The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  Just before first light on 19 September the marine pickets outside the perimeter heard movements in the nearby jungle. Assuming that the black shapes between the trees were the native porters relieving themselves, they were taken by surprise when hundreds of Dahomeyan warriors erupted from the surrounding darkness and hurled themselves forward screaming and ululating. However, this was no undisciplined tribal assault. The Dahomeyan army was well drilled in volley firing and simple manoeuvres. It numbered around 4,500 regular warriors, of whom 800 were the Amazons, plus the same number of ‘reservists’, all commanded by full-time war chiefs.

  The pickets’ first shots as they ran back inside the camp woke their restive comrades, sleeping with weapons stacked outside each tent. The Legion’s bugle-calls, Loum-Loum’s bellowed orders and the high-pitched battle screams of the attackers combined into the din of battle. Luckily, although the Dahomeyans had purchased from the German arms dealers 2,000 modern Mauser and vintage Chassepot rifles, Winchester repeaters, five clapped-out French machine guns and even six Krupp cannons, their firearms were rarely cleaned and were usually discharged with the eyes shut in the belief that small arms were self-aiming. Most of Behanzin’s warriors were anyway still armed with ancient blunderbusses, bows and arrows and swords and spears whose long, thin hand-forged blades served both for slashing and stabbing.

  ‘My legionnaires were already running towards me rifle in hand, some in their undershorts, some in their shirts,’ wrote Lt Jacquot of that morning. ‘No matter, they were there, and by the time Maj Faurax arrived two minutes later we had already commenced firing on the large numbers of enemy fortunately entangled in the abattis barrier of cut thorn trees with their branches facing outwards between the jungle and this side of the camp.’[196]

  Martyn described firing as fast as he could load, with each shot knocking over a black shadow in the grey pre-dawn light. When Henri-Paul Lelièvre reached the firing line, he found the Dohomeyans no more than 10 metres distant, some coolly returning the legionnaires’ fire seated on small stools they had brought with them for the purpose. Jacquot again: ‘The infantry fired salvoes. The artillery shot canister shrapnel at a range of less than 100 metres. The gunboat Opale peppered the woods with shells from her Hotchkiss gun[197] which whistled past above our heads.’[198]

  Maj Faurax, who insisted on mounting his horse to oversee the mêlée and be visible to his men, caught a bullet and died shortly afterwards. He was probably a victim of one of the small number of snipers hidden in the trees, who did take careful aim before firing. According to Legion legend, his last words to Dodds were, ‘Were you satisfied with my men?’[199] Be that as it may, it was the legionnaires’ bayonet counter-attack that broke the first wave of Behanzin’s warriors.

  Four more mass attacks after dawn were reminiscent of the Chinese human waves in Vietnam. Martyn takes up the story when the legionnaires ended the battle by making a bayonet charge at the wall of bodies in front of them: ‘We were ramming our bayonets into their bodies until the hilt came up against the flesh with a sickening thud, and then throwing them off to make room for another, like a farm labourer forking hay, until we had to clamber over dead and dying men piled two or three high to get at the living. . . . They couldn’t run away, for the great mass behind was pushing them onto our bayonets. It was a terrible slaughter.’[200]

  By 0900hrs the attackers who could still walk had melted away into the jungle. The wounded were finished off with bayonets. A few prisoners taken unhurt were shot immediately afterwards, including two of Behanzin’s Amazons, wearing blue, knee-length cotton kilts held up by leather cartridge belts and with their oiled bodies naked from the waist up. The sexually curious legionnaires noted that some of the dead Amazons were barely nubile, while others were much older, with flaccid pendulous breasts. Both male and female bodies were disposed of the same way – some to the crocodiles in the river and some on a huge funeral pyre that smouldered on nauseatingly for days. At the price of five dead and sixty wounded, Dodd’s column claimed a body-count of 832 enemy dead.

