The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  Off-duty, there was little to do apart from getting drunk and running amok. If native women were nearby, the results were predictable. When Paul Rollet landed as a young lieutenant on Madagascar in the occupation forces seven years later, he discovered that nine of his legionnaires had typically run amok in a native village recently, raping all the women.[209] The 150 Legion reinforcements who arrived in Mahajanga in 1895 had no black marks against them, but a company of conscripts for 200th Infantry Regiment arriving with them disappeared into the village of Makoas on their very first evening ashore to kidnap all the women at gunpoint.[210]

  After seven weeks’ agonised work, bridging rivers and hacking a road of sorts through fever-ridden lowland jungle and scrub, only a quarter of the route had been covered and re-supply was already so poor that the legionnaires were for the most part living off the land, slaughtering any livestock they came across. Compared with road-building, the fighting was easy. On 2 May at Marovoay on the mouth of the Betsiboka River, the Merina defenders ran away so fast that the pursuing legionnaires were unable to keep up with them. On 9 June at Maevatanana on the Ikopa River 100km inland, they watched the same thing happen again.

  Duchesne did not let the deaths from heat-stroke and fever deter him from pushing the column on until it reached the town of Andriba on the healthier high plateau after seventeen nightmare weeks of hacking a way through the mountains and jungles. Long before then, the aid stations and field hospitals had been revealed as grossly inadequate because the army’s budget had been trimmed by cutting back on such ‘luxuries’ as these.

  Although quinine was available in theory on this campaign – it had not been issued at all in Dahomey – the supplies were intermittent because it had been so loaded in the holds that it was the last item to be brought ashore. Even when it was issued, men often did not bother to take it. The connection between the insect and the disease had been discovered only the previous year by a British army doctor working in India, so no one yet thought of taking any precautions against mosquitoes.

  At Andriba on 21 August after a three-hour cannonade by the French artillery, so painfully dragged up from the coast by Gen Emile Voyron’s 2nd Brigade, put the Malagasy defenders to flight, Duchesne decided to crowd the pace by leaving the most exhausted behind and picking a flying column of the 5,000 fittest men to force-march the rest of the way with 3,000 mules for transport, leaving Voyron to follow on with the slower movers. Of the Legion’s original landed strength of 840, the medics – whose standards were pretty low, given that most men were suffering from malaria anyway – were able to pass as fit for this operation only nineteen officers and 330 men. From these, the fittest 150 were selected for the final stage of the war.

  Frederic Martyn, now a lieutenant, was among the reinforcements who caught up at this time, as did Capt Brundsaux, to find they were joining an army of fever-racked, emaciated scarecrows. Watching them being reviewed by Duchesne on 12 September, Lt Gustave Langlois wrote that the men were ‘so downcast, depressed and pale, they seemed more dead than alive. Their clothes were rags. Their boots had disintegrated. Their helmets were too large for their skull-like heads and concealing almost entirely the yellow faces with eyes the colour of fever. They seemed so pathetic, so poor and so miserable that tears sprang to my eyes.’[211]

  Two days later, this ghost of a flying column set out on the last lap, along what passed for a road to the capital, 160km to the southeast. In the force of 4,013 other ranks under 237 officers, the Régiment d’Afrique was composed of two battalions of Algerian tirailleurs and a ‘battalion’ of the Legion only 150 strong. Before the day was out, they ran into the first of a series of defensive positions. Next morning, the legionnaires’ role was to advance through a marsh towards the Merina artillery, most of whose shells failed to explode. The gunners and supporting infantry ran away when the Legion fired their first volley at 2,000 metres – well out of accurate range.

  Langlois again: ‘One of the defenders ran off with no self-respect. Two or three other men stood up, looked around and also legged it. As one man, they suddenly erupted out of their trench and disappeared fast down the ravines, throwing away their arms, the faster to get away. We greeted their grotesque flight with yelled insults.’[212]

  After the adrenalin of this push-over attack, fatigue set in. There was no pursuit because so few could still run. A night march on 18 September left a great tail of stragglers who could not keep up in the climb to the next line of fortifications on the Ambohimenas Mountains, where it was so cold at night that men who collapsed from exhaustion on the way were stiffened corpses before sun-up. Langlois recalled reluctantly beating his laggards with a club to keep them moving, for their own good.

