The French Foreign Legion Page 13
The Legion’s tradition of not abandoning dead bodies whenever possible was already in place. Present was François-Achille Bazaine, who had joined the Legion as a second-lieutenant and would rise to become a Marshal of France. He wrote afterwards to Gen Harispe, ‘(Col Conrad) thought he could rally them. He advanced in front of the skirmish line, shouting, “Forward!” But the men . . . continued to flee. His body almost fell into the hands of the enemy. With the help of an officer and four courageous men, I got him onto my horse and across the battlefield. However, as we were outflanked on the left, it took me half an hour to get his body out of danger.’[112]
Conrad had informed Harispe weeks before that honour demanded he set an example to his demoralised and sorely tried men by constantly exposing himself to enemy fire. So was it suicide, as some of his men believed? Or a gesture of despair? Or simply sheer fatigue, combined with the necessity in the much depleted Legion to take abnormal risks? Even Louis-Philippe showed some guilt over this death out of all the thousands suffered in the Spanish intervention, personally giving a widow’s pension to Conrad’s wife while his son the duke of Orleans undertook to pay the fees of Conrad’s two boys at a military school.
The decimated Carlist force was disbanded a few weeks later, but the war continued to be running sore in the body of Spain for another fifteen months. Commanded by André-Camille Ferrary with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, what remained of the Legion was reduced again and again until absorbed directly into the Constitutionalist army and finally disbanded in September 1838.
In January 1839 sixty-three officers and 159 NCOs and legionnaires with seventy-five mules rode and marched back into France, followed by an unknown number of wives and children, whose misery cannot be imagined – especially that of the orphans and widows, condemned to live on charity by begging unless the mothers were young enough to earn money through prostituting themselves. They cannot have looked much different from the last Carlists to flee across the frontier into France in May 1840, whose arrival in Perpignan was witnessed by Capt François Certain Canrobert: ‘Some wore sandals. Others marched barefoot and even barelegged. Women, children and old people followed the soldiers, Lord knows in what rags and in what misery.’[113]
And that was the sorry end of the first French Foreign Legion: a testimony to the cynicism of politicians, who will always sacrifice the soldiers who serve them when self-interest so dictates – and to the heroism of men reduced to the level of beasts, yet who fought on like Greek Bronze Age heroes despite all the odds, in the knowledge of almost certain death for a cause that was not theirs.
It is worth asking why they did it because the Legion has done it again and again. The answer seems to be that, when betrayed by everyone else, the only reality for men in combat is the bond with comrades who share their hardships and risks. That is why they will risk their own lives trying to save a comrade’s body. It also explains the viciousness of friends killing each other at Barbastro. In the final analysis, the greatest hatred is reserved for the man who betrays this sacred trust.
But politicians care little for either extreme of what former captain in the Royal Guard Alfred de Vigny called servitude et grandeur militaires in a book he published in 1835 while the Legion was en route between Algeria and Spain. As far as Paris was concerned, the tattered remains of the Legion that limped across the Pyrenean pass in January 1839 without any expectation of a hero’s welcome were best disposed of by sending them back where they could be completely wiped out.
Chapter 8: Blood on the sand
Algeria, 1835 – 1840
Marshal Bertrand Clauzel, the new Governor-General of Algeria, had been given the job largely because he presented to Louis-Philippe’s government what sounded like the first intelligent plan for the country which looked beyond the immediate stage of military occupation. Having spent four years in exile in the United States to avoid prosecution after the Bourbon Restoration, Clauzel had seen what ruthless, hard-working European settlers could achieve after dispossessing the natives of an economically unexploited country. He envisaged driving all the peasantry off the fertile Mitidja Plain – the level coastal strip 100km long by 20km deep centred on Algiers – before draining its swamps and fortifying it with a chain of blockhouse forts, in whose arc of protection settlers from Europe could rapidly become self-sufficient and grow cash-crops for export, including cotton.
