The French Foreign Legion Read online

  In Paris Adolphe Thiers, an ambitious journalist who had taken up politics in the July Revolution, was Minister of the Interior and would soon be Prime Minister. Eager to re-establish France as an international power after the humiliations of 1812 in Moscow and 1815 at Waterloo, Thiers was determined to at least equal the Portuguese and British interventionist forces south of the Pyrenees. When he now proposed committing French troops, Nicolas Soult’s voice of reason warned from his personal experience of commanding Napoleon’s army in the Peninsula War 1808–1813 that Spain was indeed a country where small armies were beaten and large armies starved. Better not to get involved, was the gist of his argument. However, Thiers’ threat to resign if he did not get his own way persuaded Louis-Philippe to back him at a meeting of the Council of Ministers on 6 June 1835.

  To avoid the possible embarrassment of French troops either being defeated in Spain or needing reinforcement, Soult decided to transfer the rest of the Legion from Algeria, so that France could be seen to be supportive without French nationals actually being involved. To ensure that the gesture did not even cost the overstretched French Exchequer any money, it was agreed that Isabella’s government in Madrid should be responsible for provisioning and paying the Legion once on Spanish soil. A convention to this effect being signed in Paris, the Legion ceased to be part of France’s armed forces on 29 June.

  News of the Legion’s transfer to the Spanish Crown infuriated its officers, who would have been prepared to fight for France in Spain, but not as Spanish soldiers. To calm the unrest, two spokesmen were sent from Paris to explain that whereas all legionnaires were obliged to go to Spain, French officers had the choice of resigning and transferring to other regiments, unless they had joined from civilian life, in which case they had to leave the army. Foreign officers who refused the transfer to Spain were back on the street. That was the stick. The carrot was an element of bribery, with promotions being offered to replace the resignations, which were so numerous that eighty-five junior officers took advantage of this.[104]

  The military situation in Spain was that the Carlist forces in the northern provinces adjoining the Pyrenees had been very successful under the Basque colonel Tomás Zumalacárregui until he was ordered by Don Carlos for strategic reasons to besiege the port of Bilbao. His irregulars being ill-equipped for this, the siege had to be abandoned, but not before inadequate treatment of a slight leg wound resulted in gangrene and cost Zumalacárregui’s life.

  On 28 July a Corsican separatist assassin narrowly missed killing Louis-Philippe in Paris, the multi-barrel gun he had invented for the purpose left forty of the king’s escort dead. No one in the Legion would have mourned the monarch who had signed them away with a few strokes of his quill. And yet, when the now mixed battalions of the Legion landed at Tarragona on 17 August 1835 after being held in quarantine for cholera on Mallorca, the Germans and Italians were singing an especially composed hymn vaunting the role of the Legion in suppressing tyranny on behalf of freedom, as befitted grandsons of the Revolution of 1789. The welcome accorded the six battalions of legionnaires led by 123 officers was lukewarm, the population greeting the column of marching men led by Col Jean-Nicolas Bernelle on a horse, followed by his wife and her maid on mules, with some cries of ‘Viva la libertad!’ and ‘Viva la Francia’ but few monarchists daring to call out ‘Viva la reína!’

  Those legionnaires who heaved a sigh of relief at being back on European soil and thought nothing could be worse than fighting guerrillas in Algeria were in for a rude awakening. In Catalunya, they fought at Artesa de Segre, Gerri and Pobla de Segur.

  After marching 400km inland to Vitoria, the Legion found itself universally hated by a population of women, old men and children, whose men of military age were in the mountains with Don Carlos’ irregulars while the Infanta’s forces sat tight in the towns and cities. The hostility to men wearing French uniforms, so soon after Napoleon’s armies had ravaged the peninsula, was exacerbated by Isabella’s Prime Minister Juan Alvarez Mendizábal policy of selling off extensive Church properties to finance the war. Local priests told their congregations that the legionnaires were revolutionary atheists or worse.