  At dawn, the Régiment d’Afrique, such as it was, was tasked with the frontal assault. The Merina artillery, as usual, was ineffective. When the legionnaires were still more than 1,000 metres distant, the line of white-clad figures on the fortifications started to thin out. With the appearance of some marines and armed Sakalave tribesmen on a ridge line flanking the fortifications, the defenders’ panic was such that the first legionnaires reached the impressively designed line of defences to find it unoccupied.

  An English officer in the Malagasy army told the British vice-consul how 300 men died falling down a precipice in the rout, while others had bribed their officers to desert, which gave them the excuse to run away. They hardly needed an excuse: given only fifteen cartridges per man, all they had to do was fire them off at the first sight of the French and then retire. In desperation the Merinas were sending chain-gangs of prisoners up to the front, to replace the panickers.

  Beyond the victorious French now lay a landscape of small villages surrounded by rice paddies, but what should have been a joyous advance on the capital became a grim test of endurance. Here in the uplands, fever was not the main enemy. Sheer fatigue was claiming lives. Even legionnaires toughened by years of campaigning in Algeria had used the last of their strength climbing up to the fortifications in the mountains. Suicides of those who could not face another day’s marching became more frequent as morale plummeted to a new low with supplies running out. The daily ration of sixteen hardtack biscuits was reduced to eight, then four, with the sick paying for favours by handing theirs to fitter men. Men who dropped out singly were set upon by the natives and hacked to death, but Merinas taken prisoner were not killed because they were too useful as porters.

  On the morning of 26 September, the head of the long drawn-out column reached the last pass and looked down on Antananarivo, 20km distant. For forty-eight hours, the men were allowed to rest before the final assault, which cost the Legion six wounded, but was for the most part unopposed as Queen Ranavalona’s army – whom its British advisers were unable to control – went through a mock defence and melted away at the first contact.

  On the morning of 30 September the French occupied the final ridge, 4km from Antananarivo. From this vantage point, the artillery began to soften up the town by a bombardment that soon had the inhabitants fleeing into the countryside for safety. Just before the Legion was due to move off, spearheading the final assault, artillery damage to the roof of the queen’s palace was rewarded by the display of a white flag. Langlois was angry that his legionnaires were ordered to stay with the guns and thus denied the honour of being first into the captured capital.

  Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony was forced to accept humiliating surrender terms. Ahead of him lay exile in Algeria, but this did not guarantee peace on the island he had left. Less than twelve months later a fresh uprising by the Menalambos party had to be put down by Gen Josef-Simon Galliéni, who exiled Queen Ranavolona to La Réunion and abolished the monarchy.

  So Duchesne’s costly victory was a case of taking a sledgehammer to crush a nut and nearly destroying the sledgehammer before realising that the nut was a grape. To the end, like the generals of the First World War dining and dancing in their chateaux behind the lines, he appears to have lived in a world of his own. On one
occasion, noticing three officers and ten men from a pioneer unit returning from a work-site, he called out, ‘That’s a lot of officers for so few men!’ apparently unaware that he was addressing all that remained of a pioneer company, reduced by disease and the privations of building bridges and laying causeways over swamps.[213]

  All the weeks of agony, exhaustion and disease for the expeditionary force had cost 4,613 European lives, a quarter as many African troops and 1,143 Kabyles. Since battle casualties had been comparatively negligible, the blame lay squarely on Duchesne for organising his private war so appallingly.

  The Legion had once again endured more than any other European troops. At roll call on 1 September, 450 legionnaires were still able to stand and answer to their names, which is not to say that they could all have held a rifle and assaulted an enemy position. But other units, of which 200th Infantry Regiment is an example, had ceased to have a separate existence because the numbers of fit men were so small they had to be re-formed into régiments mixtes. Only twenty of 150 Chasseurs d’Afrique were still able to mount a horse. Even the Chasseurs à Pied, recruited largely from the fittest French Alpine troops, had only 350 men out of 800 still able to shoulder a rifle.[214] The 13th Marine Regiment was down to 1,500 men from its original strength of 2,400 after being in-country only three months. Of the sick, crammed into the holds of the transports for the return voyage, 554 died before reaching France and a further 348 afterwards.

