French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  American historian Leonard V. Smith has argued that, in the case of the 5th Infantry Division, this process did not begin in 1917, but was a slow one that saw the soldiers imposing their own norms on battle as early as September 1914.11 It was the soldiers themselves who were responsible for Joffre's conversion to a “nibbling” strategy by their actions in the summer offensives of 1915. This thesis would seem to be supported by the Legion's history of this period. The revolts of June 1915 in the Legion were ostensibly protests against insensitive treatment of the foreign volunteers and against having been placed in the Legion in the first place. While in the absence of archives more detailed than the journaux de marche it is impossible to ascertain how far they were also protests against a certain way of making war, as were those that erupted in 1917 in other French units, coming in the wake of the failure of the April-May 1917 offensives, it is entirely possible that they were. The Legion had imported fresh, unblooded troops for the September offensives at Souain and Navarin Farm. However, it is fairly clear that on the ground level, the task demanded by the high command came to be considered quite impossible. The regimental diary of the 2e régiment de marche of the 2e étranger praised the conduct of the men during the attack of September 25 when, despite heavy losses, it continued to attack and even to rally troops of the 171st Infantry, which had broken.12

  Three days later, on September 28, it was the turn of the 2e régiment de marche of the 1er étranger to attack the strongly held German reserve trenches at Navarin Farm. Companies were compelled to break off attacks after heavy losses when they discovered that German wire had not been cut nor machine gun nests destroyed by the French barrages. With 608 hors de combat out of 2,003 officers and men, or a 30 percent casualty rate, Lieutenant Colonel Cot asked that the attack be abandoned and the regiment be withdrawn to the rear. The resolution of the attackers had not faltered—Cot blamed their failure on the formidable German defenses and the fact that most of the officers and NCOs were killed.13 But the cadres had disappeared in puffs of smoke on May 9 also, and still the legionnaires had thrust forward, despite higher casualty figures than in September. While their courage was still intact, what appears to have changed was their belief that these attacks would deliver victory. The action of these legionnaires, like that of other troops such as those in the 5th Infantry Division, sent a strong signal to the high command that, in the opinion of the men on the ground, there was a serious gap between the strategic goals of the high command and the ability of the French army to achieve them.

  1916, when much of the French army was involved in fighting the mammoth battle of Verdun, was a fairly quiet year for the Legion, spent mainly in calm sectors and training camps. It did participate in the Somme campaign, designed at least in part to draw pressure away from Verdun, and there distinguished itself on July 4 when, despite insufficient artillery support, the Legion charged over two hundred yards of open ground toward the heavily fortified village of Belloy-en-Santerre. Seeger's company was in the vanguard: “His tall silhouette stood out on the green of the cornfield,” Seeger's friend Rif Baer wrote to the poet's parents. “He was the tallest man in his section. His head erect, and pride in his eye, I saw him running forward, with bayonet fixed. Soon he disappeared and that was the last time I saw my friend.”14 The first Legion wave had been cut down by German machine guns. The second crawled forward past the wounded men, one of whom was Seeger, through the field of wheat. A final bound behind a hail of grenades, and they were in the village, which they seized after two hours of house-to-house fighting. The legionnaires then installed themselves at the edge of the town, which by now was in ruins, and all night held off repeated counterattacks from German reinforcements who disembarked from trucks only a few hundred meters away. When they were finally relieved on the morning of July 6, their bag included 750 German prisoners. The Legion lost in killed, wounded and missing 25 officers and 844 soldiers, including Alan Seeger, of 62 officers and 2,820 cadres who participated in the attack, or a 30 percent casualty rate, in an action considered one of the most glorious in Legion history.15

  1917 proved to be a more exciting, and more costly, year for the Legion. This was in part because trench raids had assumed a new importance on both sides, and a new dimension with the addition of artillery support. However, the Legion also participated in the ill-fated Nivelle offensives of April, calculated to break through the German lines by attacking on a narrow front on the Chemin des Dames west of Reims along the Aisne. Although his general plan failed, Nivelle continued a series of limited offensives, including those calculated to seize the heights of Moron-villiers in the chalk ridges east of Reims.