  The legionnaires in their blue jackets with red, yellow or green epaulettes and red trousers – and bright red shakos visible for miles[105] – had come from the intolerable heat of Algeria to the cold, bleached uplands of the Basque country as autumn was turning to winter, with the first snow silvering the peaks of the Pyrenees, beyond which lay the country that had given them away to a government in Madrid that had no resources to equip, feed or pay its own soldiers, let alone the foreigners in its service. Supply was so bad that operations had to be cancelled and engagements broken off because ammunition failed to arrive and many men sold their useless sabres for food.

  [SEE MAP F: ‘The Spanish Intervention 1835 – 39’ below]

  Already occupying the best quarters in Vitoria when the Foreign Legion arrived was a British Legion commanded by George de Lacy Evans, who had fought brilliantly against the French at Vitoria in 1813. Favoured with the rank of lieutenant-general by Maria Cristina, he outranked his former enemy in the Peninsular War. Bernelle, given the courtesy title of Mariscal de Campo or Brigadier by the queen on 30 June 1835, found himself in an impossible situation. Whilst government forces were evenly matched numerically against the insurgents, far too many stayed safely in the garrisoned cities for them to have any hope of wiping out the elusive bands of guerrillas. Nor were Evans’ men of the calibre to fight so uneven a war.

  In England, the Duke of Wellington had opposed intervention for reasons similar to Soult’s, and regular army officers had followed his lead. The 400 officers of the British Legion were therefore either second-rate mercenaries or restless amateurs with no previous military experience, who were simply out for an adventure. Nor were their 6,000-plus rank-and-file much better. Evans’ force was a mirror of the Foreign Legion’s beginnings in Algeria, whereas the officers and men Bernelle commanded had in the meantime been tried under fire and winnowed by desertion and discipline.

  There were the usual internecine squabbles of military coalitions. Both the French and English accused their Spanish allies of talking, rather than fighting, and both suffered from irregular pay and inadequate provisioning. Prime Minister Mendizabal, in turn, called Evans ‘a man of mighty pretensions and small performance’[106]. It was not a happy alliance.

  Even after it relocated from Vitoria to the Navarrese capital Pamplona, casualties were high on both sides due to the Carlists’ custom of killing wounded prisoners. The British Ambassador in Spain had managed to halt the practice and arrange exchanges of prisoners, but the Carlists claimed that the treaty they had signed did not cover foreign mercenaries like the legionnaires. After the Carlists captured 2/Lt Durmoustier and thirty legionnaires, they were dragged from village to village blinded, naked and shackled, before eventually being shot. In retaliation, when Capt André-Camille Ferrary took a Carlist company prisoner, none survived. Ordered by the government in Paris to desist, Bernelle did so unilaterally – but resumed no-quarter warfare when the Carlists continued their atrocities.

  Bernelle was the Legion commander with the worst job of all during its early years, disowned yet curbed by the government in Paris. He was a good-looking man with strong features that a moustache and neat goatee beard only served to emphasize. Aloof and autocratic, he was a strict disciplinarian even by the standards of the time when flogging was general in the British army and navy for petty offences. Discovering that caning was a normal punishment in the Spanish army, he introduced it in the Legion also. Whilst officers guilty of offences were usually placed under detention, his frequent resort to caning and the firing squad for rank-and-file caused widespread resentment.

  On the plus side, his mixing of nationalities greatly improved esprit de corps and the addition of three squadrons of Polish lancers allegedly financed by the Spanish Minister in Paris, plus an ambulance section, a sapper unit and a battery of ar
tillery under Capt Rousselet made the Legion a self-contained army at last. There is a mystery surrounding the money that paid for all this. The answer may lie in loot accumulated during the intervention and the allegations that the Legion occasionally took hostages for ransom.

  There was nothing unusual for the time in the way Bernelle surrounded himself with a brilliantly uniformed cluster of staff officers, a number of whom were related to him. But it must have been hard for his officers and men, deprived of family life, to see his wife Tharsile not only living with him in quarters but riding around wearing the scarf of an aide-de-camp and issuing orders as though she was in command. This and her habit of ensuring favourable treatment for her toadies and punishment for anyone who crossed her earned her several nicknames from the legionnaires, the politest of which was ‘Queen Isabella III’. On one occasion she gave a man fifteen days’ imprisonment for the crime of seeing her informally dressed in her garden.[107]

  The officers found their champion in Maj Conrad, who had been given the title jefe de cuerpo or colonel by the Spanish queen. He had the advantage not only of a more soldierly heartiness and up-and-at-’em attitude to war than his nominal superior, but also spoke fluent German, still the common language of the majority of legionnaires. In January 1836 Conrad started calling Madame Bernelle’s bluff by promoting his own candidates to fill vacancies, which was his prerogative as acting colonel of the regiment. When Bernelle countered by obtaining from the War Minister in Paris confirmation of his wife’s contrary decisions, Conrad resigned in fury, to the dismay of his supporters. This did more to shatter Legion morale than the Carlists could have hoped.