  In the sordid annals of inter-service rivalry, there are few worse examples than Gen Duchesne’s cut-price campaign in Madagascar.

  Chapter 20: Miracle and massacre at Taghit

  Morocco and Algeria, 1901 - 1903

  The paranoid mistrust of France’s nineteenth-century leaders for their army, which could by force of arms so easily topple them from their precarious positions of power, appeared to be justified when a Jewish captain working in the War Office was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in 1894 for allegedly passing intelligence to the German military attaché in Paris. Five years passed before Capt Alfred Dreyfus was brought back to France, to be court-martialled again and ‘pardoned’ for a crime he had not committed. Not until July 1906 was his name cleared and he reinstated with appropriate seniority after it had been ascertained that the true perpetrator of the crime was his colleague Ferdinand Walter Esterhazy, who had served as a Legion officer in the Franco-Prussian War.

  Forgetting that many civilians had shared the anti-Semitic sentiments of Dreyfus’ enemies in uniform, loudly trumpeted by the scandal sheet La Libre Parole, the public was encouraged to take the whole sordid business as yet another proof of the untrustworthiness of a military caste that was capable of leaking secrets to the enemy and unjustly sending one of its own to Devil’s Island. Accordingly, on becoming Minister of War in 1901, Gen Louis André established a system of secret files recording each officer’s political and religious beliefs, promotion being reserved for those whose opinions, or lack of them, made them ‘safe’ appointees. When a nationalist député revealed this pre-Gestapo snooping in October 1904[215], André was forced to resign, bringing down the government of Emile Combes a month later.

  However, the damage had been done. With the army now run by a clique of unimaginative time-servers, the manhood of France was to pay dearly the next time the Germans invaded in 1914. In the Pay Corps, for example, 31.9% of all officers rose to brigadier rank or beyond, while in line regiments only a miserable 1.5% of captains ever reached the rank of major.[216] So it was not surprising that ambitious and well-connected young officers went for the rapid progress only possible in administrative branches, while outspoken officers in the fighting arms stagnated with consequent effect on morale – nowhere more so than in the Legion, where outstanding leaders of men like Paul ‘Loum-Loum’ Brundsaux might have ended his career as a captain, had not the First World War swept him upwards to brigadier’s rank.

  By 1900 the European powers had staked their claims to most of the Dark Continent with the exception of Morocco, whose successive sultans and their advisers had managed to pursue an independent course between the minefields of colonial diplomacy. Although their country measures 1,328km north to south and 765km east to west, outside the coastal farmlands much of it is arid mountain and desert. Two things made it desirable to European colonisers: mineral deposits and its strategic position.

  Because the northern tip of the country lies only 13km from the Spanish coast, the area around Ceuta and Melilla had been Spanish territory for centuries. In 1859 a dispute over the boundaries of Ceuta ended with the Spaniards expanding the enclave the following year, capturing Tetouan and staking out for themselves a larger Spanish zone that included the iron ore mines in the Rif Mountains. To buy its way out of the dispute cost Morocco an indemnity of $20 million, the acceptance of Ceuta’s expanded frontiers, and the promise to cede to Spain another enclave at Ifni.

  Other European powers with designs on Morocco included Germany and Russia, but Britain and France had specific reasons to get involved. The English, who had held Gibraltar with its harbour and naval dockyard since 1704, required at the very least Morocco’s benevolent neutrality because of its position overlooking the straits through which thousands of their merchant and naval vessels travelled to India and the Far East each year since the opening of the Suez Canal. The French argued that Morocco had to be under their control to ensure that Algerian ‘rebels’ could not find asylum across the unguarded frontier between the two countries. In the event, to ward off a French invasion, the Moroccans defied their religious duty to protect fellow-Muslim Abd el-Kader and chased him back into Algeria for Gen Lamoricière to arrest.

