The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  On 5 January, the 1st and 3rd Battalions were again in action. After eight huge mines laid by sappers beneath the German positions opposite them were detonated, they seized three lines of trench, taking more than 100 prisoners and two machine guns, temporarily advancing the line by 500 metres. On 7, 8 and 9 January they were again in combat against the Silesian dragoons and Hessian Landwehr, losing 429 including another grandson of Giuseppi Garibaldi[254] to no obvious effect before being reformed on 10 January at Clermont-en-Argonne.

  On 5 March 1915 their high losses and the certainty of Italy’s coming declaration[255] on the Allied side – in order to exact revenge on Austro-Hungary for its long occupation of the peninsula that had been ended with French help – entailed the disbandment of 4th/1st RM. The majority of the Italian legionnaires headed for home and only 127 volunteered to stay in France with the 1st Brigade of the Legion, commanded by Col Théodore Pein.

  Chapter 23: Guns and gas in the trenches

  France, 1915

  Pein was an interesting man of action, who could not have been more different from the blasé French staff officers in their châteaux behind the lines. A first-generation pied noir, to whom the desert and mountains of North Africa were home, he had once defied Lyautey to prove that the Sahara could be crossed on a motorcycle. When it broke down after a few days’ crashing along desert camel-tracks, he and his batman almost died of thirst, but his spirit was unscathed.

  His men included American journalist Henry Weston Farnsworth of Groton and Harvard, who noted in his barrack room a grizzled Alsatian who had done fourteen years with the Legion in the Far East, a black Fijian student from Oxford and former brigadier Moussorgsky, a cousin of the composer. Fellow scribe Blaise Cendrars listed in his intake of volunteers ‘tailors, furriers, upholsterers, goldsmiths and concierges, night-club musicians, racing cyclists, pimps and pickpockets … also a few sons of the nobility like the Polish knight Przybyszewski and Bengoechea, the son of the richest banker in Lima, Peru, plus a few intellectuals from Montparnasse who, like me, were enchanted by the obscene argot of these exhilarating companions.’[256]

  The reference to cyclists was presumably to François Faber, the Luxemburger who had won the Tour de France in 1909. Promoted corporal, he was swiftly killed in combat. Had Cendrars wanted further alliteration beginning with the letter p, he could have mentioned a painter and a prince and future king. Moïse Kisling, whose fellow-artists Modigliani, Cocteau and Max Jacob frequented his studio in Montparnasse, enlisted in August 1914 for the duration, as did Prince Louis II of Monaco.

  Veterans the Legion NCOs certainly were, but desert-warfare tricks like sleeping with rifle tied to one’s wrist to prevent Arab intruders stealing it were useless in the war just beginning – as were the rifles for most of the time. The French army standard-issue Lebel rifle – with its twisting bolt action that jammed with mud or sand far too easily and a long barrel that impeded movement in the confines of the trenches, gave away movements by sticking up above the parapet and, with bayonet attached, was fatally unwieldy at close quarters – was of so little use against machine guns, mortars and artillery that popular humour alleged it had been invented to keep rear-echelon NCOs busy with drill and weapon cleaning. The well-honed blade of an entrenching shovel was of far more use to these biped trench rats, both for digging the holes that saved their lives from air-bursts and for slashing an enemy’s face or cleaving his head when taking a trench.

  Cendrars described the sordid reality of moving up to the line, so different from the glory of battle he had imagined. To avoid being seen by a German spotter plane that brought down a ‘stonk’ which could wipe them all out before they ever reached the front line, they moved at night, groping their way without even a candle through knee-deep mud where the duckboards had been destroyed by shelling, tripping over spilled sandbags and painfully colliding with wattle splinter barriers placed across the trench.

  The new arrivals’ noses picked up the strange cloying stink of unburied bodies and the lingering acrid chemical bite of explosives as well as more familiar smells that told them the clinging mud through which they were walking and into which they fell from time to time was compounded as much of excrement and urine, for there was no sanitation except the trench itself. Sleep tempted no one on the first night, ears straining to distinguish the scrabbling of rats foraging for human flesh from the rustle of a raiding party about to kill them with stick grenades, clubs and bayonets. When dawn came, the landscape in front of them and behind was a tortured treeless wasteland, viewable only through a crude cardboard periscope, except by those intent on suicide.