  On 24 April, the 4th and 5th Battalions won Pyrrhic victories at Arlabán and Tirapegui in Navarre. The Legion’s next success was snatched from the jaws of defeat by Rousselet’s cannons at Zubiri on 1 August. In Paris, Thiers, whose ambition for France to be seen as an international power had caused the whole mess, was now Prime Minister. Despite Louis-Philippe’s increasing distaste for the Spanish intervention, Thiers persuaded him to sign an ordinance of 16 December 1835 to raise a battalion of Spanish émigrés in Pau, literally in the shadow of the Pyrenees’ northern flanks. Recruiting on 3 February 1836, this new ‘legion’ was supposedly for Algeria, but was sent to Spain that summer to make good the losses there. When Isabella’s own army rebelled against the Infanta and her overpowering mother on 16 August 1836, and imposed a new and more liberal constitution, Thiers was outvoted in the Cabinet. He resigned on 25 August, and was replaced on 6 September by the haughty Count Louis-Mathieu Molé, a non-interventionist who despatched a second ‘new’ battalion of Spaniards from Pau to Algeria early in 1837 under Maj Alphonse Bedeau.[108]

  Throughout the winter of 1835–36 and the following summer, Evans’ legion of British volunteers was alternately idle in barracks or thrown into engagements it had no chance of winning, with the inevitable negative effect on morale. In contrast, Bernelle managed to gather his scattered battalions and commit them judiciously, so that the body count swung more and more in his favour. Perhaps as a consequence, desertion did not cause so many problems as it might have done with the French frontier so temptingly near.

  By August 1836, a year after landing in Tarragona, the Legion’s numbers were up, new recruits having more than compensated for the 117 killed in action and 380 dead from wounds and disease, executed by firing squad, taken prisoner or deserted. But the Legion was sick nonetheless. Six months after Conrad’s departure Bernelle resigned in his turn, worn out with fighting against his own disgruntled officers and his political masters in Madrid. One of his chief complaints was that Paris did nothing to stop the Carlists’ weapons and ammunition being smuggled into Spain across the Pyrenees. Louis-Philippe’s representatives had been equally useless in bringing diplomatic pressure to bear on the Carlists to halt the continuing murder of legionnaires taken prisoner.

  Arriving in August, the new commander was an unlikely appointment. Waterloo veteran Col Jean-Louis Baux must have been desperate for a job after twenty years on half pay. Although personally courageous, he was a modest, withdrawn intellectual whose idea of a suitable uniform in which to arrive at his new command was a wide-brimmed hat, an old cape, ill-fitting breeches and awkward boots with very long spurs that hindered walking. Ironically nicknamed ‘Le Beau’ – a pun on his surname that needs no translation – Baux’s appearance was hardly going to impress fashionable officers who judged a commander on his manners and dress as much as his military skills. Nor was an introvert likely to boost the morale of men whose pay was non-existent and many of whom were hospitalised as a result of eating the badly cured pork, unfit for human consumption, which was the only meat supplied.

  Appalled at the French government’s total lack of interest in the Legion’s welfare, Madrid’s inedible food and inadequate supplies of arms, and unable to control his own officers, Baux resigned after two months, following his first engagement with the Carlists at Estella, 30km southwest of Pamplona, which turned to disaster when the ammunition ran out.

