The French Foreign Legion Read online

  Although hardly an impressionable child at the age of thirty-six, Tsar Aleksandr II had been educated by a Swiss republican tutor and was known to be liberal and pro-European in comparison with his overbearing father. In the hope that a major Allied victory would give Aleksandr reason to sue for peace, Napoléon III ordered a major French attack for 1 May. Its designated target was an important Russian bastion that was heavily mortaring the French lines. At 2030hrs that day six elite Legion companies spearheaded the attack with bayonets fixed. Driving off the Russian defenders, they were reinforced by the rest of 1st Regiment under Col Viénot. Repeated Russian counter-attacks were beaten off while legionnaires from 2nd Regiment dug and built desperately to link the French lines to the strongpoint with its eight captured mortars.

  Cost of the operation? 480 French wounded and 118 dead, the latter including the third Legion commander to die in action, Col Viénot, who would be commemorated by the naming of the headquarters barracks at Sidi-bel-Abbès – and later in Aubagne – as ‘le Quartier Viénot’.

  Counter-attacks the following day were again beaten back, with 2nd Regiment and a battalion of 98th Infantry Regiment turning the enemy flank and holding their positions despite violent Russian counter-attacks. Losses included five officers and 34 legionnaires killed, with eight officers and 174 legionnaires hors de combat. On 3 May another truce was called to bury the dead, already stinking in the hot sunshine, after which the Russians began the construction of a counter-fortification on high ground overlooking the French lines.

  Finding it impossible to continue working with his sick and francophobic English opposite number and the interference of Napoléon III from Paris, Canrobert stepped down on 16 May to take command of the 4th Division under his successor Gen Pélissier. Although rejecting the more ridiculous orders from Paris – he even cut the telegraph line once – Pélissier was about to find that it was far easier to asphyxiate Algerian women and children than to kill armed Russian soldiers.

  On 22 May legionnaires took part in the next ‘big push’. At 2100hrs, two battalions of 2nd Regiment were among those who went over the top and took the first Russian trenches. Menshikov threw three battalions at them in an effort to retake the position, but when dawn came they were still there, looking out over a sea of corpses including five Legion officers and thirty-four men dead, with eight officers and 174 men wounded.[135]

  Three other battalions of the Legion had not been so successful. During the next two days, the position changed hands no less than five times. Casualties included over 200 Legion dead and wounded. When another truce was arranged on 23 May to bury the dead, the job was made more repugnant than usual by bodies swollen with the heat coming apart at the joints.

  Under pressure from Paris to end this embarrassingly protracted war of so little benefit to France, on 7 June Gen Pélissier launched an attack on the two key forts blocking the route to Sevastopol, known as the Redan and Malakov, whose positions on high ground at the south-western edge of the walled city denied any cover to attackers. After occupying a nearby height called Green Hillock, the Zouaves and Algerian light infantry managed to penetrate the Malakov, but were driven out with heavy losses.

  On 17 June a determined attack cost 3,000 Allied lives to no effect. On 28 June Lord Raglan died of dysentery, the body being shipped home to Bristol for a quiet burial at the family home. Raglan’s deputy being too ill to stay in the Crimea, it was Gen Sir James Simpson who replaced him on 1 July. Pélissier had chosen the day of Raglan’s death to expunge the disgraceful memory of Waterloo by another major attack on the Malakov, but the French, including a detachment of one hundred volunteer legionnaires serving as pioneers under Sgt Valliez, mistook an outburst of firing nearby as a signal to start ten minutes early. Alerted by the French move, the defenders of the Redan cut the English to pieces with grapeshot when their attack went in on time. Both attacks failed with a total of 6,000 casualties on the one day for no result whatsoever.

  At the end of July, Aleksandr fired Menshikov and replaced him by Prince Gorchakov, whose first act was to launch an attack on 16 August with four infantry divisions and two artillery brigades across the Chornaya River. When it too failed, Gorchakov sent a dispatch to St Petersburg stating that there was no point in prolonging the defence of Sevastopol. Finally on 8 September, after a three-day Allied barrage by 800 cannons, legionnaires were in the forefront of a third assault, whose success was largely due to their construction under fire of a network of jumping-off trenches inching nearer and nearer to the Malakov each night and their movement of scaling ladders right up to the walls. The fort was taken by the Allies – at what total cost in lives on both sides no one was ever clear.