  The days were spent huddled on wet straw mattresses in man-made caves, with Balaklava helmets pulled down over their faces, muffled in as many layers of clothing as possible – all of them damp. For companions, there were the rats and lice. At dusk, weary men emerged to repair the stretches of trench destroyed during the daylight bombardments, to risk their lives in the communication trenches fetching water and food that was rarely hot by the time they got it back to their comrades, to stand sentry in the darkness full of menace and movement, to slither out into No Man’s Land with a wiring party and repair the entanglements damaged that day at risk of bumping into a German patrol or, worst of all, being despatched to raid a trench and bring back a shivering, terrified Bavarian or Saxon for interrogation by men who had killed his comrades.

  Bumping into the enemy in the dark of No Man’s Land, they were always at a disadvantage, for the Germans were better fed and clothed, better trained and far better equipped. Cendrars and Seeger both agreed how the poilus[257] coveted German grenades, Luger automatic pistols, electric torches and flares that were the most prized booty. The disparity was general: even the French artillery was outranged by the German batteries, safely out of reach of counter-battery fire. The commonest piece on the French side was the famous 75mm gun designed in 1897, which lacked the elevation necessary to hit a target concealed behind a fold in the terrain, and often had not the range to roll a barrage ahead of an advance. While the guns were being moved forward to a new position, the advancing men had no cover at all and would often be at the limit of the new range, to find themselves taking friendly fire as soon as their own guns opened up anew.

  It was nine-tenths boredom interrupted by one-tenth terror, someone said. Seeger described in a letter to his father dated 11 January 1915, which was hardly calculated to reassure an anxious parent, how he and Kiffin Rockwell, a fellow Harvard man who would become famous as one of the Lafayette Squadron pilots later in the war, were manning an observation point in a ruined chateau identified only as ‘C . . .’ to get through the censorship. A German grenade landed at their feet. By reflex, Rockwell bent and threw it away just in time. Seeger ran to tell their corporal that the enemy were very close. He yelled, ‘Aux armes!’ as another grenade landed inches away. Throwing themselves flat, they lifted their heads after the explosion to see the door kicked in as the first Germans poured into the room. As the trio fled for their lives, the corporal was shot and battered to death with rifle butts.[258]

  The western front was not the only campaign where the Legion was in action. From St Petersburg, Grand Duke Nikolai had been begging for any intervention to draw Central Powers’ forces away from the eastern front and give the Russians a breathing space. So, when Turkey declared war against the Allies early in November 1914 the French and British general staffs re-examined a plan to seize by force the 50km-long Dardanelles channel and occupy Constantinople. The difficulties were immense, but on 2 January 1915 the Allies agreed to mount a combined naval and military operation. On January 28 the Dardanelles committee decided on naval action alone, using obsolete warships too old and slow for the main battle fleet. On 16 February this decision also was modified, since the navy could not force a passage as long as the well-sited coastal batteries remained in Turkish hands.

  With a large Franco-British ground-force assembled in Egypt, the Royal Navy bombardment of land targets began o
n 16 February but was halted by bad weather and not resumed until the end of the month. Some demolition parties of marines landed almost unopposed, but bad weather again intervened. On 18 March the bombardment continued, but the loss of three battleships sunk and three others damaged confirmed naval opinion that success required large-scale landings. These began in the early hours of 25 April – the British at Cape Hellas with Australian and New Zealand forces on the Gallipoli peninsula while the French force of four battalions of Tunisian Zouaves and one Legion battalion – rather grandly designated the Régiment de Marche d’Afrique and commanded by Gen Maurice Sarrail – was landed opposite on the Anatolian shore near Kumkale.

