by Douglas Boyd
Once the news passed down the chain of command, an orgy of looting and destruction began, with legionnaires helping themselves to officers’ belongings and gorging on hoarded supplies before the quartermasters could destroy them. Inevitably they over-indulged on the unopened barrels of wine and tafia, a locally produced rum. The 2nd Battalion exceeded all others in this, according to Herbinger. However, Maj François George Diguet defended his men by pleading that only twenty or so were completely drunk – a capital offence on active service – and tried to shift blame to the quartermasters and sutlers for not breaking open the casks when destroying their other stores.
Legionnaire Maury recalled seeing ‘several soldiers lying on the ground dead-drunk. We disarmed them and abandoned them.’[185] If dumping the artillery in the nearby river, despite the pleas of the gunners, was normal practice, it is a measure of the general panic that dumped likewise in the river was the pay-chest containing Mexican coinage to the value of 600,000 French francs, which had arrived only two days before. The retreat along the Mandarin Road to the delta was without major incident, although some Legion rearguards became separated from the main body and had to find their own way back on jungle trails, followed at a discreet distance by the Chinese, to make the point that their sting had not been drawn.
Herbinger was used as a scapegoat for the failure of Brière de l’Isle’s policy and Négrier’s impetuous incursion into China because he was the unpopular cold and clinical tactician who had admitted that the force of French arms was not absolute, while Négrier with his heroic wound had acted like the swashbuckling hero a good officer was supposed to be. To cover themselves for exceeding their mandate, generals Brière de l’Isle and Borgnis-Desbordes accused Herbinger of being an alcoholic and lied about the military situation to blacken his name still further.
Returning to France in June 1885, he demanded a court of enquiry to clear himself. The following February the court heard evidence from Maj Schaeffer commanding 3rd Battalion that the Chinese had been preparing a massive attack on the very day of the evacuation, but supporters of Brière de l’Isle and Négrier insisted that supplies had been adequate to hold out.
In fact the garrison had been on half-rations for several days, artillery ammunition was all but exhausted and bullets were down to seventeen rounds per man. Although cleared, Herbinger died three months later at the age of forty-seven, a broken man. In fact, his appreciation of the situation had been accurate. With Chinese regular and Black Flag forces building up all along the frontier, there had been no chance of holding Lang Son without colossal loss of life and equally no chance of evacuating the 3,700-man garrison once it was surrounded by the enormous forces the Chinese had brought into the field.
As it was, the arrival in Paris of news of the costly defeats in Vietnam brought down Jules Ferry’s government – the longest-lasting of the Third Republic. However, that is not our affair. The Legion does not make policy; it only carries it out as far as human courage can, and no one could accuse it of failing in that respect during the conquest of Vietnam. A complex of internal problems and foreign threats elsewhere obliged the Chinese to sign a cease-fire agreement on 4 April. This led to the Treaty of Tientsin in June 1885, whereby they abandoned their claims on Tonkin. That, in turn, sparked a palace revolution in Hué, with the 14-year-old king fleeing to the mountains to organise resistance to the French. They simply replaced him with a puppet and divided the country, like Algeria, into three military-administrative areas: Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina in the south.
Thereafter, Vietnam became the Legion’s posting of choice. Between 1887 and 1909 statistics show surprisingly few legionnaires in the theatre dying in combat: only 271 against exactly ten times that many deaths from disease,[186] for Vietnam was known as the land where ‘dysentery is queen and malaria king’.[187] In one particularly bad period before cheap modern prophylaxis for malaria arrived, Legion Sgt Ernest Bolis arrived in-country with a company of 116 men and noted that only sixteen were fit enough to be returned to Sidi-bel-Abbès by the end of their tour. The others had all died or become unfit for further soldiering.[188]
But there were good reasons for wanting to go east. One year in Vietnam counted as two for pension purposes, whereas service in Algeria was considered a home posting. In addition there was a colonial allowance that did not apply in North Africa. Whereas other French units in Indochina lived like kings, with native servants to wash their clothes, clean their weapons and even carry them on patrol, the Legion was tougher, forbidding the handling of weapons by servants, who nevertheless washed the legionnaire’s underwear and cleaned his uniform and other equipment – a luxury unheard of in North Africa.
