The French Foreign Legion Page 10
On 9 March 1831 the Chamber of Deputies passed his Bill and the following day Louis-Philippe signed the ordinance creating a legion of foreigners, to be officered by Frenchmen. All recruits had to be aged between eighteen and forty and not less than 1.52 metres (five feet) in height. As with line infantry regiments, each battalion was to have eight companies of 112 men, whose uniform was to be a royal blue tailcoat with red piping, and crimson trousers, with a heavy – and very hot – black shako. The iron-grey greatcoat was to be carried rolled up in a ticking cover atop the back-pack.
The stipulation in the Bill that the new corps should serve only outside France somehow got lost between Louis Philippe’s desk and the drafting of the ordinance, but was taken as read from the outset – and continued to be so except for emergencies until 1962. On 18 March 1831 a supplementary order barred enlistment by Frenchmen and married men.
Overseas service at the time embraced the French garrisons in Greece, at Ancona in Italy and on the islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique. Thanks to Dey Hussein’s ill-judged gesture with the fly-whisk, it would also include the little war in Algiers. However, the Foreign Legion’s first home was in Champagne at Langres, a safe 300km from Paris. There, unemployed foreigners already living in France and men honourably discharged from the Hohenlohe Regiment were turned away by the commanding general of the 18th Military Division, into whose jurisdiction Langres fell. The Legion, he made clear, would accept only immigrants.
His ruling reinforces historians’ opinion that the Legion was intended by Soult as nothing more than a sink for dissidents, as does a letter written three years later to Gen Voirol, C-in-C Algiers, who had suggested that the mediocre performance of legionnaires in his jurisdiction would be improved if their initial engagement was raised from three years to five. The venerable Marshal replied tersely, ‘As the Foreign Legion was set up with the sole purpose of . . . giving a destination to foreigners flooding into France and who might cause trouble, we have no need to consider your suggestion. The government has no desire to look for recruits for this Legion. This corps is simply an asylum for misfortune.’[85] The Marshal was either being disingenuous, or simply disillusioned with the performance of the Legion until then.
In 1831 social unrest in France was reaching dangerous heights. In Lyon 600 workers were killed or seriously injured when a mob of 15,000 confronted the National Guard. The Ariège region was torn by a revolution of peasants and shepherds. Disguised as women to hide their identity and calling themselves Les Demoiselles, they attacked gamekeepers who confiscated their flocks for illicit pasturing. In Paris, tailors fearing unemployment were smashing the new-fangled sewing machines in a lingerie factory in the rue des Sèvres. Even workers with jobs lived meanly, the capital’s building labourers being paid just enough to live in dormitories with fewer beds than bodies and one stinking earth-closet toilet among sixty men.
From all the border cities, especially those in the northeast, came warnings to Paris that the flood of foreign trouble-makers was increasing, not drying up. So why was the Legion allotted a barracks in Langres that could only accommodate 385 men, if it was intended to soak up many thousands of potentially troublesome refugees?
Towards the end of March 1831 Soult ordered the depot for primarily German-speaking deserters entering France from the north-east to be moved to the depressed textile town of Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine, overriding the protests of the Prefect of the département on behalf of local inhabitants who had no desire for their town’s economic troubles to be aggravated by an influx of destitute deserters. Two other towns with similar problems were Auxerre in Burgundy – which had a depot for the reception of Italian-speakers imposed upon it – and Agen, midway between Bordeaux and Toulouse, which became the base to which Spanish refugees were directed.
By July 1832, fifteen months after it had been set up, the Langres / Bar-le-Duc depot had attracted a total of 1,164 legionnaires[86], as they were coming to be called. This does not seem like a significant contribution to the refugee problem, but it was far in excess of the number that could be accommodated in barracks – which makes the choice of the Legion’s second home even more questionable. With the majority of legionnaires billeted in private homes in the unwalled town, discipline was impossible to enforce and normal garrison duties difficult to organise. In any case, most of the men had neither arms to drill with, nor uniforms to clean and polish.