  The legionnaires fared no better than the British and Anzac forces on the other shore. By the end of the first week of May only one captain survived to command the RMA, under him a few hundred men who included one Legion NCO and a handful of legionnaires. Their agony was not yet over. Re-grouped into a multi-national force under Sarrail, ahead of them lay the long slog from Salonika through parts of Hungary and Yugoslavia, their only real success the capture of Monastir from the Bulgarians. Despite Sarrail hailing this as a victory, so few of his ‘army’ were still alive that it was dissolved shortly before the end of the war and the survivors shipped back to France.

  Meanwhile, in France by April 1915 the volunteers had modified the protocol of what they regarded as useless confrontations that led only to reprisal raids. In a forerunner of the ‘fragging’ of over-zealous NCOs and officers in Vietnam, Cendrars recounts his squad ambushing an officious lieutenant, to discourage him from paying further visits to the front line.[259]

  When a hidebound NCO wanted to put Cendrars on a charge for fraternising with the enemy, he explained that both sides needed fuel from a slag-heap between the lines in this coal-mining area. Rather than kill each other for something of which there was plenty for everyone, they took turns – the Germans one night and the legionnaires the next. Was that fraternising? And if the odd present of beer or food or cigarettes or newspapers was left where the other side would find it the following night, that had nothing to do with winning or losing the war, so far as the volunteers were concerned.[260]

  As the weather improved, a new hazard was introduced. The Germans had been using gas since January in Poland, where the air had been too cold for it to vaporise with full effect. On the western front, the French had shot tear gas grenades into German trenches as early as August 1914. At Neuve Chapelle in October that year German shells containing a chemical irritant that produced violent sneezing fits had landed in the French lines. Just after 1700hrs on 22 April 1915 French sentries in the Ypres salient watched uncomprehendingly as a ground-clinging yellow-green mist floated towards them from the German lines.

  The problem with releasing gas from canisters was that a change in wind direction could blow it back on the chemical squads. Once the technical problems of compressing it into shells had been solved, the gas could be delivered accurately on target. To all the other horrors of the trenches was added that of being blinded and having the lining of the lungs so burned that men drowned in their own secretions. The banging of an improvised gong and the cry of ‘Gas!’ had everyone fumbling for his unwieldy mask, wearing which he had to sleep, to dig in and even to climb over the parapet and run through mud, wire and machine gun fire. Horses and the dogs used for carrying messages between the front and reserve trenches to coordinate artillery barrages also had to be accustomed to wearing helmets like huge feed-bags strapped over their eyes, nostrils and mouths. The first protection the legionnaires had was home-made. By urinating on a sock and holding it as a pad against the nostrils, the naturally present ammonia had some neutralising effect on chlorine gas, but worse was to come when mustard gas was introduced by the Germans in 1917, causing burns on the slightest skin contact that erupted into huge blisters.

  The next major action in which the Legion took part was on altogether another scale. On 9 May 1915 the Moroccan Division including four battalions of 2nd/1st RMLE was tasked with taking a spur of the Vimy ridge 10km north of Arras and designated Hill 140 on their officers’ maps. Before dawn a five-hour ‘softening-up’ barrage kept the Germans down in their deep dugouts on Hill 140 and was supposedly cutting the barbed wire entanglements between the lines. At 0958hrs the guns were silenced. The stillness is there yet, echoing in visitors’ ears a century later. Still there too are the holes and hummocks sculpted from cold earth and warm bodies by the barrages, now softened by time but still oddly unnatural. Green with grass it is again, but this is not a pleasant land.

  On that fatal morning, the silence was broken at 1000hrs by whistles in the other regiments and bugle calls in the Legion trenches, followed by shouted commands as temporarily deafened officers and men clambered up the scaling ladders and over the parapets to walk, weighted down with weapons and equipment, towards the wire which, as so often, was not cut. Emerging unscathed from their dugouts, so deep and well-constructed that they made the Allies’ trench accommodation look like the scrapings of animals, the Germans manned their machine guns before the legionnaires with wire-cutters had made the first snip on the intact wire. At 600 rounds per minute they scythed down the men queuing up to pass through the narrow gaps before they had time to work out that this assault was not going to be the promised ‘walk-over’.