  The Legion's contribution to the Nivelle offensive was an assault upon the village of Aubérive. Despite seven days of artillery preparation that reduced the woods on the Moronvilliers heights to matchsticks, when the legionnaires jumped off at four-fifty on the morning of April 17 in appalling weather, the clanking of numerous German machine guns announced that the enemy had lain untouched in their deep, concrete-reinforced bunkers. The attack waves were splintered, and men pressed into the mire to avoid the heavy German fire. Unable to advance according to the timetable, groups of legionnaires formed around officers or NCOs and moved forward, infiltrating the German positions. Over the next four days, the battle became a series of disjointed skirmishes between small groups of Germans and legionnaires who fought through over seven miles of trenches with grenades and bayonets. One group of ten legionnaires under an adjudantchef (sergeant-major) seized a position which contained a battery of heavy artillery guarded by an infantry company. On April 20, the heavy fortified German reserve position fell to a grenade assault.

  Legion losses had been heavy, and included the regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Duriez, and nine officers. One battalion had been reduced from almost 800 to 275 men. The fighting had been made all the more difficult by the terrible weather, and because the legionnaires were insufficiently supplied with grenades: “Only the lack of grenades stopped them. One saw them crying with rage, their hands powerless,” the regimental diary recorded.16 Legionnaire Casimir Pruszkowski, wounded in the action, confirmed in an official report (an encouraging, perhaps rare, example of senior officers soliciting the opinions of intelligent front-line troops) that rifle grenades gave the Germans tremendous advantages in trench fighting. He also noted that lookouts offered Germans the most vulnerable targets, that the legionnaires were still too heavily laden for attacks, and that infantry-artillery liaison still left much to be desired.17 To this, one might add new German defensive methods that relied upon lightly held front lines so as to avoid excessive casualties in initial artillery bombardments, combined with carefully coordinated counterattacks from secure positions in the rear, all of which made it a costly business for the Legion.18 For all of these reasons, the Legion's fifth citation had been well merited.

  The failure of the Nivelle offensive dashed the high hopes of the French army in a breakthrough and produced a series of mutinies that appear not to have infected the Legion.19 The most important reason why the Legion avoided the morale crisis, which affected about one-third of French army units in 1917, including elite ones, was that their problems had been largely resolved by the restructuring that occurred after the summer of 1915. Admittedly, the evidence is limited to Cot's explanation in the regimental diaries for the failure of the 1915 attacks, and to Cendrars's comments about organizing a live-and-let-live system in the trenches, but one might conclude that in the RMLE, officers and men had come to share a common assessment of what it was possible to achieve in the conditions of trench warfare. At the very least, those who remained in the Legion were volunteers whose mentality was closer to that of professional soldiers than to conscripts. Also, the Legion was simply less heavily engaged in 1916 and 1917 than it had been in 1915, so that discontentment over the way the war was being conducted—apparently the main motive for the mutinies— was less developed in the Legion. In fact, the Legion was counted among the reliable
troops who were used to seal off the roads and return the mutineers to the front.20

  The strategy of the new commander-in-chief, Philippe Pétain, was generally a defensive one. He acknowledged that France had wasted her strength in attempting to achieve victory before she had accumulated the necessary materiel and before her British allies had been fully mobilized. For this reason, she risked defeat from sheer exhaustion. Therefore, his slogan was “attendre les chars et les américains”—wait for the tanks and the Americans. However, in order to restore morale and rebuild the confidence of his army, he ordered a limited offensive against a salient in the German lines near Verdun in August, for the first time massing vast quantities of heavy artillery. Dazed by the tremendous artillery barrage, the Germans put up little resistance as the Legion surged forward for over two miles. The Legion's trophies included 680 prisoners and sixteen artillery pieces, including a large French naval gun recaptured from the Germans and a large quantity of machine guns. The cost to the Legion was the fairly minor bill of 53 killed and 271 wounded and missing. On July 14 the RMLE was awarded the yellow and green fourragère of the médaille militaire, especially created for it by Marshal Pétain. On September 27, the flag of the RMLE was awarded the Legion of Honor, with the promise of a second, red fourragère.

