been exemplary, it was apparent that many of its soldiers no longer shared the goals of their commanders and were ill at ease in the hard-bitten atmosphere of a mercenary unit. This caused many to flee the Legion, and had even led to mutiny in June 1915. However, this crisis, once surmounted, allowed the Legion to put its house in order. The cumbersome and nationally organized units of 1914–15 gave way to a leaner, more homogeneous organization much more in the old style of the Legion.
Even before this reorganization took place, however, it was apparent that a Legion mentality was beginning to emerge among those eager to legitimize themselves as “real” legionnaires. Those who elected to remain in the Legion on the whole did so voluntarily, which suggests that among these men an amalgamation was beginning to take place between veteran legionnaires and new recruits, and a glimmer of regimental pride had taken hold. Seeger, who had seriously considered transferring to a French regiment, in the end elected to remain with the Legion in part because “I am content and have good comrades,” but basically because the Legion's performance meant that it had acquired “a wonderful reputation, and that we are ranked now with the best.” He argued that, despite everything, “Our chance, now that we are with the Moroccan division, of seeing great things is better than ever ... perhaps the greatest glory will be here, and it is for glory alone that I engaged.”1 The successes in Artois had much to do with the decision of Henry Farnsworth to remain. Although he had not taken part in these attacks, they had reflected glory upon the entire regiment: “Think only that, when all the other troops said the thing was impossible, the Legion took not one line, as planned, but four, and was not stopped then, though more than half the officers and men were down at the taking of Souchez.” In an August 1915 letter to his parents, he contrasted the military bearing and professionalism of the Legion with a neighboring regiment of territorials, honest men all no doubt, but who were slovenly and bolted into their dugouts at the first explosion of a shell from “miserable 77's.” In September he castigated French regulars for surrendering terrain that even “our old 3e régiment de marche ... never considered as a very remarkable outfit,” would not have given up in an attack. And the legionnaires adopted expressions common to the Legion in North Africa.2
The feeling of being part of an elite unit made itself felt in other ways. Reybaz found the unit of Provençaux next to which he served very generous with their wine and good hunters, but afraid to crawl out of the trenches to fetch the birds they brought down between the lines, so that this task invariably fell to the legionnaires, who refused their offers of money but went “for the pleasure of playing with danger.”3 When the American Algernon Sartoris reported to Valbonne in December 1916, his hut erupted into a brawl between the Spanish and the rest almost as soon as he set foot in the door. “It was a near call and might have been a nasty business,” he wrote.
I began to wonder if I had not taken more on my shoulders than I could carry, but little [Gaston] Mayer [another American] reassured me, said I would gradually get used to it and comforted me in general. Among the other men, too, I found a certain rough kindliness.4
As late as November 1917, the American Ivan Nock passed up the chance to transfer to the American army because “I'm pretty sure no U.S. regiment will ever be as distinguished as the Légion Etrangère. Besides, I'm beginning to think I'm a Frenchman.”5
However, it was Cendrars, a man especially concerned when his group of foreign intellectuals were directed into the Legion, who embraced the Legion's prewar mystique most enthusiastically. In part, he too was impressed by the regiment's ferocious reputation, which he discovered was actually of practical value—during the battle of May 9, groups of German soldiers surrendered to them, and
they did not need to be told twice, preferring to run all the risks of crossing the open battlefield with their hands in the air rather than remain another minute in the hands of the chaps from the Legion. “Die Fremdenlegion!” They were scared as hell of us. And to be truthful, we were not a pretty sight.6
Perhaps this was an indication that the anti-Legion campaign mounted by Germany before the war had actually backfired by inflating its violent reputation. But even more than this, Cendrars seems to have been seduced by the very North African romanticism of the Legion that had so revolted some of the more respectable volunteers.
The first inkling of his new prestige came during his first leave when he found that his Legion uniform—the Moroccan Division had been fitted out in colonial khaki in 1915—earned him great success in the Paris brothels.7 But the Legion experience offered him more than that, he claimed: “Legion or no Legion. Personally I did not care,” he wrote.
I do not attach too much attention to words. I enlisted, and as several times already in my life, I was prepared to follow the consequences of my action. But I did not realize that the Legion would make me drink this chalice to the dregs and that these dregs would make me drunk, and that by taking a cynical pleasure in discrediting and debasing myself, I would end up by breaking free of everything to conquer my liberty as a man. To be. To be a man. And discover solitude. That is what I owe to the Legion, and to the old lascars of Africa, soldiers, NCOs, officers, who came to lead us and mix with us as comrades, these desperados, these survivors of God knows what colonial epics, but who were all men, all. And that made it well worth the risk of death to meet these damned souls, who smelted of the galleys and were covered with tattoos. None of them ever let us down and each one was willing to sacrifice himself, for nothing, for kudos, because he was drunk, for a challenge, for a laugh, to stick it to som
eone, by God.... They were tough and their discipline was of iron. These were professionals. And the profession of a man of war is an abominable thing and leaves scars, like poetry. You have it or you don't. One cannot cheat because nothing wears out the soul more and stigmatizes the face (and secretly the heart) of man and is more vain than to kill, and to begin again.8
Therefore, while the Legion was seriously reduced in strength, it improved in efficiency. The Historique probably put it correctly, although not exactly diplomatically, when it concluded that, “Slight reduction in numbers, but serious improvement in the worth of the remainder, this was the result of the filtering of enlistees: The rejection of scum is not a loss.”9 Of course, it was entirely disingenuous of the Legion to blame their problems entirely upon reluctant recruits—as has been seen, the ferocious and unsavory reputation of the Legion, the often hostile reception given to the volunteers by the veterans of Africa and the poor quality of many of the temporary cadres all contributed to the Legion's problems.
The restructuring of the Legion came at a time when the French high command was rethinking its strategic options. The offensives in Artois and Champagne in the summer of 1915 were critical in the strategic shift on the Western Front from breakthrough to attrition—what Joffre called “grignotage” or “nibbling.” On one hand, one might view the distinction as an artificial one, for the high command hoped that attrition would lead to breakthrough. On the other, it is possible to see it as a compromise between a high command committed to an offensive à outrance (an all-out offensive) and soldiers on the ground who realized that this was utterly unrealistic. The point of the 1917 mutinies was not that they were the result of socialism and subversion. Rather, they were a protest by the soldiers against the wasteful offensive strategy of the high command, and this protest actually forced the high command to adopt the more cautious, more defensive (or, at least, limited offensive) strategy of Pétain.10
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