The French Foreign Legion Page 14
The reaction of their officers was increasingly brutal punishment. Even Soult in faraway Paris was driven to protest about the ‘insufficient food, hard and often unjust corporal punishments. Bread and water, the whip and the cane, are the means employed to correct insubordination. The result is a system of repression which is altogether alien to our French values.’[116]
Some courts martial were reluctant to convict Legion deserters because conditions in the punishment sections to which they would be sent were so inhumane. Maintaining discipline by harsh repression invited mutiny, a spectre only kept at bay by the policy of splitting up national groups. However, so many ex-Carlist refugees were recruited in 1839 and 1840 that entire battalions came to be composed of them. Three companies of these men, composing the 4th Battalion, arrived in Algiers in March 1840. Before the month was out, thirty of them attempted to desert to Abd el-Kader after murdering their officers. By luck or misjudgement, only one officer was wounded, but eight recaptured mutineers were shot as an example to their fellows.
By the middle of September an entire battalion of 600 ex-Carlists was training at Pau. Whether criminals as some of their French officers believed, or simply men brutalised by years of scorched-earth warfare, they were certainly guilty of rapes, thefts and murders there. Within days of their disembarkation in Algiers forty-four deserted with their weapons, which was always treated as a capital crime. In the peak years of the Spanish recruitment, desertion rates ran as high as 11.9 % and the lowest figure was 6.8%. These figures do not tell the full story because ‘desertion’ meant absence from one’s unit for six days or more and many men returned, or were caught, earlier and thus technically had only been absent without leave.[117]
One instance of what they were fleeing from was the siege of Melyana. On 8 June 1840 a combined French force captured this strategic city fortified by Abd el-Kader as one of his centres of resistance in the Chélif valley. At 700 metres above sea level on the southern flanks of the Zaccar Gharbi, Melyana dominated the valley to the south and east. Hardly had it been captured by the French than it was besieged by a force of several thousand Arabs. The garrison, consisting of one Legion battalion, one from 3rd Tirailleurs and a handful of artillerymen and sappers, held them off throughout the scorching summer.
With no possibility of re-supply in the heart of el-Kader’s territory, bad water and severe food rationing that permitted only one meagre meal a day led to widespread sickness and deaths. On October 4 when the relief column finally fought its way through, half the original garrison men had died and the others were so emaciated that only 150 men were capable of holding a weapon. The condition of the others was so poor that only seventy survived of the original strength of 1,232.
During the siege twenty-five legionnaires had deserted. What became of them is not known, although el-Kader’s adviser Marius Garcin recorded two battalions of European deserters, a squadron of cavalry and some trained artillerymen. Those deserters who could not stand the rigours of life in the Arab militia wandered hopelessly from tribe to tribe on the run from French retribution, earning a pitiful living by pretending a knowledge of European medicine, such as it then was, until they themselves died of disease or were murdered.
Chapter 9: A Head on a Spear
Algeria, 1840 – 1849
The flow of refugees unwanted in France continued to boost numbers, so that in December 1840 the ‘new’ Legion was divided into two regiments, despite a shortage of experienced NCOs. The first regiment, of predominantly Nordic legionnaires, was stationed in Algiers initially, extending its range into the Oranais from 1843 onwards. The second, composed of Mediterraneans, was based in Constantine to cover the east of the country.
After his success against el-Kader in 1836, Bugeaud had returned to France making no secret of his revised opinion that the whole North African adventure was a ridiculous waste of lives and money because the Maghreb would never be satisfactorily subdued and, even if it was, the land was largely arid and therefore useless for colonisation. Since he had spent several years farming in France after his forced retirement in 1815, he was talking from personal experience, and had taken for his motto ense et aratro – meaning by sword and plough. However, every man has his price and Bugeaud’s was the offer of the governor-generalship when Valée retired.
Returning to Algiers on 22 February 1841, Bugeaud found that el-Kader had drawn the correct conclusion from his defeat at the Sikkak River and was now extremely hard to bring to battle, even by lightly armed columns unencumbered with artillery or rations for a long period. Compelled by the ever-longer reach of the French to abandon a fixed capital for his state-within-a-state, he had reverted to the smala, a mobile encampment of 3,000 tents, from which he governed his people and organised the resistance to the French, moving its location every time the invaders got too near.