  Three days later, the Russians blew up the remaining forts, burned or scuttled their ships in the harbour, and evacuated Sevastopol. In the sack of the town, the legionnaires defied all attempts to keep discipline, with so many getting drunk by looting the cellars of the wine merchants that ‘as drunk as a legionnaire at Sevastopol’ became a measure of inebriation for many years to come. Two drunken legionnaires poisoned the regimental mascot of 23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Ceremonially interred with military honours, the goat was then dug up by its killers, skinned and made into a fur coat. A polite request from a fusilier major resulted in the legionnaire wearing it, selling it back to the regiment for £20.[136]

  Thanks to the telegraph cable under the Black Sea, Pélissier’s reward was to learn four days later that he had been made a Marshal of France by his grateful emperor. Appointed ambassador to London, he was created Duc de Malakoff (sic) the following year, and left smog-bound Victorian London for the sunshine and clear skies of Algeria and the post of Governor-General that he held until his death in 1864.

  A more immediate consolation for the loss of all the men whose deaths earned him these honours was his after sending Gen Bazaine with the Legion and a British brigade to reduce the Kinburn fortress in southern Ukraine. During his absence, the well named Aimable Pélissier arrived at Madame Bazaine’s house each afternoon, perhaps to listen to her piano-playing. Her husband can hardly have been unaware, since Pélissier came to visit in the only liveried coach of the whole Allied territory, formerly the property of a Russian nobleman.

  Peace terms were not agreed until 1 February in Vienna, with ratification of the treaty in Paris on 2 March 1856, after a second winter spent by the surviving legionnaires in digging trenches and rebuilding some of the destroyed fortifications. On 13 April Pélissier was accompanied by Russian Gen Luders at a ceremony of remembrance in the French cemetery, where he announced that Napoléon III was recognising the Legion’s contribution to the war-effort by an offer of French nationality for all legionnaires who had taken part, with a transfer to a regular regiment if they so wished.

  Russian losses in the campaign were put at 256,000 deaths, 128,700 in combat and the others from disease or exposure. For the Allies, the war marked the first time since the crusades that France and Britain had fought on the same side. The price of their victory was 252,600 lives, of which only 70,000 were lost in combat and almost three times as many died from cholera and/or dysentery as in battle.

  In July 1856, two years after they had left Algeria, the survivors paraded in the Quartier Viénot at Sidi bel-Abbès to honour their fallen: twelve officers dead and sixty-six wounded in the war, with legionnaire casualties numbering 1,625. Of every three men who had set sail for the Crimea, fewer than two returned – a relatively low rate of casualties due to the toughening-up they had received before shipping east.

  The Legion’s sacrifices were acknowledged by a decree signed by Jean-Baptiste Vaillant, the Minister for War, regularising the establishment of 1st and 2nd Régiments Etrangers or ‘foreign regiments’, as they would in future be officially known.[137] For convenience, the brigade returning from Crimea became 2nd Régiment Etranger and Ochsenbein’s under-strength Swiss units formed the nub of 1st Régiment Etranger, which continued unofficially to be called ‘the Swiss regiment’.
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br />   Under the peace treaty the Black Sea was declared a demilitarised zone, but fourteen years later Russia abrogated the treaty and built new bases and a new fleet. More importantly, the Allies had stabilized the disintegrating Ottoman Empire until it was dismantled by them after the First World War. Although the Legion veterans could not claim any Crimean victory as exclusively theirs and losses in combat and from disease had been no greater than during some equivalent periods in North Africa, they had fought as a unit on many occasions and built an esprit de corps and sense of regimental history that can be gained no other way.

  More importantly for its status and the quality of its future officers, the Foreign Legion had also proven itself an integral part of France’s military machine. Although a snobbish inspecting general deplored ‘a regiment that is nothing more than an amalgamation of all the nations of Europe’ in 1861[138], no officer in a line regiment could any longer accuse the men who returned from the Crimea of being just a band of convicts fighting infidel bandits on African soil or label the Legion a holding tank for misfortune, as Soult had done.

