French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  This is not to say, however, that desertion was an exaggerated or unimportant aspect of Legion life. On occasion it might seriously undermine performance, especially if there were a place to desert to, as in Mexico, in Casablanca in 1907-08, in Morocco immediately following World War I, possibly in the Rif War, and at certain times during World War II. But the most negative effects of desertion lay elsewhere. It provided a constant source of diplomatic friction, especially between France and Germany until well after World War II, which in 1908 led the two countries perilously close to war. It was a small, but persistent, source of bad publicity for France. Moreover, desertion or the threat of desertion exercised a direct influence upon the employment of the Légion, as in the Rif in 1925, when withholding the Legion from the frontier with the Spanish zone contributed to the initial success of Abd el-Krim's offensive. Fear of desertion also influenced Legion organization, for it caused French generals to be reluctant to expand the Legion beyond its basic heavy infantry role. Lyautey objected that turning légionnaires into artillerymen could be suicidal for the French if these men revolted, while others forecasted that Legion cavalrymen would simply be able to desert at speeds and in numbers hitherto unknown there. The Legion never fully trusted its soldiers, an extension of French suspicion of foreigners that caused that country to place them in a separate corps in the first place, and took elaborate steps from the 1920s to create a secret service whose primary mission was to oversee the loyalties of its own troops.

  While sluggishness and desertion were peculiar to the Légion, its other weaknesses were common enough in line units, although they might assume a more exaggerated form in the Legion. In theory, infantry units especially should be versatile, able to turn their hands to a variety of tasks that war requires of them, from conventional conflict to what today are euphemistically called “low-intensity operations.” In practice, however, units prefer to carve special niches for themselves that correspond to a carefully nurtured self-image. The Legion was no exception to this rule. Traditionally it proved poor at “pacification,” which it saw as a mission in opposition to its elite combat image. While it was frequently used to build roads and other structures as part of the imperial “mission civilisatrice” any contact between the Legion and the local population was liable to result in a public relations disaster. The cohesiveness of the Légion, its racism, its elite combat image, the preference of its commanders for strong-arm solutions to problems of colonial agitation and its recruitment made it especially useful to support a shoot-first policy. One of the criticisms of the 2e REP in the Kolwezi operation was that they were trigger-happy and killed far more people than necessary.5 Nor was a didactic role such as Vietnamization in Indochina encouraged by regimental preference for action, although légionnaires often performed better at this than many of its officers predicted.

  Like other units, the Legion also performed less well when shattered into minute groups in small scattered garrisons, as in Mexico, in Morocco in the interwar years or in Indochina. This practice weakened regimental spirit and the influence of the command upon the légionnaires. All soldiers tend to go to pot in garrison. However, the diversions of bored légionnaires might assume stunning proportions. It was a cliché that légionnaires had to be kept occupied; otherwise, drunkenness, fighting, cafard, desertion and even suicide would inevitably follow. It is also likely that the weakened influence of the command upon small, isolated units contributed to excesses of indiscipline, such as those committed by légionnaires in Northern Annam in 1930-31.

  Legion efficiency was also hampered by the French military system, which, in the colonies especially, was notoriously parsimonious. Weapons, uniforms and equipment that were often badly adapted to the climate and the requirements of combat; inadequate transport that, quite literally, placed an enormous burden on the shoulders of the légionnaire; miserly rations; and usually inadequate medical support all contributed to transform difficult campaign conditions into very arduous ones. While the Legion attempted to supplement this through training for long marches and selection, the result was excessive fatigue, high drop-out rates, and fewer rifles on line. While an inadequate military system hurt all French imperial forces, it did not hurt all of them equally. Native regiments could survive on slim rations and “requisitions,” and demonstrated far more resilience than white troops on long marches. If so many Legion campaigns from the early conquests in Algeria to Dien Bien Phu read like an unrelieved narrative of suffering and sacrifice, it is largely because the combination of terrain, inadequate logistics and armaments and poor senior leadership often proved more pernicious enemies for the légionnaires than did the enemy. Therefore, as Janos Kemencei realized, the real injustice of Legion service was that good troops too often failed to realize their true potential because they were inadequately trained, armed, led and supplied.

  If the Legion has carved for itself a reputation as an elite force, this has not been because it has functioned as part of a modern military system. On the contrary, many légionnaires with experience in other armies have considered the Legion very backward in several respects, a criticism that continues in the post-Algerian War force.6 When American légionnaire William Brooks heard a French general insist to a group of Legion NCOs in Djibouti in the mid-1970s that “ ‘The Legion will always be a modern arm within a modern army,’ ... I was dumbfounded,” he wrote.7 This attitude was dangerous because it encouraged the Legion to undertake missions beyond its capabilities. “They just kept harping about how modern they were,” Brooks recorded. “I don't think they read anything that wasn't published by their own propaganda press. But they believed it and it made them special.” The elite status claimed by the Legion has nothing to do with its modernity. Rather, the Legion is entitled to that status because

  a very high percentage of its members have suicidal tendencies. James Jones once wrote that an elite unit is only elite when the majority of its members consider themselves already dead. That is the full evolution of the soldier. I believe légionnaires think they are already dead. Dying is what the Legion is all about.8