  A spokesman for Benhanzin was conducted into Dodds’ presence to sue for peace and at the same time warn that his master was ‘the shark that eats the French’. He was told to return with the message that Dodds was ‘the whale that eats the shark’.[201]

  Progress, once across the Ouémé, was slow with frequent ambushes. Reinforced nightly guard duty and dawn stand-tos added to the misery. On 28 September the gunboats were ambushed while reconnoitring up-river. After dark on 30 September, the French camp was bombarded by artillery from the opposite bank, but without casualties because ranging was so poor that the shells landed in the jungle well beyond the camp.

  On 4 October as the Senegalese advance guard neared the village of Poguessa, the Sudanese native cavalry and a company of Hausa infantry in the lead bore the brunt of an ambush, under which they broke and ran for the rear. Snipers in the trees killed three officers, but once again the Dahomeyans’ artillery shells passed harmlessly overhead. When the French ceased fire on command, the enemy assumed they must be out of ammunition and attacked again.

  A company of the Legion was ordered to outflank them on the left, while the gunboats bombarded the enemy reserves, forming up in clearings visible from the river. Among the bodies counted on the battlefield strewn with fetishes that were supposed to deflect French bullets lay more than thirty Amazons, whom Martyn reckoned had fought at least as courageously as the men alongside them. A French marine who grabbed one female survivor with sexual intent was rewarded by her biting his nose so hard that an officer had to run her through with his sabre before she would let go. Among the unwounded prisoners tied up outside Dodd’s tent for interrogation was another Amazon who appeared to be about fifteen years old. Smiling prettily at her captors, she pleaded for her life, but was shot with the others because there were neither provisions for feeding prisoners nor spare men to guard them.

  Ambushes, skirmishes, bombardments, hacking a way through jungle and scrub to avoid being ambushed even more often when staying on the main trails … the French were now suffering from thirst as the retreating Dahomeyans had poisoned or filled in all the wells. Torrential rain was welcomed as a source of water, all too soon exhausted. The advance ground to a halt. On 16 October Dodds was compelled to retreat in order to give his sick and wounded a chance of recovery. Lips blackened, tongues swollen, men were dehydrating at an alarming rate, especially those suffering from dysentery – which Martyn estimated as high as one in five of the Europeans. Burying their dead as they went, the Legion trekked back the way they had come, carrying the wounded with them.

  On 17 October, after a convoy of 200 sick was despatched back to the coast, protected by two companies of native troops, the slimmed-down column numbered fifty-three officers, 1,533 other ranks and 2,000 porters. It was badly in need of two Senegalese infantry companies that arrived as reinforcements, enabling Dodds to create four ad hoc battalions of one ‘light’ Legion company and two native companies in each.

  The outcome was still in the balance, but fortuitous help was on the way in the shape of an epidemic of smallpox among the Dahomeyans and an uprising by the Yoruba slaves who cultivated their crops, thousands of whom took advantage of their masters’ preoccupation with the French invasion to go on the rampage, causing damage to property and loss of life that distracted Behanzin’s chiefs at just the right moment for Dodds.

  On 26 October, together with reinforcements bringing artillery up from the coast, he turned back once again towards Behanzin’s capital. Taking the town of Kana on the way, even Martyn and the other legionnaires who had seen horrific ‘honour guards’ of rows of impaled enemy heads at bandit camps in Vietnam were aghast at the Dahomeyans’ furniture made from human bones and the skulls used as plates and drinking vessels. The sight of so many human body parts displayed as grotesque artefacts made the Senegalese infantrymen fear that juju would claim their souls in this macabre place.

  Three weeks later, after fruitless
peace negotiations with Behanzin, who had neither the ready cash nor the control over his chiefs at this stage to comply with the harsh and unconditional terms imposed by Dodds – now elevated to general’s rank to give him the status to deal with a king – the French column entered Abomey on 16 November, to find even more gruesome sights, including the king’s throne constructed of human bones. Of Behanzin himself there was no sign, so Dodds appointed one of the absent king’s brothers as puppet monarch.

