The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  With bayonet and grenade – the per capita consumption stayed at ten per man per day throughout this action – the position was taken before the flanking companies had reached their objectives. In return for heavy losses including Duriez and captains Germann and Manurien, RMLE secured a 2km-square dent in the German salient. But Maire had been right to take the risk: elsewhere in one action the dawn complement of 275 men stood at nineteen by nightfall.

  Maire was another Legion legend in the making. One night he reluctantly agreed to make a fourth at bridge in a dugout with some other officers waiting to go over the top at dawn. After the last game they shook hands and went to their units. By 0600hrs Maire was lying on the ground with a bullet in his left thigh, but before the stretcher-bearers had carried him to the aid post, the other three bridge-players were already dead.[273]

  On 21 April the 6th Company was ‘resting’ in a captured German trench on the spur designated Trench 67 on French maps. Unable to sleep in the near-zero damp and filth, German-born Sgt Maj Max-Emmanuel Mader decided that it would be prudent to reconnoitre further along the well-constructed trench towards the enemy. Taking with him a young sentry, 18-year-old Legionnaire Bangerter, he rounded a corner in the trench to find a clear view over a valley along which a French lieutenant was leading a patrol marching with rifles slung, seemingly unaware that they were in sight of a German emplacement whose machine gunners were waiting for their prey to come into range.

  Bangerter wanted to fire a warning flare to warn off the patrol, but Mader had a better idea. Waking ten of his men, he led them in a low crouch along a fold in the terrain to short-cut the bend of the trench and bring them out above the nest. The Germans in it were too concentrated on the patrol below to hear the approach of the men behind them until a score of grenades landed among them, killing and injuring most. The survivors were taken prisoner. At that point, no one could have criticised Mader for leaving the forewarned patrol to extricate itself. Instead, he ordered his men to secure the emplacement against counter-attack and ran down into the valley – a sweating, unkempt, bearded figure in a muddy uniform neither recognisably French nor German, yelling at the bewildered lieutenant and patrol to follow him.

  He then interrogated the surviving machine-gunners in fluent German, learning the exact location of a nearby camouflaged battery. With his legionnaires and a company of light infantry he located and captured the battery after a five-hour battle with a company of the Imperial Guard. For this, he was awarded the Legion of Honour and became the most-decorated NCO in France.

  RMLE’s remarkable record in capturing 7km of trenches and the battery at the Aubérive salient had cost sixteen officers and 777 men. Many of these lives could have been saved, had the supply of munitions been adequate. The regimental diary recorded that Men could be seen crying with rage. Only the lack of grenades stopped them.[274]

  But there was nothing about that in 4th Army’s General Order No. 809 of 7 May 1917. It read: The RMLE is a marvellous regiment which incites the hatred of the enemy and inspires the highest level of sacrifice. On 17 April under the orders of Lt Col Duriez it attacked an enemy forewarned and heavily entrenched, capturing his first lines. Halted by machine gun fire and despite the loss of its mortally wounded commanding officer, RMLE continued the operation under the orders of battalion commander Deville and by unceasing close-quarters combat for the next five days and nights until the objective was secured, deprived the enemy of 2km square of terrain, forcing by its sustained attacks the evacuation of a heavily defended village that had resisted all our attacks for two whole years.

  (signed) Anthoine, Commanding General

  Duriez’s replacement, Lt Col Paul Rollet was a soldier’s soldier who had passed out 311th in his promotion of 587 cadets at St-Cyr. Four years later, in December 1899, this short, slightly built but ferociously bearded officer who would become known as ‘the father of the Legion’ applied for a transfer from the boredom of garrison duty in the Ardennes to join the Legion, earning the respect of his men in Algeria, Madagascar and Morocco by courage and physical toughness. On every razzia he made a point of walking twice as far as his men, who took turns to ride on the mules while he stayed on foot the whole time, wearing out the rope soles of his non-issue footwear so fast that he received the nickname ‘Captain Espadrilles’.