Eleven hundred restive men need to be kept busy. It had been envisaged that Legion officers and NCOs would be drawn from the regular army, which was itself in upheaval. Denunciations of officers allegedly disloyal to the July monarchy, usually by subordinates who wanted their jobs, resulted in thousands of dismissals including the colonels of forty-four of the sixty-four infantry regiments and five out of the twelve regiments of dragoons.[87] Lower down the scale, revolutionary democracy saw junior officers replaced by NCOs, which in turn caused a shortage of experienced NCOs.
The government’s solution was to recall the demi-soldes – Napoleon’s officers retired to their country estates on half-pay. Like many political answers to military questions, it caused as many problems as it cured, the return of senior officers meaning their subordinates kissing goodbye to any chance of promotion. In addition, after their years in retirement on their country estates, the demi-soldes tended to be poor disciplinarians and were out-of-date in the drills and manoeuvres that served as tactics at the time.
Not surprisingly, service in the hotchpotch Legion of refugees attracted only those officers and NCOs who had no family connections or were simply not wanted elsewhere. Its first commander, Baron Christophe Antoine Jacques Stoffel complained soon after the move to Bar-le-Duc, ‘Of the twenty-six officers here, only eight are competent. The others have been retired for some time, are foreigners or cavalrymen. It is imperative that we be sent good German-speaking line officers.’[88]
One of the twenty-six was labelled ‘the worst officer in the army’ by an inspecting general. Col Stoffel’s admin staff were either incompetent or corrupt, or both, lining their own pockets by selling supplies instead of distributing them. Even he complained that his companies were commanded by second-lieutenants who stole the pay of their men and spent it themselves, while in many cases their NCOs neither understood French nor could keep accounts, and so had no idea what stores had been issued to whom.
Ignoring the resistance of the French officer corps to the employment of foreign officers, the government set about recruiting foreigners who would make a better job than Stoffel’s original staff. It was not easy. Of the many Spanish officers who had fled to France, only six were enticed to Bar-le-Duc, and all of them resigned within months. In the first four years of its existence, the Legion saw 107 foreign officers come and go – mainly Swiss, German and Polish. Nor was the inspecting general much impressed by poor Stoffel. By background a Swiss staff officer, he was assessed as lacking military experience and familiarity with French army regulations, although it was admitted that he was popular with his men and genuinely concerned for their welfare.
Stoffel’s two battalion commanders – Maj Clavet Gaubert and Maj Salomon de Musis – did not conceal their poor opinion of him. Although their sarcastic comments went over the heads of the men, few of whom could speak French, the colonel’s habit of reviewing his motley Legion on parade accompanied by his mistress dressed as a man must have seemed unusual. The inspecting general thought so, and required it to stop – which did not prevent a later commanding officer of the Legion from indulging a similar habit.
It is a truism that all armies are run by their sergeants. The dearth of experienced NCOs in the Legion therefore led to a decision to promote the more educated German-speaking refugees to serve as corporals. This was a disastrous choice, for academic intelligence has little to do with wielding authority over men from different countries and very different social backgrounds. The rank-and-file objected to what they saw as the airs and graces of the new corporals, whose precarious authority was undermined by m
en who had themselves been NCOs in previous armies, while the corporals’ middle-class sensibilities made it hard to share dormitories with illiterates who habitually sold any article of equipment or clothing – their own or stolen from a comrade – in order to buy drink.
The educated men were therefore segregated into two separate companies, where they clustered, refusing new ‘promotions’ in the hope that their superior education would lead to them being collectively nominated as the two elite companies of grenadiers and skirmishers to which a normal line battalion was entitled. With no such provision in the Legion until April the following year, their premature addition of grenade badges to their shakos had to be expressly forbidden.