For those who did not mind seeing betel-blackened teeth in the mouth of their bed-mate, the congai – hired long-term for a few piastres a week – was not only a nightly solace. It was quite normal for the wives of Tonkinese light infantrymen to march along at the end of a column with their cooking utensils and much of their husbands’ kit balanced on a bamboo pole over their shoulders. Sometimes they did more than that. As Herbinger knew all too well, on the march to Lang Son and the subsequent campaign on the Chinese frontier, the issued rations were way below starvation level. Some 8,000 coolies and 800 Chinese ponies, able to stand the climate and terrain better than mules, had been impressed to carry the dismantled artillery pieces, food and ammunition for the Lang Son expedition. But the impressed labour melted away at the first unguarded moment, terrified by the Chinese practice of killing all coolies taken prisoner. It was the enterprising congais like that of Legionnaire Bôn-Mat who saved the day by travelling back and forth to the delta buying supplementary food for their ‘husbands’ and their comrades.
Alcohol was everywhere the legionnaire’s release. In Vietnam tafia and choum-choum were cheap. But opium at two piastres for a pipe was the great relaxation for officer and man alike. Initially frowned on by Paris and the Church, it came to be the social drug of the colonial scene in the early twentieth century, so much so that by 1914 it was a government monopoly, producing a third of all the tax produced in Indochina.[189] In the Legion, providing a man did not become so addicted that it affected discipline and military usefulness, the officers turned a blind eye.
In 1891 the new Governor-General Antoine de Lanessan divided the frontier with China into four sectors, placing a colonel in charge of each with instructions to ‘pacify’ his area by his own methods. It was hard and dirty work. Legion and other patrols travelled light on jungle trails. East of Suez, legionnaires wore white uniforms and exchanged their képis for the pith helmets, which were believed to prevent sunstroke. Since the Chinese used the white helmets to single out European targets, the Legion often wore non-standard headgear.
One account explained the procedure when there were no facilities to evacuate the wounded: ‘If we left a chap, we would find him butchered by the pirates who hammered a sharpened bamboo stake up his arse until it came out of his shoulder. So when there was one who was on his last legs, we gave him a drink of tafia and then we said, “Now it’s your last mouthful.” We would stick the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. Then we could go off with a clear conscience.’[190]
In August 1892 a patrol from Cao Bang, ambushed by an armed band near the border, took refuge in the Chinese frontier post of Bo Cup, where the commander’s embarrassed acquiescence to their request was explained when a large patrol of his soldiers returned to base obviously having been in a fire-fight, and some came up to congratulate the Legion lieutenant on the skill with which he had extricated his men from their ambush.
Soldiers keep a sense of humour when civilians might not. Marshal Joseph Galliéni recalled his days as a colonel commanding 2nd Military District, in which Lang Son lay. After a number of incursions in the summer of 1896 he protested to his Chinese opposite number Marshal Sou, who apologised but said he could not control his troops. However, he had no objection to them being shot out of hand if caught in flagrante delicto. Galliéni’s rem
edy was to play Sou’s own game and replace his regular troops on that stretch of the border with legionnaires, who also indulged in cross-border raids for pillage and food. When Sou protested, Galliéni replied that the legionnaires were foreigners, over whom he had no control, but if Sou wished to shoot them, that was fine by him. The Chinese raids stopped.
Most colonial soldiering in Indochina after the initial conquests consisted not of great battles and prolonged sieges. It was a slow routine of patrols, garrison boredom and R and R where opium, women and alcohol fostered the dream of the exotic east that had made them volunteer. Volunteer they did, despite the health risks that awaited them. The Legion always had more men wanting to ship east than were required there, although a fair number of these volunteers changed their mind on the long and uncomfortable sea voyage, jumping ship in the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, or in a port of call where they risked the bullets of the sentries on the gangway for an uncertain future, penniless in a strange land.