  In France, he insisted on wearing a képi instead of a steel helmet and carried a rolled umbrella instead of a sidearm in combat – not because the weight of a revolver in its holster spoiled the hang of his uniform as some officers felt, but because he believed that having a weapon distracted a commander’s thoughts from his primary business of commanding his men. Their affection was gained by his strict fairness and a willingness to fight for them against higher authority – a characteristic no more appreciated by French generals than in other armies. Typical of this up-and-at-’em officer was Rollet’s decision to transfer from the Legion to a regular regiment in 1914 for fear of being left out of the coming war.

  The arrival of this new commander with a reputation among the long-service NCOs for having baraka, or luck, came just at the right moment, when the costly failure of Nivelle’s failed Aisne offensive broke whatever will to continue the war still existed in many French regiments, resulting in widespread mutinies. RMLE does not appear to have been affected, possibly because so many of the men had volunteered, whereas most soldiers in regular regiments were conscripts enrolled against their will.

  A second black mark against the Legion – the first was for the executions in Paris after the Commune – was earned by the way legionnaires now acted as military police, of whom there were nowhere near enough to prevent whole units leaving their positions and heading to the rear. Morale in the much-abused French army slowly climbed back up after the sacking of Nivelle and his replacement by Gen Philippe Pétain on 15 May 1917. While agreeing with Nivelle about coordinating artillery to reduce the horrific infantry losses, Pétain saw clearly that incentive must be mixed with punishment because the stick without the carrot was killing the donkey.

  On personal tours of canteens and cookhouses he horrified his aides-de-camp by insisting on eating the poilus’ food and tasting their wine, to test the quality with his own taste buds, and had no hesitation in castigating cooks and commissariat officers for failing to do their duty and ensure the fighting men were properly and regularly fed. Among other incentives he introduced were leave for men who had not been home in years – and the award to RMLE of the yellow and green shoulder lanyard of the Médaille Militaire. To a civilian it seems nothing in return for all the suffering, but all the small authorised variations to uniform are expressions of regimental pride and there are moments when nothing else is left to motivate exhausted and disorientated men in action.

  In January 1918 RMLE was taken out of the line in Lorraine to reinforce troops endeavouring to hold the German ‘bulge’ near Soissons and Compiègne, only 60km northeast of Paris. With the gradual collapse of the eastern front as the Bolshevik revolution incited more and more Russian soldiers to shoot their officers, throw away their weapons and walk home, Berlin had started moving fifty divisions from its eastern armies to the western front. Signature of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 finally released the manpower for Berlin to launch another huge ‘push’ by 2nd and 17th German armies between Arras and St Quentin while 18th Army protected their left flank.

  Known by the Allies as the Second Battle of the Somme, it was preceded by a bombardment from 6,000 guns. On 26 April RMLE was among mainly British troops defending the strategic communications centre of Amiens. Ordered to occupy a wooded hillock at Hangard, 15km south-east of the town, where the price of touching a shattered tree or the ground was immediate blistering from the mustard gas lingering everywhere, the legionnaires advancing behind British tanks found themselves in a very different situation from the static war of the trenches.

  In the absence of radio communications, a rolling barrage only worked when a strict timetable was adhered to.
With the front pushed forward in one place and lagging behind in another, that was impossible. Taking advantage of the partly wooded landscape and a thick fog, small parties of German machine-gunners managed to lie low as ‘stay-behinds’ and take the legionnaires from the rear, so that their maximum advance was less than a kilometre. Driven back, they counter-attacked and managed to hang on to the wood until relieved on 6 May, but in conditions of sustained artillery bombardments and ground attacks so horrific that 1st Battalion was down to one officer and 187 men. Command of one company eventually fell on the shoulders of the longest-serving legionnaire, a Luxemburger named Kemmlet, after every officer had been killed.

  RMLE’s well-merited rest from the line was cut short by Gen Erich von Ludendorff finally launching Operation Blücher on 27 May. On a front extending from north of Soissons, eastward toward Reims, fifteen Germans divisions attacked the seven French and British divisions opposite them, and swarmed over the ridge of the Chemin des Dames[275] and across the Aisne River. By May 30 they were back on the Marne, between Château-Thierry and Dormans.