The theoretical beauty of Clauzel’s plan was that, in the process, they would generate the taxation to pay the occupation forces. But first he had to ‘dispossess the natives’. In December of 1835 Abd el-Kader was driven out of his home territory of Mouaskar, 80km southeast of Oran. However, with a flair for deploying his loosely federated tribes that would have done credit to Saladin, he took his revenge on 27 April 1836 by encircling and cutting off an important French camp on the Tafna estuary in western Algeria.
The man sent to relieve the siege was ‘Jailer’ Bugeaud, who began by telling his officers they were out of their minds to make war on an elusive and highly mobile enemy who knew the country by marching at the slow pace of heavy artillery limbers and an enormous supply train, as though for a set-piece battle against a European army.
Bugeaud had learned in the hard school of the Peninsula War against Wellington to cut supplies to what could be loaded on a mule and restrict artillery to light canons that could likewise be dismantled and transported on mule-back. His officers thought him mad until his swift-moving columns outflanked the enemy near the Sikkak River, where Abd el-Kader had been expecting to ambush a ponderous Napoleonic army. Wrong-footing him by appearing from another direction, Bugeaud then altered the normal formation of column and square into a V-formation, using massed musket fire in place of the missing artillery to cut swathes in the enemy ranks as they tried to get to close quarters.
Among the dirty tricks Bugeaud introduced was an old one from his days against Wellington in Spain: loading muskets with one ball and then stuffing down the muzzle a second that had been cut nearly into four. The effect at close range was devastating, the deformed shrapnel-like projectiles tearing out huge lumps of flesh on impact. Sun Tsu said that killing one frightened a thousand. Bugeaud went further by ordering several hundred tribesmen thrown over a cliff to their deaths and then releasing a handful to spread the news.
Seeking a softer target than Abd el-Kader, Clauzel now turned his attention eastwards to the city of Constantine, still garrisoned by Turks commanded by the Bey Hajj Ahmed. It was as near as one can find to the non-existent ‘impregnable fortress’. Isolated on a spur of rock, with steep precipices falling on three sides to the gorges of the River Rummel, the city could be approached only from the southwest, along a narrow ramp of land called Coudiat-Aty and an even narrower bridge.
In November 1836 Clauzel’s force of 8,700 men was beaten back with heavy losses after shamefully abandoning to the enemy both their wounded and their artillery. Retreating through the winter storms in bad order for 65km to the town of Guelma, where Clauzel had founded a town and military camp on the ruins of the Byzantine walled city, they were savagely harassed all the way by the Turks and their Berber allies. After reaching the coast 60km further north at the port of Annaba, Clauzel could measure the scale of his defeat. In addition to the heavy casualties at Constantine and on the retreat, another thousand men died of various causes in hospital.
The first siege of Constantine was Clauzel’s swansong. Post-Napoleonic France being rich in generals and marshals, he was replaced by Gen Charles Damrémont, who arrived full of confidence, little thinking that his death was imminent. Only three months after Conrad had left France with his final reinforcements for the Spanish intervention, the ‘new’ Legion in Algeria acquired eight companies of ‘Hollanders’, meaning men who had entered France from the Low Countries. They arrived on 15 December 1836 under the command of Maj Bedeau, who soon discovered that numbers meant little in the field. Allocated to 2nd Brigade charged with securing the coastal plain around Algiers, his Hollanders proved
inapt for the task – which did not stop the continuing recruitment in France of men of the same indifferent quality.
On 30 May 1837 Thomas Bugeaud was showing another side of his personality by negotiating with Abd el-Kader the Treaty of the Tafna, under which a truce was bought in return for French confirmation of el-Kader as amir of two-thirds of Algeria. In this, Bugeaud was exceeding his political mandate from Paris in order to gain a short-term military respite, during which he could move forces from western and central Algeria eastwards in the effort to sort out the Turks in Constantine and avenge the shame of Clauzel’s defeat.
