The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  Chapter 25: Identity crisis

  North Africa 1918 - 1940

  The scale of French casualties relative to the total adult male population in the First World War was far higher than for Britain and would have brought down the administration in Washington, had it been equalled in the US forces. As the war memorial in any small French village still testifies, one in three young Frenchmen became a casualty during the four years of carnage. The masculine depopulation was such that glancing through the telephone directory of any commune in the south of the country today can reveal more Italian and Spanish surnames than French ones. To replace the dead Frenchmen hundreds of thousands of landless men from Leon and Lombardy and Cantabria and Calabria walked across the Alps and the Pyrenees into southern France, where they laboured in the fields, looked after the animals and pruned the vines of the dead poilus. The local girls, inheritors of the property their brothers and fathers had died to defend, married the immigrants as the only men available to father the next generation.

  Within the Legion there was no longer a French-born majority in the ranks. In some battalions, the percentage of French recruits fell as low as 7%, giving them swift promotion, in many cases to sergeant within a year of signing on. In 1920, 72% of legionnaires originated from what had been enemy nations in the Great War. Fourteen years later that figure was down to 44% and although only 16% were French-born, they made 35% of NCOs.[284] This was not necessarily due to chauvinism, but because the language of command was French and many foreign legionnaires never mastered it sufficiently to make themselves clearly understood – a potentially fatal situation in combat.

  Throughout these years Rollet clung obstinately to his vision for a bigger, better Legion of the future. Realising that the citations and honours showered on men from fifty-one nations in RMLE throughout the war counted for little with the top brass and politicians, he managed to persuade them that the Legion would make an excellent training school for the best young officers emerging from St Cyr, who could afterwards be implanted in regular regiments to imbue them with energy and valour. His most powerful political ally was Gen Jean Mordacq, chef de cabinet to Prime Minister George ‘Tiger’ Clemenceau. Mordacq had served with the Legion before the war and was convinced that now more than ever before France needed foreign soldiers in the colonies, to avoid spilling any more French blood. He accordingly drew up a blueprint in 1919 for several foreign divisions comprising regiments of infantry, cavalry, artillery and engineers.[285]

  Another powerful ally was Lyautey, who had not obeyed orders to retreat for the duration of the war into a few international enclaves on the coast where foreigners could be kept safe. However, his effectif had been so whittled down by deaths in combat and desertion that he had resorted to compulsory transfers from other corps to keep up even a semblance of normal strength in the five battalions in Morocco, largely composed of Germans and Austrians. They were divided into two irreconcilable camps: those who had wanted, but not been able, to return to Europe at the outbreak of war and those volunteers who had been sent to North Africa to avoid fighting their compatriots in Europe. Recruitment was so bad by June 1918 that Lyautey proposed offering a re-enlistment bonus of 500 francs to anyone who would re-muster and sending the rest to the POW camps on Corsica, where they could cause little harm.[286]

  His postwar plans for completing the colonisation of Morocco envisaged stationing there permanently 30,000 European troops, including a large share of Mordacq’s expanded Legion. However, Mordacq’s plan was thrown out by a Parliament where many députés feared a predominantly German mercenary force in French uniform at a time when the regular army was mainly composed of short-term conscripts. Although few civilians imagined that it would be only two decades before Germany invaded France for the third time in seventy years, a significant proportion of her politicians guessed that their neighbours across the Rhine would wriggle out of their Versailles Treaty obligations and menace France again before too many years had passed. To their way of thinking, with some Legion battalions composed mainly of schleus[287], who could trust such an army? Never again would it set foot on French soil, they swore.

  However, nobody objected to the beasts from the east being used to expand and keep the peace in French overseas possessions, although a limit had to be set to the heights to which non-French officers could rise. And so was born the rule that foreigners could serve up to captain’s rank, above which ceiling only French nationals were eligible. That too caused problems, for finding French-born officers was difficult in the years immediately after the war, when professional soldiers were regarded so askance in France that few would go out in public wearing uniform, if they could avoid it. The result was that some of the Legion’s new officers were a rather wild lot, who would not have been commissioned into regular units because they were bound to cause trouble.