  His replacement was Joseph Conrad. Taking command on 10 November, he did more than any other colonel could have done to save the Legion’s bacon, so to speak. Shortly after his arrival at the head of the last battalion of reinforcements to be sent to Spain, eight officers reported sick just so that they could have a meal in the hospital.[109] In a desperate measure to counter the shortage of rations while stationed at Zubiri, Conrad allowed the 300 – 400 men whose contract expired each month to leave and also released many who would otherwise have deserted and were prepared to walk the 25km that separated them from the French border. In December, when snow blocked the passes and made that option impossible, whole companies were threatening to go over to the Carlists. Many men did so, and this was to lead to one of the bloodiest confrontations in the Legion’s history.

  Even Conrad’s natural authority and command of German could not stop the Legion’s numbers dwindling to 3,841 by February 1837 from a peak strength of 6,134 men after the severe winter weather meant that sick legionnaires who could not keep up with the column froze to death by the wayside. Yet somehow the exhausted, starving, sick, repeatedly wounded men responded to the heroism of a few officers and NCOs – one of whom was a 44-year-old hard-drinking brawler from Württemberg.

  At the battle of Larraintzar in the Pyrenees, Capt Johan Albrecht Hebig was cut off with his company on the exposed summit of a hill under enemy fire from two battalions of Carlists. For two hours, he stood in the open directing his men. When relieved, he had seven dead, but the enemy casualties all around the position were at least three times as high. Like all the Legion’s battles in Spain, so much suffering for a hill without any importance was pointless, but Hebig’s heroism would be repeated again and again – all the way to Dien Bien Phu.

  After Larraintzar, desertion to the Carlists increased to the point where they were able to field a motley foreign legion of their own, composed of men from the French and English legions. To curb it, Col Conrad again resorted to the firing squad, but with the Legion reduced to two battalions, two light cavalry squadrons and a battery of light artillery, he had to sell his own horse to buy food after receiving no pay from Madrid for five months. By the end of March 1837 he was writing to his old comrade Gen Jean Harispe, commanding the garrison of Bayonne across the frontier, in uncharacteristically despairing tones: ‘I really don’t know how all this will end.’[110]

  It ended near Huesca, an Aragonese city not far from the border of Catalunya. For weeks, the Legion had been harassing a Carlist force trying to break through from the war-ravaged Basque provinces to Catalonia on the Mediterranean coast, where they had strong support. At 1700hrs on 24 May Gen Iribarren, under whose orders Conrad was placed, ordered the Legion to attack the Carlists who had already stood down for the night, but had everything else in their favour. It was an order Conrad should have at least questioned. Instead, typically raring for a fight, he ordered his exhausted men forward. Cut off when the Spanish on their
flanks held back and with Iribarren killed while personally leading a cavalry charge, Conrad ordered a fighting withdrawal, with many wounded men having to be carried by their comrades.

  At 0100hrs next morning what remained of the Legion was licking its wounds in the village of Amudevar, after fighting their way clear and marching 20km through the night. Casualties totalled between 350 and 400 legionnaires and twenty-eight officers. Next day, a thousand of the survivors whose contracts were up, departed for Pamplona and demobilisation.

  Then at last, any sane person might think Conrad would throw in the towel. Instead, the remnants of the Legion were still with their Spanish allies on 2 June, 50km to the east, when the Carlists halted for their midday meal in the town of Barbastro, preparing to cross the River Cinca, which was the last obstacle before the Catalunyan border. The new Spanish commander, Gen Marcelino Oraa knew this was his last chance to bring them to battle before they linked up with Catalunyan reinforcements.

  The Legion, on the right flank of the second line of attack, saw the Spaniards ahead of them break and run. Standing fast when the Carlists were upon them, they recognised in the foreigners on the other side many of their former comrades who had deserted to the enemy. As the battle raged around them, old friends greeted each other in French or their mother tongues, questions were asked and answered to catch up on what had happened since they last met … and then the slaughter began.

  A German officer serving with the Carlists, Baron Wilhelm von Rahden wrote in his memoirs, ‘The soldiers recognised each other during the combat. They approached each other as friends and then killed each other in cold blood.’[111]

  Conrad was in the thick of the fray. To give a rallying point, he raised his red skull cap aloft on the end of his cane and shouted, ‘Forward!’ Whether anyone would have followed him after the nightmare of comrade killing comrade, no one will ever know because a musket ball shattered his head and he pitched to the ground, dead. Around him lay 715 of the Carlists’ 875 foreigners.