Bugeaud’s way of beating el-Kader was to starve his followers into submission. The razzia, from the Arabic rhâzya, was a punitive raid in tribal warfare. Bugeaud raised it to a science: ‘Destroy the villages,’ he said, ‘Cut down the fruit trees, burn the harvest, empty the grain stores, search the ravines and caves to find the women, children and old people. That is the only way to defeat such proud mountain folk.’[118] Even date palms were cut down to blight an area for years until new palms could be brought into production. Livestock was driven off and wells poisoned. This was total war.
A chain of fortified supply dumps extended the range of Bugeaud’s flying columns. One of these at Sidi bel-Abbès, a place 100km south of Oran previously marked only by the grave of a holy man, was to become the Legion’s home. A commission was set up by royal ordinance to design and build a complete town there, centred on a massive Legion barracks. Given that sort of protection, the initial population of 431 rose rapidly to 5,259 in 1859.
The attraction of razzia warfare for officers and men alike was that booty was divided among all ranks. The new policy was also used by recruiting officers to attract native infantry and horsemen. It was, however, heavily criticised in France and even by some officers in l’Armée d’Afrique. The tactics involved a rapid and stealthy approach. Once all escape had been blocked by native Spahi cavalry, every single man in the camp under attack was killed, along with many of the women and children.[119] Younger women who submitted were taken and used as ‘free wives’. Some animals were slaughtered and eaten on the spot to give the first fresh meat tasted in months. Everything that could be of use was destroyed or stolen, underground silos emptied and the flocks – sometimes of thousands of animals – all driven off to the north for sale.
Whether for razzias or otherwise, Bugeaud thought little of the Legion, writing to Soult on 18 June 1842[120] that recruitment of foreign refugees should cease because the quality of soldiers it produced was so deplorable. Among other shortcomings he listed, they were no good at fighting and they were not fit enough to march in the heat of a North African summer. At the Sikkak River, he had had to send back to base two newly arrived regiments for this reason.[121] Once recruitment ceased, he argued, losses from disease and in combat would reduce the numbers of legionnaires until the last few could be absorbed into other units, the officers remustering or being retired.
His pleas were not heeded. Shipping off unwanted male immigrants to North Africa had become a part of French domestic policy and the vague idea that France had an empire in North Africa was to its rulers a compensation of sorts for the much reduced role they played in Europe. Other props to national pride that year were the return of Napoléon’s body by the British, so that it could be accommodated in a sumptuous shrine at Les Invalides, and the erection of the column in the Place de la Bastille surmounted by a bronze statue of the spirit of Liberty, the base of the column being a mausoleum in which are conserved the remains of the 615 victims of the July Revolution.
In this jingoistic mood ‘Old Bugeaud’ could plead all he liked. He was stuck with the Legion and ironically became father-by-default to this bastard that no one wanted to own. Amon
g the improvements he was to introduce was the slimming-down of the regulation European 40-kilo backpack – a cruel burden to men marching in the midsummer heat. More importantly, it was his introduction of razzia warfare that put an end to the often-fatal cafard in the blockhouses of the Mitidja Plain with their drunken brawls and the endless round of indiscipline and punishment. The new policy of marching light and living off the territory brought officer, NCO and common soldier closer, for they ate the same food and lived in the same conditions.
A mistake by any one of them could lose many lives, and when in territory where every native was an enemy, it was better to stay with the column even though debilitated with chronic diarrhoea, bleeding and blistered feet and footwear worn into holes than to lag behind at risk of an agonising death at the hands of men whose families had been killed by the French. Reporting sick was not advised. A Polish regimental surgeon by the name of Ridzeck bled to death seventeen legionnaires suffering from heatstroke, a condition rarely encountered in his home country. Angry at their failure to respond to his treatment, he conducted an autopsy by splitting the skull of one of his victims with an axe, to examine the brains. Thereafter, ether was used with better results.