Arrests due to drunken brawling resulted in the local prison having to accommodate up to fifty-six legionnaires per communal cell, with a can for its only sanitation. The prison authorities had no funds to feed military prisoners, but provisions from the Legion commissariat were intermittent at best, with the defaulters’ quartermasters often unaware they were in the cells.
By mid-May of 1831 the Legion was in a state of mutiny so acute that the two battalion commanders had to call out a hundred men of the National Guard to protect civilian police charged with arresting the ring-leaders. Even this attempt to impose normal military discipline turned to farce because twenty of the arrested men could not be court-martialled. Not having been formally inducted and made to sign enlistment papers, they were officially civilians not subject to military law.
The decision in November to despatch this travesty of an army to North Africa had little to do with its military value in the campaign around Algiers. Stoffel’s men were being sent there to die. Understandably, he foresaw massive desertions on the march to Toulon for embarkation on 25 November. Probably the only happy people in Bar-le-Duc were the local inhabitants, watching Stoffel’s ill-dressed ragtag army shambling away towards the distant Mediterranean. In the event, few men went missing during the 700km march – perhaps because they had already discovered that life as a penniless deserter was even harsher than in the Legion with all its problems. Or perhaps they simply had no idea of the hell that awaited them south of the Mediterranean.
Chapter 6: The scarecrow soldiers
Algeria 1831 – 1835
The French navy did not waste its single prestige steamship, the paddle-steamer Sphynx, on shipping across the Mediterranean several hundred men who were going to die. It was from wooden troopships, pitching and tossing abominably in the teeth of the December gales that the landlubber legionnaires gained their first impression of their new home. It was not comforting.
After 120 years of Turkish rule the casbah of El Djazaïr[89] – the name was soon be Europeanised to ‘Alger’ in French and ‘Algiers’ in English – was a medieval city of 15,000 homes jammed together within its imposing walls, protected by a deep dry moat. Outside the Bab Azoun, or southern gate, where Stoffel’s men were drawn up to impress the natives, rows of hooks on the walls showed where the heads of executed criminals had been impaled until recently. As to impressing the natives, the author Camille Rousset – one of the few European civilians present – commented, ‘To clad this mob, which comprised of men of every age from sixteen to sixty and over, we appear to have scraped the bottom of army supplies to procure the oldest rags. They were a bizarre sight that would have delighted a circus crowd. But, their heads high, their banner before them, their drums beating to the rhythm of the famous war-song La Parisienne, they proudly paraded through the crowded city streets.’[90]
The banner to which Rousset refers was a cock rampant with its talon on a globe marked ‘France’[91] and they were marching at the slow pace of eighty-eight paces to the minute, as taught by their NCOs from the Hohenlohe Regiment – as they obstinately continue to do today, making problems for any unit behind them in a parade. Obviously not a military man, Rousset mistook the popular ditty the legionnaires were singing for a marching song, but his remarks on their dress were accurate. In complete defiance to the Ordinance, the quartermasters had issued just about every cast-off uniform the army wanted to get rid of, from 1789 National Guard, Imperial Guards, Royal Guards, Swiss Guards, infantry, cavalry and artillery.
There was little that was familiar to the legionnaires’ European eyes in a walled city dominated by the palace of the former dey, from the topmost tower of which fluttered the tricolour flag that had replaced Charles X’s fleur-de-lys banner after the July Revolution. The main thoroughfare later known as the rue Bab Azoun was lined with arcades of shops and stalls from which, thanks to the mixture of blood from centuries of slaving, all the male faces of Africa north of the Equator peered out at the newcomers while veiled women followed by their African slaves made their way to the baths and markets. There were also the kouloglis of mixed Turkish and native blood.
Founded by the Phoenicians, captured by Carthaginians and from them by the Romans, Algiers had been destroyed by the Vandals in the fifth century, to be revived as a Berber dynasty in the tenth long before the Turks arrived. Now the Turks too were gone, chased out by these fair-skinned foreigners who would one day also go, as they had come, in blood and fire and grief.