  The year 1918 would be critical for the Legion on the Western Front, the most critical since 1915. However, it entered the year with several strengths—a fairly homogeneous organization, a solid battlefield reputation and a commander prepared to act as a forceful—even fanatical— spokesman for the RMLE. When Lieutenant Colonel Paul Rollet arrived in May 1917 to replace Lieutenant Colonel Duriez, killed at Aubérive in May, “He fell upon us like a meteor,” remembered Captain Fernand Maire. “Small, thin, nervous, a lined face from which shone, beneath thick arching brows, two transparent blue eyes.... He suddenly restored to us a strong odor of Africa.”21 Although Maire had not met Rollet, his reputation as a captain of la montée before the war had preceded him. Born in 1875, son of an officer, Rollet had the Legion in his blood. In December 1899, barely four years out of Saint-Cyr, where he had graduated 311th in a class of 587, he tired of the monotonous existence of a line infantry regiment in the Ardennes in eastern France and requested transfer to the Legion. By 1914, he had seen service in Madagascar, Algeria and Morocco, where he had distinguished himself as an indefatigable marcher and an officer who had inherited in full measure his father's often irreverent attitude toward superiors. Although he had a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, Rollet earned the loyalty of his legionnaires by the sartorial liberties he took with the uniform—during the war, for instance, he insisted on wearing his kepi through the most ferocious bombardments, and only consented to wear the regulation helmet for the 1919 victory parade—and by the tenacity with which he defended his men when he believed they had been mishandled by a higher authority who did not understand the special rules of the Legion. “He understood his men, even their need of wine—he was not indifferent to a glass himself,” wrote English legionnaire A. R. Cooper. “And if one could go to him direct, one was sure of a fair hearing and understanding.”22

  In 1914, Rollet had abandoned the Legion for a line command in France. However, the death of Duriez.returned him to his regiment and to what became for him a mission in life. After the war especially, Rollet was to stamp his personality on the Legion to the point that he earned the nickname of “Father of the Legion.” Few who served under him, even future deserters like the American Bennett Doty, could fail to be impressed: “He came down the line,” Doty wrote, “a little broadshouldered man with a spade beard and fiercely turned-up mustache streaked with gray, and a nose like an eagle's beak.”23 Unfortunately, the respect of legionnaires for the regiment's father was not extended to its “mother,” Rollet's wife, whom he married in 1925 and who became known to a generation of postwar legionnaires as “Nénette.” Rollet frequently asked for men to help Nénette around the house, but only the newest arrivals volunteered: “The men who knew Nénette used to say they would rather be sent to court martial than work for her,” Cooper wrote.24 In 1918, however, Rollet would have his hands full preserving the RMLE as a fighting unit.

  For France, 1918 would also be a crisis year. The collapse of the Eastern Front allowed the Germans to shift their armies west, where, for the first time in the war, they would actually enjoy a numerical advantage. Therefore, the only thing secret about the German offensive of 1918 was when and where they planned to attack. “We expect a German offensive and perhaps a breakthrough. We will do our best,” Rollet wrote in February 1918. And despite his insistence that Legion morale was “very high” in the winter of 1917–18, and that the Legion was “an incomparable instrument of war without peer in any army,” the challenges were all too obvious.

  The first was that by 1918 the Legion in France was being seriously squeezed for recruits. While Legion strength stood at over twelve thousand men in 1917 (excluding the battalion in the armée d'Orient) and 1918, it had steadily reduced its commitment in the colonies. In 1915 and 1916, its strength in Tonkin had plunged from three battalions to one company, and while it had continued to maintain five battalions in Morocco, strength there had been seriously reduced. Cadres also had to be provided for a Legion d'Orient made up of Armenians and Syrians operating in the Levant in 1917 and 1918. All of this left only three battalions for the Western Front. For obvious reasons, most German and Austrian subjects had been left behind in North Africa in 1914. This made for a very curious atmosphere in the Legion there. According to Joseph Ehrhart, who was in Morocco when the war broke out, strict measures were taken “to avoid unfortunate incidents between German and Austrian legionnaires and French. Newspapers were forbidden and communiques were not read out.” Apart from an attempt by five Germans to hand over a blockhouse to the Moroccans and a knife fight between a French and a German legionnaire, “in general, everything passed off alright.”25