  On 14 January 1858 an Italian anarchist attempted to assassinate Napoléon III on his way to the opera. There was nothing unusual in this – Louis-Philippe suffered one or more attempts on his life every year of his reign – but some said it was from that moment that the Emperor decided to get involved in Italian affairs despite the resistance of the Church and the business community, which feared new taxes to pay for another war.

  The real reason for the Italian intervention was Napoléon III’s determination to restore France’s territorial integrity by re-possessing Savoie and the county of Nice. In July 1858 he concluded a secret pact of mutual assistance with Camillo Cavour, the prime minister of Piedmont, with this restoration as the quid pro quo. So, when in April 1859 Austria was manoeuvred into declaring war on Piedmont-Sardinia, France honoured its side of the agreement by declaring war against Austria in support of Cavour on 3 May.

  Ochsenbein was long gone, but 1st Regiment was already in Corsica, attempting unsuccessfully to recruit on the Italian mainland. Landing in Genoa on 11 May, it counted barely 600 men and was brigaded with 2nd Regiment of sixty officers and 1,400 men including the Crimean veterans who had arrived on 26 April directly from Algeria. Together they marched inland to confront the Austrian army at the small Lombard market-town of Magenta, 20km west of Milan.

  The rest of the French army included the first military units to travel at least part of the way to the front by rail, but it was ill-equipped in terms of provisions, ammunition, horses, tents and even blankets. Having brought no siege artillery, about the only thing in its favour were sixty-eight new rifled cannons, superior to anything the Austrians possessed.

  The brigade was part of Gen MacMahon’s[139] army of 54,000 men facing 58,000 Austrian troops under Gen Franz Gyulai in a battle unlike the set-pieces of Napoleonic warfare because the countryside around Magenta was divided up into smallholdings, orchards and vineyards separated by dry-stone walls. In such a broken landscape cavalry could not manoeuvre and the lines of attacking French infantry soon became ragged and spread out.

  Had not the Austrians been wearing white coats, they would have been hard to discern through the vines and the trees in the orchards. On 29 June, the first Legion officer to spot a flash of white through all the green, Capt Rembert of 1st Regiment ordered his men to charge, apparently on his own initiative. With the advantage of numbers in the immediate vicinity, the Austrians stood their ground. Seeing the position, Col Granet Lacrosse de Chabrière, commanding 2nd Regiment in the saddle of his white charger, brandished his sword above his head, ordered his men to down packs and cried, ‘En avant!’ They were his last words. Hardly had he issued the order than a bullet knocked him clean from the saddle, dead.

  The joint attack of legionnaires and Zouaves pressed the Austrians back in a disciplined retreat until Chabrière’s second-in-command Lt Col Antonio Martinez called a halt and prudently sent some grenadiers forward to draw fire and ascertain the enemy position. Shortly afterwards, they returned to report that the Austrians were marching out of Magenta in the opposite direction. Seizing the moment, Martinez ordered his legionnaires and the Zouaves to charge. 2/Lt Charles-Jules Zédé, who had joined 2nd Regiment at Sidi-bel-Abbès straight from St Cyr in 1857, described in his Souvenirs what happened when the charge went in, ‘The Austrians hardly resisted but surrendered en masse, and we were furious to see the officers ride away with their flags. Only one was captured . . . by the Zouaves.’[140]

  Writing a history of the Legion, one is often confronted with ‘facts’ that have become part of Legion lore, yet are pure invention. One that is true is of MacMahon riding past some Legion veterans he recognised from Sevastopol as they fixed their bayonets prior to the assault on the town. ‘Voici la Légion,’ he said to his aides, acknowledging the veterans’ salutes. ‘L’affaire est dans le sac!’ – the Legion’s here, so the affair is in the bag!