In 1843 the arrival of Edme Patrice Maurice de MacMahon as colonel of 2nd Regiment did much to bring its men into line. One small change paid dividends: the ridiculous shakos were replaced by light képis with a neck-cloth to protect the back of the neck from sunburn. Desertion lessened and inspection reports improved to the point where the Legion began to attract officers who wanted to do some real soldiering with fast-track promotion, rather than rot away in a provincial garrison with its parades, drills, snobbery and promotion by seniority only, and gambling the only relief. While a cadet at the military academy of St Cyr, Charles-Nicolas Lacretelle expressed an ambition to join the dragoons, but a senior officer advised him that the cavalry was finished, whereas the infantry in Algeria had a lot to offer an ambitious young second-lieutenant. The best posting of all, Lacretelle was told, was the Foreign Legion, which was in the thick of every action. Lacretelle followed the advice, to the amazement of his fellow cadets, who had never heard of the Legion.[122]
In 1844, 2nd Regiment had thirteen captains, seven lieutenants and four second-lieutenants of foreign nationality. On 15 March Louis-Philippe’s son the duke of Aumale personally led elements of the regiment in the successful assault on the fortified village of M’chouneche in the Aurès Mountains after several line regiments had failed to take it. The duke subsequently asked his father to honour the regiment with its own standard.
Little had been heard of el-Kader since his smala had been captured on 16 May 1843 minutes after he had fled. Pursued from refuge to refuge for six months, he was forced to seek asylum in Morocco that November. On 30 May 1844 he returned to Algeria at the head of the warriors of the caïd of Oujda, with a Moroccan army moving threateningly close to French territory in support. On 19 June, Bugeaud spiked their guns by occupying Oujda, a town just inside Moroccan territory. On 4 or 6 August De Joinville’s fleet bombarded Tangiers as a hint to the sultan of Morocco not to meddle in Algeria. When that did not work, Bugeaud thrashed the Moroccan army at Isly near Oujda on 14 August. With Essaouira[123] taken the following day, the sultan bowed to the wind of change and signed a treaty with France on 10 September, under which he promised to intern or expel Abd el-Kader should he set foot again in Morocco.
Already some very unusual legionnaires were to be found in the ranks. Visiting a typical Legion fort at Khemis Miliana, some 90km southwest of Algiers, in 1844 military historian Count Pierre de Castellane found the garrison of 300 men including the son of a Privy Councillor to Austrian Emperor Francis II, a cardinal’s nephew, a German banker’s son and Lt Thomas Lansdown Parr Moore, a godson of Lord Byron who may have been the first Briton to serve in the Legion. Moore ‘often took the portrait of a beautiful woman from his bosom and gazed earnestly upon it when he thought himself unobserved.’[124] Was he the first lovelorn legionnaire?
Typical of the Legion’s bases in North Africa for the next century was the fort in which these men were shut up each night. Affording no more comfort to its occupants than the fortresses built by the Romans, often in the same places, it was a square of high walls pierced with firing slits at intervals, the crenelated parapet and watch-towers at each corner accessible by stairs shielded from missiles, making it almost impossible to take by surprise. Built in this case of adobe bricks and elsewhere of local stone, they all had a single gateway high enough for a man on horseback to ride through and wide enough for a small cart. The men slept in hammocks slung in the dormitories, with three rooms reserved for the use of the officers. In the centre of the courtyard at Khemis was a sundial made from the base of a Roman column and a large tree, under which the officers enjoyed the cool of the evening with their glasses of absinthe. There was no other relief to the bare sun-baked earth and brick walls that drove men literally mad with boredom.[125]
In his 1844 inspection, Gen François de Barail found, not surprisingly, that the Spaniards of 2nd Regiment were the legionnaires best adapted to conditions in North Africa, having greater stamina and an ability to go for hours without water than the taller northerners of 1st Regiment. The Italians were judged the worst soldiers, followed by forty Britons who had deserted from Evans’ expeditionary corps in Spain. One of their failings was that they could not exist on the basic rations, but needed twice the food of the Spaniards.