  Statistics are notoriously misleading. The government in Paris could claim a victory for the reasonable price of eleven officers and seventy men dead and twenty-five officers and 411 men wounded, but those figures do not include the losses five times as high from disease, heat-stroke or simple dehydration – nor the men who were repatriated with health broken for the rest of their lives. Of the original 800 legionnaires from 1 RE and 2 RE who had landed at Cotonou on 23 August only 450 could reply, ‘Présent!’ at the end of the expedition, but the Legion’s 35% attrition from sickness was far less than the toll on the French marines, whose numbers were so reduced by disease that they had ceased to exist as a fighting force.

  Whether the difference was because of all the toughening-up legionnaires had gone through in Algeria, or simply because they were older men in their prime whereas the marine recruits were young, fresh out of Europe and not physically fully developed, was a debate never settled. It remained true of other wars, however, that legionnaires suffered fewer losses from disease than other European forces. Yet, of 219 legionnaires evacuated from Cotonou on 25 December 1892, only 150 could walk down the gangway on docking at Oran; the others were stretcher cases. Among their souvenirs was Behanzin’s white parasol edged with fifty human lower jaws.

  The little war on the belly of Dan ground to a halt by fits and starts as Behanzin was harried from village to village in the bush. When, on 26 January 1894 the deposed king was finally brought to bay, his European captors stared with surprise at this captive whose reign of cannibalism and terror they had ended. He was a quiet, rather studious-looking young man of indeterminate age, who was to spend the rest of his natural life in relatively comfortable exile with four wives and four of their children, a Dahomeyan prince and his wife, plus an interpreter, on the Caribbean island of Martinique and later in Algeria, a hostage for the good behaviour of his people.

  Chapter 19: The cut-price campaign

  Madagascar, 1895

  Dahomey was far from being the Legion’s only commitment south of the Sahara during the last years of the nineteenth century. It was a period when tearaway officers from many European nations carved off chunks of Africa or Asia for their political masters in London, Madrid, Lisbon, Berlin and Rome – with the satisfaction of naming after themselves or their monarchs features of landscape hitherto unseen by European eyes.

  Among the Legion’s mounted companies thus occupied while Dodd’s column was pursuing Behanzin through the bush was a party of four officers and 120 emaciated legionnaires who staggered back into the French post at Kayes on the Mali-Senegal border on 3 May 1893 after covering nearly 3,000km in eight months of exploration and fighting in the uncharted areas of what is now up-country Ivory Coast, Mali and Guinea. Invalided back to bel-Abbès after enduring appalling privations, they vanished from history.

  The French aim in this scatter-shot approach was to gain control over the Dark Continent from the West African coast right across to the Red Sea. At the eastern end, this collided with the British imperial imperative of controlling Egypt and the Suez Canal – Red Sea imperial route to India and also constructing a railroad from Cairo all the way south to the Cape of Good Hope.

  Clashes were inevitable, the most famous being in July 1896 when Capt Jean-Baptiste Marchand with a column of Senegalese infantry reached Fashoda[202] in Southern Sudan after an epic 3,000km safari that began in Libreville on the West Coast. When the future Lord Kitchener also arrived in Fashoda on 18 September after fighting his way south from Egypt via Omdurman and Khartoum, Marchand refused to give up the fort. Combat was narrowly avoided only by him agreeing to fly British and Egyptian flags alongside the tricolour on its tower.

  On this occasion, the French withdrew with ill grace after British Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury promised Paris political support against the growing strength of the German Empire. On other occasions the clashes of geopolitical interest were avoided by European powers exchanging one area of influence for another, as when Britain swapped dominion over the island of Heligoland for Germany’s interests in Zanzibar and the adjacent African mainland[203] at the same time as ceding to France the largest island in the world in return for her trading privileges in Zanzibar. After thus acquiring Madagascar, Paris was faced four years later with an anti-colonial uprising on the island which resulted in the Armée d’Afrique being required to contribute a Legion battalion of twenty-two officers and 818 other ranks to a punitive expedition of 30,000 men under Jacques-Charles Duchesne, who had retaken Thuyen Quang as a Legion lieutenant-colonel and was now a general.