  However, other sources suggest that the national divisions intensified in the Legion after the outbreak of war. The Irishman John Barret, one of the “volunteers for the duration” sent in 1914 to Morocco, discovered that “Every solitary man of these [Germans, Austrians and a Turk in his company] hoped for the victory of the German armies and openly voiced their opinions, particularly when they were a little drunk, which happened rather often.” German legionnaires deserted daily to the Moroccans, according to Barret, and when his unit was sent to reinforce the Moroccan garrison at Khenifra after a French column of over three hundred men had been massacred there,26 “I remember how sick I felt when I saw that the men I was compelled to call comrades were delighted at the French disaster, although they themselves wore (or rather disgraced) the French uniform.” The old German and Austrian veterans who had been marooned in North Africa by the war “hated” their compatriots who enlisted in the Legion “instead of returning to Germany and Austria to fight for the Fatherland.” Still, he noted that, despite the incongruous and, for him, distasteful spectacle of the Legion marching against the Moroccans singing the “Wacht am Rhein” “the unit had great esprit de corps.”27 In 1916, Magnus discovered at Sidi-bel-Abbès “a German regiment of the lowest type transplanted to Africa,” many of whose members were openly disloyal:

  They read the papers ardently, and were delighted at the French set-back at Verdun and the German victories. Their idea was that no one but a German could be a good soldier. And often I heard: “Look at them—they call themselves soldiers, and think they can beat our well-trained German army?”28

  A second group who could not be sent to France were those who had elected not to fight the Germans, or who had been sent there because they were wounded or considered in some other way unfit for active service— Magnus wrote that his captain was nicknamed “the telephone captain” or “Captain Hallo-Hallo,” because it was rumored that at Gallipoli he rushed into the dugout on the pretext of calling headquarters each time there was any danger.29 Ehrhart recorded that the Legion in Morocco received
reinforcements of Polish POWs who enlisted on the condition that they would serve in Morocco, and Italian volunteers who presumably had no desire to serve in their own army.30 However, Magnus speaks highly, for instance, of the Spanish soldiers at Sidi-bel-Abbès who might have been dispatched to the Western Front, as well as other odds and ends like Danes.31

  A second impediment to the reinforcement of the RMLE was the attitude of the Moroccan resident general, Hubert Lyautey. In August 1914 he had been ordered to withdraw to a few coastal enclaves and repatriate most of the troops in Morocco to France. Lyautey disobeyed these orders and instead pushed his troops out to the periphery of the conquered areas on the theory—the correct one as it transpired—that by holding the frontiers strongly he could maintain control of those areas already pacified. And while he claimed to have repatriated more troops to France than the government actually requested, on August 16 he “protested formally against sending the Legion to France.” On August 20, 1914, the war ministry compromised and decided to retain the Legion in Morocco, but ordered each of the four battalions in Algeria to send a half-battalion to France.32

  While it is certainly true that most of the Legion in North Africa was unsuitable for service on the Western Front, even when Lyautey could have contributed to the strength of the RMLE, he proved reluctant to do so. On November 9, 1916, Lyautey wrote that he did not want to send the Czechs and Poles to France because this would open the door for the departure of the French and those from Alsace-Lorraine as well, “so that the Legion would no longer have sufficient cadres and I cannot do without it.”33 In this respect, at least, Lyautey appears to have been more concerned with securing his precarious colony than with doing all he could to help the salvation of France. By 1917, large numbers of contracts of German and Austrian legionnaires who had enlisted before the outbreak of war in 1914 were beginning to expire, and many chose internment in France, where they were allowed to work for wages inflated by the war. Furthermore, they encouraged their former comrades whose enlistments were coming to an end to do the same, which further depleted regimental strength. On September 4, 1917, Lyautey wrote to the war minister to request urgent measures to allow the “Austro-Germans” to reenlist for the duration of the war, for which they would be given a twenty-five-franc bonus and an extra twenty centimes a day, “. . . always with the goal in mind of preserving the battalions of the Legion which form the best of my white troops whose existence is my primary preoccupation.”34 But these incentives, if implemented, were hardly competitive with wages on the outside. Also, some of these men must have had a bad conscience about serving in a French unit while France was at war with their country.