Yet those who did come surrendered something of themselves to this strange and fertile country which had been at war for a thousand years and would be so for another century. Even today, recalling the landscape, the Vietnamese people and the way of life, old legionnaires who served there sigh, ‘Qu’elle était belle, la vie là-bas!’ For the European settlers, it was a beautiful life. For a legionnaire, it was as good as it gets.
Chapter 18: War on the belly of Dan
Dahomey 1892 – 1894
The Legion’s elevation to the status of a brigade in December 1884 made little difference to the units in Vietnam. In Algeria, 1st Regiment, abbreviated to 1 RE – the letters standing for régiment étranger – was based at Sidi-bel-Abbès with 2 RE in Saïda, 90km to the southeast. In July 1892 each of the regiments was ordered to furnish 400 men for a régiment de marche to be sent to Dahomey, now Benin in West Africa.[191]
There were both pros and cons to this system of temporary units. Its advocates argued that they permitted the best men to be taken for a specific mission without bringing along the dross. Its opponents argued that the effect on morale was bad because it divided legionnaires into two classes – those who always got the plum jobs and those who became despondent lead-swingers. Better, they said, to take a company that had trained together, get the slackers up to scratch and use volunteers to replace those physically unfit for the mission.
Invalided back from Vietnam with blackwater fever, but now cured, Sgt Frederic Martyn could not wait to get abroad again. Dining in town to escape the monotony of canteen food, he learned of this opportunity to escape the boredom of depot life on seeing a copy of the Echo d’Oran newspaper. Reading that the Minister of War had placed at the disposal of the navy a battalion of the Foreign Legion that would be leaving on 4 August for Dahomey, Martyn and fellow-sergeant Ivan Petrovski rushed back to barracks to put their names down as volunteers. Well down the list, they pinned their hopes on knowing the nominated battalion commander Maj Marius-Paul Faurax, under whom they had served in Tonkin.[192]
Rumours that King Behanzin of Dahomey kept a bodyguard of female warriors may have helped fuel their enthusiasm. The Amazons, as they were dubbed, were originally all captives trained as warriors and forbidden on pain of death to have sex with any male apart from the king. Since he had a large harem, this condemned them to lifelong virginity, of which the main compensation was to live in the royal household and eat its food. Such was the status this conferred that important families donated daughters to the royal guard, much as medieval Europeans donated boys to the Church as oblates.
Sir Richard Burton, visiting West Africa in 1861 had described them as less than seductive:
‘… with a development of adipose tissue, which suggested anything but ancient virginity. I saw old, ugly and square-built frows [Frauen] trudging grumpily along with the face of Cook after being much nagged by the Missus.’ He divided them into five categories: the blunderbuss women, each followed by her ammunition porter; the elephant huntresses, said to be the bravest; the razor women, who looked like scarecrows; the infantry, whom he found ‘rather mild in appearance;’ and the elite archeresses. After pointing out that the object of Dahomeyan warfare was capturing slaves, he concluded that the women were certainly as brave as, if not braver than, their male counterparts.[193]
Whether out of uninformed lust for these female warrior or not, so many legionnaires volunteered at bel-Abbès that the colonel of 1 RE simply appointed Faurax’s senior captain, lieutenant and second-lieutenant, leaving those officers to select the NCOs and men they wanted. The tall German-born Capt Paul Brundsaux, whose Vietnamese nickname ‘Loum-Loum’ referred to his rampant beard, and whose obsession with obedience had once put his daughter in the cells at bel-Abbès, was an obvious choice for the régiment de marche. It was thanks to his daughter that he was serving in the Legion at all, having resigned from the regular army in Bizerta when refused permission to marry her mother, who was pregnant with his child. Although a graduate of St Cyr, he had lost three years’ seniority by resigning in order to get married and re-enlist in the Legion afterwards. He had also been rewarded for his integrity with a ‘foreign’ commission, only valid for service in the colonies, which prevented him ever transferring back to a regular regiment.