  With the rest of the Moroccan Division, RMLE was transported in buses to the west of Soissons, there to hold the wavering line – which they did at a cost of forty-two killed and 289 wounded or missing in action and despite a desperate shortage of ammunition. Added to the stress of combat was the impossibility of restful sleep, repeated gas attacks during the next few days necessitating continuous wearing of the cumbersome masks. Praise for their courage must have rung hollowly in the ears of the survivors: the losses since Hangard stood at 1,250 men, with no replacements at all.

  On 14 July Rollet marched at the head of an RMLE colour party in the Bastille Day parade, where the regiment was awarded the Médaille Militaire, officially for valour, but off-the-record for standing firm during the mutinies. Four days later, it was business as usual when the Moroccan Division formed part of Gen Ferdinand Foch’s attempt to nip off the German salient south of Soissons. RMLE, seriously under-strength, attacked at 0445hrs behind a screen of Renault light tanks, not much helped by an ill-coordinated barrage. In two hours, they took 450 prisoners. Three times on 20 July the Germans counter-attacked, but the Legion held – at a cost of 780 men.

  One of the few personal stories with a happy outcome is of Sgt Maj Mader, who had his right arm and most of his shoulder blown away. In the Boer War, largely fought over dry virgin terrain, most gunshot wounds had healed naturally, but in the richly manured farmland of northern France and Flanders the heavy dose of bacteria injected by projectiles into even relatively superficial wounds, plus the presence of chlorine, and/or mustard gas molecules and other chemical residue from exploded munitions in the soil, led all too often to gas gangrene, amputation and death.

  The French word triage – meaning originally ‘division into three lots’ – came to be used in military English because the field surgeons in aid posts had to divide casualties into those who could be moved to base without attention, those who needed immediate surgery if they were to survive and those on whom surgery would be a waste of time. The last category was simply left to die. By any reckoning, Mader was in the third group. What he said on regaining consciousness to find a padre giving him the last rites, has sadly not been recorded, but incredibly his indomitable will and iron constitution pulled him through to sport the button of the Legion of Honour on his lapel for a normal span of life.

  Massing an unheard-of concentration of artillery for the preliminary softening-up of the German line, Pétain ordered a limited offensive near Verdun in August, in which RMLE suffered losses of only fifty-three dead and 271 wounded/missing in action for a booty that included sixteen heavy guns and 680 prisoners. This resulted in its regimental flag being decorated with the Legion of Honour, and a second shoulder lanyard in red, to commemorate on each legionnaire’s uniform the honour to the flag.

  On 1 September RMLE succeeded in taking two villages near Soissons that had resisted American attacks and found itself fighting the new war of movement and infiltration, with some companies down to their last fifty men. With the rest of the Moroccan Division they reached the Hindenburg Line of concrete pillboxes and extensively wired trench systems, where they distinguished themselves by capturing twice their own number of prisoners. Ordered by Gen Mangin to take the Vauxaillon railway tunnel, Rollet marched into it at the head of his exhausted men, together with a drummer and bugler playing Le Boudin. Harassed by friendly and hostile fire, by the time the survivors reached the far end of the tunnel, they were down to 50% of strength at the outset of the battle. In recognition of the loss of 1,433 officers and men, a new lanyard was created for the survivors, combining the colours of the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre.

  In the final months of the war leading up to the Armistice that stilled the guns on the stroke of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, RMLE was a skeleton. Despite Rollet’s personal belief in the Legion, the régiment de marche had found it impossible to recruit and make good its losses. The young men of Europe had had enough of war and the colonial battalions had no spare flesh.