  Other officers were too meek and mild, rotated into the Legion under a training programme called ‘Théatre des Opérations Extérieures’ to widen the experience of cadres from administrative posts in regular regiments. They found themselves thwarted at every turn by experienced NCOs who took a delight in undermining their authority. Humiliated every time a swaggering long-service legionnaire did not salute them off-duty, the TOE officers took refuge in dreams of a more congenial next posting.

  Whatever Paris thought about them, the international reputation for valour of France’s two most decorated regiments – RMLE and the Régiment d’Infanterie Coloniale du Maroc – was such that in October 1919 the Spanish government sent Maj José Millan Astray y Terreros, one of its most experienced colonial soldiers, into French Morocco to study first-hand the organisation and methods of Lyautey’s military government and decide how they might be applied in the Spanish enclaves. Millan Astray returned to Madrid with his own ideas for a differently organised Spanish Foreign Legion for deployment in North Africa. In January 1920 a royal decree created his new army as 3rd Extranjeros and he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel as its first commander. La Bandera, as it came to be known, never acquired the glamour of its older French brother.

  It is not surprising that Millan Astray was unimpressed by Lyautey’s Legion of enemy alien stay-behinds and veterans from the trenches who intended to live long enough to collect their pensions, plus refugee career soldiers from armies that no longer existed after the Russian Revolution and the general upheaval in eastern Europe. For these last to return home would have meant a firing squad, if they were lucky. Homeless, their families dead, their property destroyed or sequestrated, where else could they go, but the Legion? With no hope of regaining their former ranks, they signed on as ordinary legionnaires – as did White Russian Gen Boris Krechatisky, who went to the bottom of the military ladder and volunteered as an ordinary legionnaire because soldiering was the only trade he knew and nobody else would give him a job.[288]

  Rollet blamed many of the Legion’s problems of discipline and morale on what he considered the contaminating influence of European civilians in Algeria. Given the chance, he would have moved it wholesale into the interior of Morocco, where there were no settlers. In the event, 1 RE remained based in bel-Abbès, while 2 RE moved from Saïda to Meknès in Morocco. The rump of RMLE became 3 RE, based in Fez, Morocco, and commanded by Rollet from its inception in January 1920 until March 1925 when he married an attractive and much younger wife, Clémentine Hébert. To provide the couple with a semblance of normal European life, he was given command of 1 RE in Sidi bel-Abbès.

  In this post-war expansion of the Legion, 4 RE was created in Meknès in December 1920 and then moved to Marrakesh in central Morocco. Two years later the Régiment Etranger de Cavalerie was set up 1,500km to the east, in Sousse, Tunisia. REC was largely recruited from Cossacks, Poles and Russians from the White armies with a few of the Kaiser’s Uhlans for good measure, officered by French cavalrymen from the Spahis and Chasseurs d’Afrique. One outstanding legionnaire, a former Tsarist hussar colonel calling himself Odintsoff reduced his age by more than a decad
e in order to enlist. So many of his fellow émigrés were sons of the nobility that the regiment was dubbed ‘Le Royal Etranger’ even though the war they were to fight would be far from the glittering cavalry parades and exhilarating charges across the plains of central and eastern Europe, to which they were accustomed.

  Of the thousands of Tsarist officers and NCOs who found themselves starving in Constantinople after escaping the Red Army at the end of the Russian Civil War, several hundred accepted free passage on French ships bringing them directly to North Africa, where their nothing-left-to-lose-but-my-life temperament introduced into the panoply of Legion horseplay the lunatic Russian roulette called Cuckoo.[289] A more sober applicant to join the Legion was Finland’s greatest soldier Gen Mannerheim. A prophet in his own country, he applied in 1925 to serve with the Legion in Morocco but was politely informed that there was no post suitable for a cavalry officer aged fifty-nine.