  Seeger described it thus:

  . . . on those furthest rims of hallowed ground

  where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires

  when the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,

  and on tangled wires

  the last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,

  withered beneath the shrapnel’s iron showers . . . [261]

  From behind the German lines, artillery pre-ranged on the wire began blowing into shreds living and dead bodies. But still the survivors pressed on to the next wire and then to the trenches beyond. Finding them largely deserted, they cleared out the remaining defenders with grenade and bayonet. No time to feel victorious: before they could take shelter in the recently vacated dugouts, some veteran who knew what to expect yelled at the novices that a fresh barrage was incoming. Whether ill-timed ‘friendly’ shells or German ones ranged on the lost trenches, what did it matter? Each was as deadly as the other.

  Where were the reinforcements? they asked each other. The 156th Infantry Regiment was supposed to be keeping up with the Legion on its right flank, but became bogged down in the outskirts of the well-fortified road junction of Neuville-St-Vaast. The legionnaires had moved too fast. Now they paid the penalty. With snipers and machine guns in their rear, they were exposed in a salient impossible to hold. But hold they did. All three battalion commanders dead, Col Pein unwisely but typically left his command post to go forward with the second wave, and took a sniper’s bullet through the lungs while reconnoitring between the first and second German lines in expectation of a counter-attack. Rescued by two legionnaires from the shell-hole into which he had dragged himself, he was carried back to the French lines, but died shortly afterwards and was buried in the nearby village of Acq.

  A counter-attack by an Alsatian unit around 1500hrs drove the legionnaires – there were few officers still alive by then – from the crest of Hill 140, but they clung to the lower slopes, waiting for the reinforcements that did not come, with only field rations and water they had carried with them, plus what could be looted from abandoned German stores and dead bodies. Nor was there any sign of activity on their flanks, with the exception of the Algerians in the Moroccan Division to the left. By nightfall casualties mounted to 1,889 dead – nearly half the men who had climbed out of their trenches twelve hours before.

  Exactly a week later, 2km northwards along the line, the survivors of Hill 140 were in the second wave of an attack on Hill 119, behind the Zouaves who bore the brunt of the attack. Under heavy machine gun fire they crossed the ravine below the hill and took the position with heavy losses. One mistake they did not make this time was to leave any Germans alive
behind them. The main hazard was ill-coordinated friendly fire. Reinforcements failed to arrive so that the Legion and the Moroccan Division had to hold the position all night after a heavy counter-attack at around 2000hrs had them at a disadvantage in trenches that had not been ‘turned around’ and therefore had the parapets facing the wrong way.

  All the valour was in vain. On the morning of 17 June began a German barrage so heavy that the order was given to retreat, back across the ravine once again swept by machine gun fire, where casualties included one of the replacement battalion commanders. To the men involved it had been a bloodier ‘do’ than 9 May, although officially out of an attacking force of sixty-seven officers and 2,509 men there were only forty-five dead and 320 wounded. Missing in action were another 263 men who would never again answer Présent!’ at roll call.

  In their innocence the volunteers had thought that selfless courage would force a breakthrough to end the war swiftly. For the first time in their privileged lives they had known terror and discomfort and seen the friends with whom they enlisted die, while their officers came and went in the hunt for career prospects and the martinet NCOs from the Paris fire department departed for more congenial duties. Lacking the regular soldier’s conviction that thinking was someone else’s job, they voiced their opinions that the Allied war effort was not being managed well enough to merit their sacrifices.

  To some extent the Legion tradition of mixing nationalities muted this protest, but units where many men shared a common language made their discontent heard. On 16 June 1915 the Greek battalion refused to advance, telling their colonel that they had enlisted to fight Turks, not Germans. Whether because he promised them a transfer to the Dardanelles, or because the Algerian light infantry behind them were fixing bayonets, they agreed to go forward. But words are not action. In vain Swiss-born Lt Marolf yelled in Greek, ‘Forward!’ but his men had disappeared in the other direction.