The Turks had been invited into the country in the fourteenth century to drive out the Spanish. Reasoning that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my (temporary) ally’, Abd el-Kader was happy to see Bugeaud’s concentration of French forces in the east, which left him free to prepare for the next round in what would be a long war – ending only with the Evian Agreement in the summer of 1962 when the French were finally driven out of North Africa.
El-Kader was fighting a jihad against the infidel invaders, his tribes united by hatred of the French, but this did not prevent him hiring foreigners to provide the training and acquire the armaments he lacked. Of these, the two best known were the dubious Frenchman Léon Roches, who afterwards became a diplomat, and his compatriot Marius Garcin, who advised el-Kader’s men on weapons training and obtained arms largely from France’s traditional enemy, Britain.
With the help of other foreigners, el-Kader established a simple civil administration which moved several times between Mouaskar and Tagdempt. To ensure that his training bases and arsenals were out of French reach, he sited them in the interior at Saïda, Tiaret and even across the border of Morocco at Taza. There also, he stored the surplus produce that could be sold to buy weapons. All these measures would have come to nothing, had he not set a personal example of piety and austerity, living like the simplest of his people in a tent and subsisting on the same food they ate.
In September 1837 another battalion of refugees had been recruited in France amid the total indifference of the French population and most of the government including Prime Minister Molé. Once shipped out to Algeria, the addition of this second battalion brought the new Legion up to the strength of a Napoleonic regiment, with two battalions in the field and another in quarters, recruiting and training new troops.
By October, Damrémont had made his preparations. On the first of the month, he rode out of his camp near Guelma with a force nearly three times the size of Clauzel’s. To breach the walls of Constantine he had France’s most famous artillery general, the universally respected Sylvain Charles Valée, nearing the end of his career at sixty-four years of age. Lt Gen Rohault de Fleury commanded the large battalion of sappers. The force of twenty thousand soldiers included a Legion battalion of 500 men under Col Combe and Maj Bedeau. So large a force, with their mounts and baggage mules, made this a formidable logistical operation in a land both arid and hostile.
After a four-day march through enemy territory, they came in sight of what generals Valée and Fleury realised was going to be a formidable task, even if Damrémont was still feeling optimistic. Since driving off the French eleven months before, the Turks had not been idle. Hajj Ahmed had strengthened his own artillery with the abandoned French pieces, so that there were sixty-three cannons of varying age and accuracy served by experienced Turkish gunners massed on the walls opposite the Coudiat-Aty spur, across which the French had to advance.
Valée had a total of seventeen cannons and a battery of siege mortars. Before they could be positioned for use, Fleury’s sappers had to construct siege-works about 400 metres from the city, whilst under enemy small arms fire. On 7 October the first sortie by the garrison was repulsed. On 9 October, the French bombardment began in foul weather, its priority being to silence the Turkish guns. On 11 October, as Valée started to pound away at a stretch of city wall in the hope of creating a breach, through which the attack could go in, several sorties from the city were beaten off with casualties on both sides. Even a slight wound could mean a lingering death from gangrene.
The wall was built of nearly two metres of dressed limestone with old buildings on the inside infilled with earth and debris, making it more shock-resistant than Valée had anticipated. This, and the need to sustain counter-battery fire to keep the Turkish gunners’ heads down, were consuming the French ammunition at an alarming rate. With only 200 shot per cannon, things were getting tense for Valée.
That night, the sappers constructed emplacements for the shorter-range siege mortars much closer to the wall. In the bright moonlight, not only were they under musketry fire from the defenders, but could see many thousands of the Turks’ Berber allies out of range, waiting on the surrounding hills. Early on 12 October, Damrémont was killed during a Turkish bombardment and Valée took overall command. The wall breached, the customary invitation was extended to the defenders to surrender and keep their lives. It was refused – but politely, which must have been a great relief to the native go-between who could have returned with his head in a basket.