  Four years later, the Legion’s strength on paper totalled eighteen battalions of infantry, six cavalry squadrons, five mounted companies and four engineering companies. One year later the three battalions stationed in Indo-China became 5 RE. This was probably the high point in real Legion strength, with 33,000 men in all. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War three battalions from 1 RE and one from 2 RE became 6 RE in Syria and 2 REC was created in July 1939, to earn the distinction of being the most often disbanded and reconstituted unit in the Legion! The infantry regiments became designated REI, meaning Régiment Etranger d’Infanterie, to distinguish them from the other arms.

  After the flood of recruits whose lives had been shattered by the war and the Russian Revolution came a new crop with the Depression, when workless men enlisted from all walks of life, one quarter of them under twenty years old and 64% under twenty-five. Of them, 73% had been labourers or skilled manual workers, and 7% had worked on the land. It was the 13% of white-collar recruits who gave a problem in what was a physically very demanding world. As to exactly how unfit they were, opinions differ. Some inter-war memoirs infer that the medical examination given to recruits was a mere formality; others, that it paid rigorous attention to eyesight and good teeth. Many problems stemmed from childhood malnutrition in men who had grown up during the war, when the British Isles had been blockaded by U-boats and Germany had also been cut off from many of her traditional food suppliers. Even men who had grown up in the country and eaten well as children could also be very unfit after being unemployed during the Depression and having eaten poorly and irregularly for months before joining up.

  The new recruits’ mental attitudes also gave problems, the regimental diarist of 2 REI complaining in 1921 that the new legionnaires had not

  … come to the Legion in search of adventure and … the desire to live peacefully while waiting for better times seems to be their main motivating force. The present legionnaires are more malleable, less drunken but also softer. The rather large numbers of letters that they write and receive shows that they have not broken with their old countries.[290]

  It was also an indication that they were better educated than the hard men of the old Legion. Whilst less prone to drink-related indiscipline than their predecessors, such men were hardly ideal material to turn into brutal and licentious soldiery, but Rollet could have done with more, all the same. One battalion commander even went so far in 1923 as to suggest that the now traditional five-year engagement be shortened to three years in order to attract recruits who wanted a brief adventure, but not a military career. The introduction of an enlistment cash bonus and another cash bonus on completion of basic training – two incentives the old lags had never known – was resisted by some officers on the grounds that they furnished unhappy young recruits with the very money needed to finance desertion.

  Before the war, when the majority of legionnaires had been French, desertion en masse was rare because if they went ‘home’ they would be caught, but if the postwar foreign recruits could make it home or to some neutral country, they were safe. So they did desert more often and in larger numbers. Those caught after an absence of longer than six days, or who had taken their weapons with them, purged their crime in the Legion’s penal battalion in Bechar, 400km south of bel-Abbès. There, an average day might be spent making by hand a quota of 1,000 adobe bricks per man. Any offence against the draconian regulations was punished by le peleton – drilling for hours at the double in temperatures in the high forties, wearing full parade uniform and with backpack stuffed with rocks and shoulder straps replaced with wire that cut into the shoulders.

  What could a recruit do with the cash burning a hole in his pocket in a garrison town like bel-Abbès? There were at the time only three pleasures on sale: alcohol, a good meal and sex. Until the Legion’s own medically supervised brothels to reduce the incidence of venereal disease[291], three maisons de tolérance in the native town were in-bounds for Legion personnel, of which Le Chat Noir and Au Palmier were legendary for their hordes of naked and semi-naked girls who swarmed over every man entering. A slightly better tone was to be found at Le Moulin Rouge, where the ‘meat’ stood or sat quietly at one end of the room. After a customer had made his selection and paid the madam, she called the girl over and sent them both upstairs with a clean towel.