  Madagascar was then dominated by the Merina tribe, itself ruled by the Hova caste headed by Queen Ranavalona III, who had been converted to the Church of England in 1868 by Anglican missionaries. In fact, the real power was vested in the hands of her husband and Prime Minister, Rainilaiarivony. European arms dealers had equipped the Merina royal guard with modern Remington rifles, but the rest of Queen Ranavalona’s army of 40,000 men was armed with muzzle-loading muskets, spears and bows and arrows.

  Although trained by two British soldiers of fortune, Col Charles Shervington and Gen Digby Willoughby, the Hova officer corps was concerned mainly with the grandeur of its uniforms: gold braid on cap, belt and the frog of the scabbard of an enormous sabre trailing on the ground, red stripes on trousers and huge gold epaulettes. A lieutenant had five gold stripes on his sleeve, a general eleven and a field marshal seventeen! The Antananarivo correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, himself a relic of the British presence on the island, commented that this was an army with ‘no commissariat, no pay and no outfit except a rifle, a few rounds of ball cartridge and a bit of calico.’[204] Apart from much marching in parades, training was non-existent due to a shortage of ammunition that prevented them firing their weapons.

  Such an army could hardly have opposed a landing in force at Taomasina[205], the east coast port nearest the capital Antananarivo.[206] There, after a bombardment that drove out the local inhabitants, the French navy had established a base of sorts in December 1894. There was also a French naval base at Diego Suarez in the very north of the island. So it remains a mystery why Duchesne opted to land on the side of the world’s fourth largest island opposite to the capital. The probable explanation lies in that perennial bugbear of the armed forces: inter-service rivalry, the War Ministry in Paris having undercut by 30 million francs the budget demanded by the French navy to conquer Madagascar using marines landed on the east coast.

  The climate of Madagascar being decidedly tropical, Duchesne planned for his soldiers to march light, with all their equipment and heavy weapons transported on 5,000 of the infamous Lefèbre carts, extremely heavy two-wheeled barrows designed to army specifications and transported in kit form, to be assembled once ashore and then dragged or pushed through 300 miles of tropical rainforest over mountains rising to 800 metres-plus above sea level.

  The best laid plans of generals ‘gang oft aglay’. The invasion went aglay on Day One when the disembarkation at Mahajanga[207] on the northwest coast had to be completely re-thought because the pioneers building a wharf, at which Duchesne’s flotilla of eleven ships led by the Primaguet were to unload and disembark their troops, discovered by soundings that access to it by shipping was impossible due to a coral reef which presumably was shown on naval charts, but had not been disclosed to them. In addition, although the great inlet called the Bay of Mahajanga looked on a map in the War Ministry in Paris like a splendid way of shuttling the whole force 50km inland using small river boats that had been transported dis
mantled in the fleets’ holds, it was found to have so violent a tidal swell that each boat launched was soon swamped – as the navy must have known when presenting its alternative plan.

  Compounding all these problems, there were no roads along which to push the carts! While disembarkation continued from January to April, Duchesne’s solution to this last problem was to launch a recruiting drive for porters to haul the carts while his men constructed the roads. The call for 2,000 coolies from Vietnam brought no response. All he could recruit was a force of 1,000-plus Somalis from the East African mainland. Then Algeria came up trumps with 3,500 Kabyles, who cannot have known the work that was going to be demanded of them, nor that they would be ill-fed even on the voyage out and later turned away from aid posts when in need of medical treatment on the island.[208]

  Another 2,000 men of mixed races and doubtful physique were raised from the slums of the towns and cities of the Maghreb. With the addition of some locally recruited natives of the Sakalave tribe, hereditary enemies of the dominant Merinas, Duchesne eventually had a force of 7,715 porters to transport the equipment of his 658 officers and 14,773 men. The term ‘equipment’ did not include the men’s packs, which they had to carry themselves.

  To make the tracks on which the barrows could travel along a route following the right bank of the Betsiboka and Ikopa rivers, once again the legionnaires’ cutting edges were more often pickaxes and spades than bayonets. With gallows humour, these tools were collectively nicknamed ‘the 1895 model’ as though they had been rifles. So many men died of heat-stroke while wielding them in tropical temperatures that the working day was reduced to between dawn and 1000hrs with a second session from 1730hrs until the evening meal.