  A second problem of the Legion that this work has attempted to resolve is that of the myth versus the countermyth of the Legion—the Legion as a vehicle of salvation, a second chance of redemption for disoriented souls, or as an instrument of exploitation and brutality for the naive, unsuspecting or down-and-out. The problem is not an easy one to resolve, largely because the evidence tends to be very partisan. The countermyth, that charges the Legion with brutality and exploitation, invites suspicion for a variety of reasons. Its main propagandists were Germans who had a vested interest in attacking a French military employer of many of their nationals, or the left, which saw the Legion as an agent of exploitation and oppression of both the working classes and of colonial peoples.

  Like most myths, the charge that the Legion treats the recruits with a brutality that would be unacceptable in a national army has a basis in reality. Brutal NCOs can be found in almost any military environment. They are not the norm, but they are more likely to flourish in the Legion for several reasons. First, NCOs have enjoyed an elevated status in the Légion, which made them virtually unaccountable for their actions, least of all to French officers, who traditionally held aloof from the day-to-day running of their units. This gave rise to occasional abuses. Furthermore, a légionnaire who felt that he had been treated unfairly by an NCO discovered early on that it was useless, even counterproductive, to complain to higher authority—the practice was to submit to the punishment, and then remonstrate, if one still felt after a quinze dont huit (fifteen days of punishment, eight of which were spent in the cells) that there was anything left to be gained from it. Also, in a nonverbal environment like the Légion, points can be forced home more easily with fists than through persuasion.

  However, blanket charges of brutality leveled at the Legion are exaggerated. As has been seen, desertion, often cited as the major product of excessive Legion discipline, was more often the product of other
causes. There were certain punishments that continued to be practiced in the Legion long after they were outlawed in the army—the tombeau, the crapaudine, the pelote (still authorized today), or the silo. The justifications for their survival were several: they were not a Legion monopoly but were practiced throughout the Armée d'Afrique; short, sharp punishments were in effect more humane and more efficient than a prolonged jail sentence, which deprived a unit of a man's services and stained his service record; and, finally, given the nature of Legion recruitment, the good légionnaires needed to be protected from the minority of bullies and thugs.

  As for the sadistic Legion NCO, he was much more likely to be found in fiction than in reality, like Sergeant Lejaune in Beau Geste. In fact, before 1914 NCOs often impinged very little on the life of the légionnaires, basically because they were few and usually remote figures. Squads tended to be largely self-governing organizations, with the corporal reaching a modus vivendi with his messmates. Deep animosities certainly existed, especially in a milieu where NCOs were quick to use their fists. But unpopular NCOs or corporals might consider taking out an extra life insurance policy, especially in combat conditions. NCOs could be perceived to be unjust, as was the sergeant who ordered légionnaire Weinrock to miss his turns on muleback in the Sud Oranais in 1910, a punishment that eventually resulted in his death. But NCO brutality, as far as it existed, appears to be a more modern phenomenon associated especially with training.9

  It is also true that brutality or excessive discipline is a relative concept, and one that has changed over time. In the first half of the nineteenth century when the Legion was founded, the recruits do not appear to have been subjected to the sort of humiliation that became the norm in basic training later on. As the nineteenth century evolved into the twentieth, the idea of breaking down the recruit and then building him up in a way in which he identified closely with the military organization became more common. In the early days of the corps, a new légionnaire was liable to be given only minimal training—upon reporting to the Legion in 1840, the German Clemens Lamping was asked if he could handle a musket, and when replying in the affirmative was sent straight to his unit.10 Lamping found the Legion to be a rough crowd, as did Antoine Sylvère in 1905. The corporal exerted his authority on the first day by beating up a légionnaire who talked back to him. But most of the violence appears to have been traded among légionnaires rather than handed down by the hierarchy.

  In any case, Legion life was almost a bed of roses compared to that of the building site where Flutsch had worked before his enlistment. Even Maurice Magnus, who was almost paralytic with indignation over Legion training during World War I, discovered that the violence of his superiors was more verbal than physical. Only once did he actually witness a légionnaire knocked unconscious by a corporal, and that légionnaire was an Arab and therefore was probably considered out of place in the Legion.11 In general, Legion recruits appear to have been given enormous leeway outside of training hours to wander into town and dispose of their time as they wished as far as duties and finances would allow. This was very different from the experience of Simon Murray in 1960, who discovered that légionnaires were subject to constant humiliation and physical abuse during basic training, and especially during airborne training, restricted to the barracks for weeks or given passes only to see them revoked for some trivial reason. “What kind of bastards are we dealing with?” he asked. “They think it spells discipline, but in my book it spells horse shit.”12

  In other words, although abuses of authority can be found in any age, légionnaires who came out of the rough working-class or peasant world of nineteenth-century Europe found what was often denounced by middle-class observers of the Legion as an excessively harsh or even brutal existence to be nothing out of the ordinary. But this changed as standards of living, of education and of public conduct improved. Then the attitudes and methods of some NCOs appeared increasingly at odds with public notions of permissible behavior and positive leadership. And while it must be stressed that this evolution in the attitude of military organizations to recruit training was a general one in the West, it is likely that they found a more extreme expression in the Legion for reasons already mentioned. But at the time that the accusation of brutality began to be heard, that is, before the turn of the century, there is no evidence that authority was exercised any more harshly in the Legion than in a French line regiment, or in a German or Russian one for that matter.