In the first example of British solidarity that became known in the Legion as ‘the English Mafia’, these men would all drop out together when one was exhausted on the march. MacMahon once sent a squadron of native cavalry pretending to be el-Kader’s men to frighten them back onto the march by feigning an attack, firing into the air. The trick only worked once because the next time he tried it, the Britons formed a square and shot back at the Spahis.
On 18 March 1845 the treaty of Lalla-Marnia agreed for the first time a clearly defined frontier between Morocco and Algeria, which was placed under the Ministry of War and divided into three military regions based on Oran in the west, Algiers in the centre and Constantine in the east.
The year also saw in June one of the worst excesses of razzia warfare, Col Aimable Jean-Jacques Pélissier set fires in the entrances of some caves into which 500 members of the Ouled-Rhia tribe had fled for sanctuary, with the intention of asphyxiating them. There were protests in Paris when it was heard that his troops had entered the caves two days later to find every man, woman and child dead. In the infernal cycle of atrocity and retaliation, on 22 September a French column was massacred at Sidi-Brahim. Again, on 24 April 1846, el-Kader killed his many prisoners to speed up his retreat into Morocco. Repulsed by the sultan’s forces, he was forced back into Algeria.
On 5 May 1847, after the government rejected his proposals for colonising Algeria with grants of land to veterans as the Romans had done, Bugeaud resigned, to be succeeded as Governor-General by the duke of Aumale. On 23 December, after a decade and a half of fighting the French, el-Kader finally surrendered to the ruthless Gen Lamoricière, who habitually cut the rations of his troops so that they were forced to loot Arab villages as part of his strategy of terror.[126] The captured Algerian leader was paraded through Paris as a curiosity, and then placed under house arrest in Toulon and Pau before being given the Château d’Amboise as a luxury prison. Ironically, one of his great-grandsons joined the Legion nearly a century later, serving in Vietnam and Algeria after the Second World War.
The following year, Bey Ahmed of Constantine also surrendered and was allowed to live with his harem and household in some luxury in Algiers. Ironically, as the Legion grew more respected, the government that had spawned it was failing. For the privileged middle classes Paris was still the capital of tolerance, where a poet like Charles Baudelaire and Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers could alike flaunt their mistresses – or three of them in the case of plump little Thiers, who kept a colleague’s wife and her two daughters for his
pleasure in addition to Madame Thiers.
However, the undercurrent of political unrest in France was becoming a flood. The year 1848 began with workers’ parliaments springing up in every town. There, any man could voice his opinions and a few brave women also took the floor. Had any speaker reminded his listeners of the original liberal aspirations of the July monarchy, he would not have been believed. Strikes over the price of potatoes and bread, strikes over the cost of living generally, strikes over the wages paid to workers and over the unemployment problem were finally pulling Louis-Philippe down to where simply sacking yet another Prime Minister was not the remedy.
On 24 February 1848 he abdicated after yet another ‘bloody affair’, in which a crowd of workers had gathered outside the residence of François Guillaume Guizot, his last prime minister, who had resigned that day. To restore order, soldiers of 14th Regiment of line shot fifty-two of them dead. It was pointless for Louis-Philippe to place his crown on the head of his grandson the duke of Paris because the population wanted to see the back of the Bourbons. Queen Marie-Amélie was urging her husband to leave France before they took it into their heads to deal with her as they had with her namesake Marie-Antoinette only fifty-five years before.
The Chamber of Deputies’ reaction to the succession of the duke of Paris was a hollow laugh. A provisional government was formed, but there was revolution in the air. As a show of force to impress the Parisians on 20 April, 400,000 soldiers from the National Guard and the army paraded on open ground to the west of the Arc de Triomphe and were there presented with new standards, after which they broke ranks and fraternised with the crowds. On 4 May the Second Republic was proclaimed, but those who breathed a sigh of relief that it had been accomplished without too much bloodshed had to think again eleven days later when a large and noisy crowd incited by the Society for the Rights of Man invaded the National Assembly waving tricolour flags under the pretext of reading a petition to send military support to suffering Poland. Accusation and counter-accusation flew on all sides. An alternative government was proclaimed. An hour later, its leaders were arrested.