The seventeen-day voyage from Oran to Cotonou on the Slave Coast in the transports Ville de St-Louis and Mytho was without incident. On 23 August 1892 legionnaires on deck sighted the palm trees and sandy beaches of the coast, the ships’ captains moored off-shore and the men prepared to disembark into lighters and pirogues that would take them through the surf to the shore.
Their first sight of the country was as disappointing as the arrival at Haiphong. Cotonou then consisted of a handful of dilapidated native huts with a long wharf reaching out to sea, a rudimentary factory processing almonds and palm oil, the resident’s house, a small sick bay and a crudely built blockhouse with a small French garrison to protect this disputed trading post. A journey of 30km inland in pirogues towed behind French gunboats brought them to the former Portuguese slaving port of Porto Novo on the shores of the Nokoué lagoon, where the King of Tofa was waiting to welcome them wearing a French naval officer’s cap, an embroidered frock coat and nothing underneath. Regally impervious to their laughter at his appearance, the king could afford to smile indulgently at these foreigners, bound up-country to die from disease or wounds in a war to keep him on his squalid throne.
His capital was a sprawling, fever-ridden village of mud huts with thatched roofs in a marsh beside the lagoon. The ‘barracks’ in which the legionnaires exchanged their uniforms for light tropical clothing and pith helmets was merely a collection of open-sided sheds with palm-leaf roofs. The local custom of burying the dead beneath the family home permeated everything with the smell of putrefaction, so no one was sorry on 1 September when the arrival of locally impressed porters to carry their equipment meant they could march north to join the rest of the 4,000-strong expeditionary force commanded by Col Alfred-Amédée Dodds, an extraordinary mulatto graduate of St Cyr who came from Senegal.
The name Dahomey was derived from Dan-ho-me, meaning ‘on the belly of Dan’ because King Behanzin’s ‘palace’ was built on the grave of a murdered predecessor. Dodds planned to follow the Ouémé River northwards and come at Behanzin’s capital from the southeast. This doubled the mileage from the coast but had the advantage of avoiding extensive fever-marshes that lay in the direct course. The crime for which Behanzin was to be punished was that of invading his former vassal kingdom of Tofa, now under French protection, after German arms traders wanting a war to shift their stocks had told him that Germany had ‘finished off’ France in 1871.
As any modern map shows, West Africa was literally carved up by the European colonial powers, all grabbing slices of the cake. The 1892 Dahomey campaign resulted from French claims based on ‘treaties’ forged by unscrupulous traders that the coastal strip from Cotonou to the former British and French slaving port of Ouidah[194] had been ceded to Fra
nce. Needing Ouidah to ship the palm oil that was his kingdom’s only export now that the slave trade had been abolished, Behanzin had used German-supplied weapons to attack Porto Novo in 1890 and regain control of Ouidah. The subsequent uneasy truce was broken in 1892 when some of his soldiers fired on a French gunboat on the River Ouémé, giving Eugene Etienne, then Minister for the Colonies, the pretext for mounting Dodds’ expedition.
Moving off from Porto Novo, progress along the eastern bank of the Ouémé River was slow, averaging about 8km a day through difficult country. A few lucky units were able to ride regally on the river in pirogues towed by French gunboats, but for most it was a painful progress. Martyn recalled how, ‘One hour we would be struggling through a mangrove swamp, and the next forcing our way through tall grasses that reached well above our heads and chopping our way through thick bush. We carried nothing except our arms and 150 rounds of ammunition per man and even this light load was as much as we could struggle along with.’[195] Other men remembered chiefly the suffocating, cloying heat. For those who had been careless enough to walk around barefoot after marching all day in boots, the agony of jiggers penetrating under their toenails, whence they had to be removed by a native using a hot needle, simply compounded the discomfort.
On 11 September the advance guard reached the town of Dogba, where the sappers were to erect a bridge to get everyone across to the western bank, after which there was only one more river crossing before Abomey. Dodds prudently decided to call a halt at Dogba until stragglers and the Legion reinforcements caught up with the main body. On arrival there, the Legion built a Roman-type marching camp of ditch and rampart on three sides, with the river securing their backs.