  It is the sort of thing that senior officers say to boost morale at a critical moment, and was far from true. The main body of Austrian troops had withdrawn, but Magenta was still defended by Croatians and some Tyrolean mountain troops in cover behind a railway embankment between the French and the town proper. As described by Zédé, what happened next was a scene from a Hollywood movie: ‘Zouaves and legionnaires hurled themselves forward. Neither cannon-shot, nor the (musket) volleys of the Austrians could stop them and this torrent rolled towards Magenta, carrying all before it.’[141]

  Wishful thinking. Two attacks were halted short of the embankment with heavy losses before the French broke through. Once in the streets, it was hand-to-hand fighting, or rather bayonet-to-bayonet. Given the mixture of nationalities fighting for both sides, the scene of carnage could have inspired Lenin’s dictum that a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends, whereas the more aristocratic sword usually had an officer at the blunt end.

  Lt Col Martinez, blood streaming from an eye wound, yelled orders to break down doors from behind which the defenders were firing and set fire to houses with men inside given the choice of burning to death or coming out to be shot. Lit by the flames, the bloodshed continued until dawn next day. The few Austrians who had been taken alive were gathered in front of the church on the piazza. By this time it was proving impossible for the officers to regain control. An orgy fired by blood-lust turned into an orgy fired by alcohol. In the wine cellars some men got so drunk that they drowned where they lay in the wine gushing out of barrels whose taps nobody bothered to close. Those still sober could hardly walk through the town, so many bodies of dead and dying men and horses lay in the streets, the drunks mixed up among them.

  Where the night had been hideous with screams and shots, the morning air was filled with the moans of men in agony, many of whom might have been saved, had there been any medical attention. Zédé recalled the scene as those men capable of standing up stripped the bodies of the fallen of their uniforms and equipment. Walking wounded hobbled and staggered about seeking help. There was none. One Polish legionnaire named Kamienski with an arm shattered by a musket ball found his own way to what passed for a dressing station in Magenta railway station, where the French doctors had no bandages, dressings or anaesthetics. All they could do was give the wounded some water to drink. Those who had surgical instruments saw no point in operating on men who would die in a few days from gangrene or blood poisoning, as happened to Kamienski.[142]

  At Magenta, 2nd Regiment lost four officers killed and 250 men killed or wounded – which often came to the same thing. After burying the dead in huge common graves, the victorious French marched into Milan on 7 June with the Legion honoured by leading the parade. The population greeting them as liberators, in the euphoric mood of the moment, local men signed up to enlist in the Legion, but few were there to answer to their names when the time came to re-embark for North Africa.

  After another extremely bloody encounter of 300,000 men and 2,600 cannons on a front thirte
en miles long south of Lake Garda at Solferino on 24 June, where the Legion was represented by 2nd Regiment, Napoléon III agreed peace terms with Austria on 8 July, to the distress of Cavour, who had hoped to free more territory south of the Alps from Austrian sovereignty before the withdrawal of his French allies. On 11 July the emperors of France and Austria signed the armistice treaty at Villafranca di Verona, but it was only in March 1860 that Cavour officially ceded to France the price of the intervention – Savoie and Nice.

  For once, something good came out of the carnage. Present at Solferino was a Swiss humanitarian called Henri Dunant. Appalled by witnessing the senseless slaughter continuing for hours under a leaden sky with the wounded left untended in agony, he improvised emergency medical services for the casualties of both sides. It was this initiative that led to the foundation of the International Committee for the Relief of the Wounded in 1863, which became the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1876, and to the first Geneva Convention of 1864.

  As for 2nd Regiment, having fought on European soil as an intrinsic part of the French army, it was rewarded with the honour of participating for the first time with the line regiments in MacMahon’s victory parade on 14 August through a Paris being ravished by Baron Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine département, who was demolishing whole districts to create the elegant grands boulevards and spacious squares that made the French capital as we see it today.

  After that brief moment of glory came the return to Algeria on 22 August. In October the Swiss-only regulation was rescinded, due to lack of volunteers, after which anyone could join, with the uniform reverting to red trousers and blue tunics. The 1st Regiment returned to Algeria via Corsica in February 1860 and was amalgamated with 2nd Regiment to make a single foreign regiment once again, whose regimental colours were green and red, as they have remained ever since.