  Smashing up a brothel or a bar in a drunken brawl was so common that it was punished locally with a spell in the cells. The Danish Prince Aage had been director of a bank that went bust in 1922. Promoted lieutenant, he was a popular officer, and once had some defaulting legionnaires from Denmark released from the cells to be interviewed over dinner by a woman journalist from Copenhagen. In a Tailhook Scandal preview, the dinner ended with her weeping and semi-naked, but no one got punished for that.

  Aage thought that there was a woman behind every legionnaire and told a story of a lieutenant and one of his men both killed in the same engagement, who were both found to be carrying in their pockets a photograph of the same woman. The idea made a good joke in the 1931 Laurel and Hardy film spoof of Beau Geste entitled Beau Hunks, in which both men join up because they have been jilted by the same girl – only to find that all the other men in the company also carry her photograph next to their hearts, as does a local bandit chief killed on patrol! Plus ça change… In 1999 the author asked a Legion jungle warfare instructor why most men join up today. His answer was the same as that of Prince Aage more than half a century before. ‘Histoire de nana, le plus souvent,’ he replied: girl trouble, usually.

  Although Rollet and the other Legion colonels resented the many films, novels and autobiographical accounts of the inter-war period that sensationalised the legionnaire’s life, they were really his best advertisements even before synchronised soundtracks became possible with Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer in 1927. No young man yearning for the Old West of cowboy films could put the clock back to that age when men were men and did what men had to do, leaving a beautiful woman crying softly in the background, but he could join the Legion.

  Film producers loved the desert because it was a cheap location around Hollywood. Matinee idol Rudolph Valentino’s box office successes included The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922) and Son of the Sheik (1926). At least one recruit saw a film glamorising the Legion in London and walked straight from the cinema to volunteer at the French consulate on Brompton Road.[292] Any man coming out of the smoke-filled darkness of the local cinema, where the flickering shafts of light from the projection booth painted his longings in black and white on the silver screen, could fantasise on the way back to his lonely digs or Salvation Army dormitory about walking into a Legion recruiting office and signing on to test just how tough he was among strangers who would become his best buddies and appreciate his true worth. To lonely men who felt undervalued in civilian life, to men who had no special skills or education, to men who had been rejected, whether by society or a woman, it was a dream that could come true. Rollet’s genius was to package the dream, by doing which he became truly the Father of the Legion.

  After 1918 an
all-army commission recommended the same uniform for all French soldiers. The regular regiments then wore the horizon-blue uniform introduced in 1914, the colonial formations wore khaki and the legion in Syria had to be fitted out in US Army surplus clothing left behind by their erstwhile allies. Tourists passing through North Africa between the wars were amazed to see legionnaires going off on patrol wearing sandals and items of Arab clothing. They were often unshaven and did not bother to salute officers. The only invariable item of kit was the képi with its flap of cloth hanging down at the rear to protect the neck from sunburn.

  During the war, the képi had been replaced by a forage cap or a steel helmet in the trenches. Epaulettes too disappeared in 1915. But in 1922 a stock of old khaki képis was dug up from some stores and distributed to legionnaires serving in Morocco. The pre-war cap covers of long-service men had been nearly white from repeated washings and the action of the sun, so the new recruits bleached theirs artificially to make it look as though they had ‘got some time in’.

  Throughout 1924 and 1925 Rollet was firing memoranda at the War Ministry in Paris arguing for official permission to replace the regulation white pith helmet and the forage cap by the képi for all Legion units. On 18 June 1926 permission was at last granted – not for a white képi, but a red one. Individual commanders took the law into their own hands and soon most képis were white, with only 1 RE and 4 RE still in the red ones.

  There was a masochistic bravado in the obsession with wearing white képis, which made wonderful targets for the concealed enemy in mountain and desert warfare. The high incidence of head wounds caused the powers-that-be to consider issuing tin helmets of the type worn in the trenches until someone pointed out that they would fry the brains of the wearers during summer in the Sahara. The new compromise was to let the Legion wear khaki képis.