  Upon the death of Morocco’s Sultan Sidi Muhammad in 1873, his son Moulay Hassan I continued the struggle to preserve his country’s independence. After he died in 1894 while leading an expeditionary force that failed to subjugate the Atlas tribesmen who pillaged the trans-Saharan caravans, his vizier Ba Ahmed ruled as regent until 1901 in the name of the boy sultan Abd al-Aziz – an Anglophile lover of hi-tech, who scandalised the more religious of his subjects by riding a bicycle and installing an elevator in his palace.

  For many reasons, the French in Algeria watched events in Morocco like a fox watching the chicken coop. The pipe-dream of a trans-Saharan railroad cost the life of Col Paul Flatters of the Bureau Arabe at the hands of the Tuareg across whose sands he was surveying its course. His companions were saved by an influential Tuareg woman named Tarichat, who took them into her tent and refused access to their would-be killers.[217] An even crazier plan than Flatters’ – in fact, one unequalled until Soviet planners dried up the Sea of Aral by diverting the waters of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers – was the idea of diverting the River Niger to turn the Sahara into an inland sea. More realistic were the ambitions of twelve petroleum exploration companies after huge reserves of oil were discovered in the Sahara just when the future importance of motor transport was becoming obvious.

  To encourage settlers to emigrate to Algeria, the French government offered free passages across the Mediterranean, but many were so disillusioned by the realities of life in Algeria that they caught the next ship back to Toulon or Marseilles. The 1902 census revealed that the only increase in the country’s European population was the arrival in-country of 40,000 troops. If life was hard for European settlers, for the Muslim natives it was worse. In Paris, Le Temps newspaper wrote, ‘Taxes, injustice and insults are all the natives have.’[218] Across the Channel The Times, had this to say: ‘The natives pay the majority of the taxes and receive little enough in exchange. They are placed in a situation where they must choose between resignation to utter misery and revolt.’[219]

  The inevitable uprising started on 2 July 1900 with the decapitation of five Italian legionnaires in the Tuat area of the Sahara. In 1901 the British market for esparto grass, used to manufacture ropes, sandals, baskets and mats, collapsed and caused widespread unemployment in the highlands where it had been the main cash crop, forcing
the dispossessed peasants into banditry. On 29 April 1901 the European village of Marguerite, only 80km from Algiers, was raided by 400 tribesmen, who sacked the place, killing almost all the 200 inhabitants. Repeated outrages of this nature drove many European farmers off the land that had been given to them and into the cities like Algiers and Oran where life at least resembled what they had known in Europe.

  French forces based in Algeria crossed repeatedly into Moroccan territory with impunity. In 1845 the military government of Algeria had told its western neighbour that there was no point in defining a formal frontier south of a point roughly 300km inland from the coast between Aïn Sefra in Algeria and Figuig in Morocco, since it was an impoverished semi-desert region merging gradually into the Sahara, inhabited only by nomads who acknowledged no other authority than their own leaders.

  The Moroccans took this to mean that, if a frontier were one day drawn further inland, it should be a line roughly north-south from this point. As can be seen from any map, France took advantage of this ambiguity to push the undefined border further and further west. In one incident, Col Bertrand commanding 1 RE had the nerve to lead 2,000 men across the desert with a supply train of 4,500 camels to occupy the Moroccan oasis of Igli, which lay well to the west of the undefined frontier. Once again, the men on the spot were exceeding their brief. Premier Georges Clemenceau, chiefly remembered today for the harsh revenge he took on Germany in the 1919 Versailles Treaty, announced that Morocco was ‘. . . a wasps’ nest. We might certainly take possession of it, but at what cost in blood and money?’[220]

  To list all the Legion’s engagements in the disputed area during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth would be onerous both to write and to read. To the men who were there, living the life of Beau Geste before he had been created by P.C. Wren – and who could recount every blood-chilling moment of their skirmishes and razzias in the mountains and deserts of North Africa – each awful ordeal, each gruelling march to the limits of human endurance and beyond, is the stuff of legend. To those who never heard the blood pounding in their ears as they raced to form a defensive square under fire from tribesmen who emasculated their captives, a few examples serve to give the tenor of legionary life during these years.