  Col Bouchez, commanding 1st Moroccan Brigade, sent a pessimistic report to the commanding general of 1st Moroccan Division (to which the Legion nominally belonged). Entitled Reconstitution of the Regiment of the Foreign Legion, it read in part:

  Since the entry into the war of Belgium, Italy, America, Greece and the setting up of the Czech and Armenian armies, the Legion has seen its sources of recruitment dry up. Only the Swiss and Spanish continue to enlist – in numbers insufficient to remedy the situation. Thereby, the existence of the Legion is threatened, and yet a regiment that has such traditions and such a past must not die. If the Legion does die, it will be impossible to reconstitute in peacetime. We must remember the hostile publicity in the foreign press.[276]

  By the time the Czech army was formed in 1918, Rollet had lost 1,020 men to the various armies of the later belligerent powers, although he believed that they transferred more in fear of the shame of not being seen to fight for their own country than because they wanted to leave the Legion.[277] The Russians in France were legally citizens of a neutral state since Brest-Litovsk, and therefore recruitable, but the three Tsarist battalions sent to fight on the western front by Grand Duke Nikolai had mutinied at La Courtine in 1917 in sympathy with the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1918, after 265 men in one unit of 694 declared no further interest in the war, 375 Russians were drafted in June and July, but refused to risk death in combat for a cause that was not theirs.

  On 6 November 1918 Rollet had an interview in Paris with the White Russian Gen Ignatiev, whose condition for enrolling what remained of his army was that his officers be allowed to retain their rank. Rollet retorted that he already had four Russian officers and needed no more, thank you. So that came to nothing.

  Rather late in the war, an American fan of the Legion named Frank S. Butterworth attempted to recruit an American regiment for the Foreign Legion on US territory until informed by the US Secretary for War that this was unconstitutional.[278] In any case the famous Lafayette Squadron of American flyers had quietly been legitimised as 103rd Pursuit Squadron of the US Air Service in January 1918.[279] There was, of course, the possibility of drawing on the African colonial regiments to fill the gaps in RMLE, but at a time when the British and US armies segregated black and white troops, this option did not occur to Rollet. His alternative suggestion that each regular regiment should donate a few men to the Legion fell on deaf ears although the largest national group left in RMLE at the end of the war were 905 French legionnaires.

  Complicating Rollet’s problem was a tendency on the part of army recruiters to get around the prohibition of foreigners serving in the French army by placing foreigners in the Legion for a token period of days only and then transferring them to French regiments. Julian Green, a volunteer US ambulance driver in France who sought to enlist in the Legion, rather than be returned to the States for basic training and then being shipped
back to Europe, found

  … this difficulty was neatly got round by first having me sign up in the Foreign Legion (in which I remained for the space of an hour), and then transferring me from the Legion into the regular army.[280]

  Similarly, millionaire’s son and gay jazz composer Cole Porter enlisted on 20 April 1918, but was immediately posted to 3rd Artillery Regiment at the artillery school in Fontainebleau[281] in keeping with Pétain’s preference for gunners rather than more cannon-fodder. Serving with his battery from 20 September to 23 January 1919, he was then detached to the staff of the US military attaché and formally demobbed on 17 April.

  RMLE ended the war in Château-Salins – a town in Lorraine that had been German since 1870, with Berlin its capital, not Paris. Giving not a damn for that, Rollet intended to honour the dead legionnaires while the guns were still ringing in the survivors’ ears. He marched his men through the town in a victory parade all of their own, preceded by drummers, buglers and the regimental flag, than which only that of the Colonial Infantry Regiment of Morocco was more decorated.

  At the victory parade in Paris the following year for once Rollet obeyed orders to wear a helmet. On seeing the flame of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe, he was perhaps feeling what Legionnaire Pascal Bonetti put into words in 1920:

  Four years he suffered and bled in that hell

  before the evening when he, too, fell.

  Is the Unknown Soldier whose tomb enhances

  all the epic pomp and glory of the past

  perhaps a foreigner who became a son of France

  not by blood received, but by blood shed at last?[282]

  There is every chance of it, despite a rumour difficult to verify, that the first randomly chosen Unknown turned out to be an African colonial soldier and was hastily replaced. According to the Livre d’Or des Légionnaires Morts pour le France au cours de le Grande Guerre 1914 – 1918,[283] 512 Italians, 455 Russians and 578 Swiss died in Legion uniform, as against sixty-nine Americans and two Britons on the eastern front and eighteen on the western front – these low figures being due to British enlistment in the BEF from the start of the war.