  Did the Legion exploit its soldiers? The answer to this question depends in part upon one's point of view. If one opposed the French colonial enterprise or the contributions of foreigners to French military strength, then any effort expended in Legion service could be counted as exploitation. Nevertheless, to accept this argument today is to bring an especially harsh retroactive judgment to a historical enterprise that had validity in its own era. France had the right to defend herself and to enlist foreigners to defend her foreign policy and imperial interests. Service in the Legion was frequently difficult, sometimes fatal. However, recruits balanced this possibility with the advantages of service when they enlisted. The Legion argued that its recruits came of their own free will, which was certainly true for the greatest number of them. Recruitment bureaus were difficult to locate, especially if one spoke no French, and recruiting officers and sergeants gave the potential recruit every opportunity to change his mind before he signed.

  But, the argument may be made, these people did not know what they were getting into when they enlisted. The lure of adventure, the romantic image that the Legion cultivated, and which was cultivated for it in popular fiction and cinema, was in fact an enormous swindle that enticed young men into a service that subsequently exploited them. One Legion deserter has claimed in a recent memoir that he and others, “were victims of the Legion misinformation service. They had believed everything they had heard and had been taken in by it.”13 But this argument appears to have little validity. Much of the public image of the Legion in the last one hundred or so years has been extremely negative. If one chose to enlist in any case, it was often because he found the prospect of serving under Sergeant Lejaune at Fort Zinderneuf attractive and regarded the alleged brutality and tough service of the Legion as a challenge, as a way to test his own ruggedness.

  How one reacted to the realities of Legion service depended largely upon one's expectations. Those who held a romanticized view of soldiering as a bold adventure in exotic settings were bound to be disappointed, as were those who came to serve France out of loyalty or patriotism. Middle-class recruits quickly came to wonder if the investment of five years of their lives was worth the anticipated dividend of appearing interesting at dinner parties upon their return to civilization. They also discovered that adaptation to barracks culture required a fairly radical downward adjustment of behavior. Others who fled into the Legion as a last opportunity to force order onto lives fallen into squalid disarray were simply too far gone to make a comeback, but seized the opportunity to lay the blame for their own failures and shortcomings upon the Legion.

  The problem of exploitation was not so much that the Legion recruit risked humiliation, hard service, death or disability in the company of rogues for discredited causes. While the Legion saw some very tough fighting, the notion, as exemplified in the celebrated statement of General de Négrier, that légionnaires had enlisted to die and that therefore their lives served merely as stepping-stones to promotion or preferment by ambitious French officers was exaggerated. In fact, légionnaires much admired officers who displayed this sort of reckless courage and were usually eager to follow them. The greatest disappointment of Legion service that gave rise to feelings of shattered expectations which could lead to desertion was not combat, but boredom, especially when they discovered that they were used primarily as a construction unit. Therefore, the much-publicized mission civilisatrice of the Legion actually diminished its morale and combat performance. As far as légionnaires were concerned, the element of exploitation contained
in Legion service was not that they were sent to fight, but that they were sent to fight with inadequate resources. The lack of foresight and planning of the high command, and the parsimonious French parliaments meant low pay, poor food, appalling logistics, understaffed medical services and many unnecessary deaths in imperial campaigns. The conditions in which many légionnaires were dispatched to fight in 1940 and in Indochina after 1946 bordered upon criminal neglect.

  The barbarism of Legion justice, or rather the absence of justice in the Légion, also agitated critics of the Legion. About this, however, they were often misinformed or given to sensationalism. Early breaches of conduct were treated rather leniently. Only those who overstepped the rules repeatedly or who committed some heinous offense like deserting with arms might merit a sentence to the infamous “Discipline” at Colomb-Béchar. The rhythm of existence there was very much of the kill-or-cure variety, a philosophy of punishment that seems to be enjoying a renaissance in some civilian circles. Like any army, the Legion took a dim view of deserting in a battle zone, especially with arms, and the culprit might expect the harshest of penalties, but not always. The major complaint against Legion justice was not that it was brutal, but that it was inconsistent, a complaint heard especially from Germans used to a truly rigorous set of rules. Nor were native police in North African frontier areas liable to be accused of treating deserters, or their severed heads, with undue tenderness.