The slave market was a reminder that the city had been built largely by Christian slaves of the Barbary corsairs, who levied a toll on all vessels passing through the southern Mediterranean. In default of payment, they took the vessels as prizes, selling off their cargoes, enslaving their crews, ransoming the passengers and selling any female captives to the harems of North Africa and the Middle East. This traditional privateering had gone too far in 1804 when the U.S. frigate Philadelphia was taken prize and naval officer Stephen Decatur was despatched to wreak retribution on the corsair harbour of Tripoli and burn Philadelphia at her mooring. Succeeding in his objective and escaping under fire with only one man wounded won him a captain’s commission and a sword of honour from the Congress – an adventure still commemorated in the US Marine Corps hymn, From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
Relieved to be on land again, the legionnaires saw the scars of cannonry from the recent French attack on the city walls and on the white marble Roman columns with Ionic capitals of the ‘barracks of the whey drinkers’, just inside the walls. Fresh milk was supplied to the city-dwellers by peasants who drove herds of goats or donkeys through the city gates to milk them at the customer’s door and the barracks’ recently departed teetotal janissary inmates had been in the habit of levying an unofficial extra tax in kind on them each morning, to guarantee themselves a permanent cost-free supply of milk.
In all, the city boasted seven Turkish barracks capable of housing 9,722 janissaries, but the Legion was not to be accommodated within the walls at all. Like a politically unreliable ally, it was based 5km away in a palace of the former dey at Moustafa. In this Moorish/Turkish extravaganza of marble floors, pillars and fountains with fine fixtures and fittings, from which the furniture had been pillaged during the invasion, there was plenty of space for the legionnaires to sling their hammocks.
The Maghreb[92], or North African littoral, is today divided into the countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, but was then an unmapped confusion of tribal territories. The writ of the dey had run in the cities of Algiers and a few towns, but the surrounding countryside was ruled by local chieftains whose traditional independence would give the French colonists problems intermittently for the next ninety years.
As though it were a unified country on the European model, the new masters of Algiers created in 1839 the name ‘Algeria’ to define geographically and politically that part of the North African littoral they sought to control. The inhabitants were politely called ‘Arabs’, despite the Berbers living mostly in the Atlas Mountains having their own language, script and customs, as did the Tuareg of the Sahara.
[SEE MAP E: The Maghreb / French North Africa below.]
In the Oranais – the western third of the region that would become French Algeria – the tribes were loosely united under a relig
ious leader, the saint or sidi Mahdi ed-Din. Imam of a religious school near Mouaskar, he decided that he was too old to undertake the military harassment of the French based in Oran and delegated this task not to his eldest son, but to his second son, Abd el-Kader. Already renowned for both piety and military prowess this charismatic 24-year-old would become the greatest thorn in the side of successive French generals.
Through 1832 his spies watched the occupation forces under Gen Pierre Berthezène occupy Algiers, Oran and Bejaïa, noting that their quality was extremely uneven. A quasi-militia corps calling itself les Volontaires de la Charte, but also known as the Parisian Volunteers, was nicknamed ‘the French Bedouin’. Universally detested for its thieving, ill-discipline and debauchery, the Volunteers were dissolved by Berthezène, its less unsavoury members transferred to the Zouaves. Originally intended as a native light infantry, the distinctively attired Zouaves became a European force, but retained their mock-Turkish uniforms. Others of the Volunteers were drafted into 67th Infantry Regiment in the traditional military way of breaking up bad units.
1st, 2nd and 5th battalions of the Legion stayed near Algiers when 4th Battalion was posted to Oran and the Belgians of 6th Battalion went east to Annaba. The 7th Batallion was being formed in France, of Polish immigrants, but when it did eventually arrive in Algeria thirty-five men were missing at the first roll-call. Two days later an entire company got drunk and attacked its officers, resulting in the court-martialling of two ring-leaders.[93]