Valée then took a gamble and expended much of the remaining shot to silence the Turkish guns and keep the musketeers off the walls while his siege mortars continued pounding away at the breach. In mid-afternoon, the Turks requested a truce, reasoning that if they could hold out for long enough the French would exhaust their provisions. In reply, Valée refused to treat until after the city had surrendered. By now, the forward French positions were within 100 metres of the breach. The noise of the bombardment was horrendous for the men waiting in the trenches to attack, while the Turks’ return fire, both from cannons and small arms, kept their heads well down below the parapets.
The barrage lifting slightly, the first wave of the French assault went in, only to find itself trapped in the breach while the defenders poured upon them a murderous fire from all sides. The hundred legionnaires waiting in the trenches to go in with the second wave under Combe and Bedeau could see the problem: an inner wall that was still intact and barred access to the city. Desperate calls from the trapped survivors of the first wave for scaling equipment reached the trench in which the legionnaires crouched. Sappers ran forward under fire with ladders, ropes and explosives. Before they could set their charges, the inner wall erupted in a curtain of stones and fire, killing them and the survivors of the first wave except for a few wounded men in tattered uniforms, some on fire, who staggered back to the trenches screaming not to advance.
The Turks had made a fundamental error in destroying the inner wall. It was axiomatic of siege-craft to have another mine ready to blow when the French second wave entered the breach, but Combe and Bedeau led their hundred legionnaires forward. Once through the breach, they headed left through the maze of narrow streets, towards the nearest Turkish battery still in action.
What happened next was described by Lt Achille de St-Arnaud – a man seeking glory to compensate for forty years of failure and setbacks that belied his fine military bearing, dashing moustache and goatee beard. After firing one ball, there was no time to re-load muskets. Swords and bayonets plunged into living flesh. Disembowelled men screamed. ‘The Turks,’ St-Arnaud wrote in his memoirs, ‘defended themselves with desperate courage. They fired (at us) and we killed them as they were reloading . . . our bayonets left not a solitary one alive.’[114]
Sustained fire from a janissary barracks held up the attack only briefly. Advancing beside St-Arnaud, Combe took a bullet wound. He shrugged it off and carried on walking until mortally wounded shortly afterwards – which made him the second Legion commander to die in action. Once the barracks had been taken and all the inmates bayoneted to death, the remaining defenders begged to surrender. At that juncture the handful of French in the city were a mixture of legionnaires, men from the punishment battalions called ‘Bataillons d’Afrique’ and some other units. Anyone not in French uniform was their target in a blood lust of kill-or-be-killed
As the firing on both side
s died away, the main body of the French poured into the town through the breach, looting and killing as they came. The sack of Constantine continued for three whole days before Valée could regain control of his men and set them to burying the enormous numbers of dead in a common grave outside the city. It is impossible to estimate the true value of the loot, but it must have been substantial since the inhabitants of Constantine, confident the French would be beaten off a second time, had not bothered to hide their valuables – out of which the ignorant looters were cheated for a few Turkish coins in an impromptu market set up by itinerant Jewish traders just outside the camp.
The scale of the casualties in the second-wave assault was clear from St-Arnaud’s account: of fifty legionnaires in his immediate vicinity, ten died and eleven were wounded.[115] Their heroism at long last lifted the Legion from an ‘asylum for misfortune’ to a formation with battle honours. Bedeau was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and the following month Valée was promoted to marshal and appointed Governor-General of Algeria. As to St-Arnaud, his actions on 12 October re-started his military career that also ended with the baton of a marshal.
On 5 December in Paris Berlioz’s massive Requiem, performed by 450 singers and musicians, was premiered in honour of the heroic dead at Constantine. Inspecting generals, however, continued to deplore the legionnaires’ behaviour when not in action, listing always the same problems: desertion, insubordination, homosexuality, self-mutilation, brawling and getting money for booze by selling just about every item of equipment and uniform with the exception of their shakos, which no one in North Africa would buy.