The French Foreign Legion Page 20

  Undetected by both sides’ burial parties, an odd relic lay near Trinity Ranch. The carved wooden hand was eventually picked up by a local farmer of Anglo-French extraction named Langlais, and sold by him to Jeanningros two years later after much haggling over the price. Transported to the Quartier Viénot in Sidi-bel-Abbès, it travelled across the Mediterranean when the Legion left Algeria and today lies in a display case in the HQ museum at Aubagne.[149] Also to be seen on French soil are the railings from the common Legion grave at Camarón, now beside the war memorial outside the Legion village at Puyloubier near Aix-en-Provence.

  There are three memorials now on the site of the battle: a Mexican one, a French one and one erected by the local authorities at what is now a weekend tourist venue for curious visitors from Mexico City. In timeless Latin, the French inscription is repeated as though to mark the death of Caesar’s legionaries:

  QVOS HIC NON PLVS LX

  ADVERSI TOTIVS AGMINIS

  MOLES CONSTRAVIT

  VITA PRIAM QUAM VIRTVS

  MILITES DESERVIT GALLICOS

  DIE XXX MENSI APR. ANNI MDCCCLXIII

  Here, less than sixty men confronted a whole army. . .

  After a careful examination of all the evidence, the full story of Camarón is thus even more amazing than the terse us-and-them récit officiel. But how many did actually die at Trinity Ranch? The martyrology of the Legion implies that only Maudet, Cpl Maine and two, presumably wounded, legionnaires survived at the moment of surrender. But Lai also survived long enough to tell his story, although grievously wounded, and those nursed back to health in Huatusco were exchanged on 14 July in Coscomatepec for the captured Mexican Gen Manuel María Alba.

  Brigadier Anthony Hunter-Choat, who began his distinguished military career as Legionnaire No 116798 and ended his five years’ engagement as a sergeant in 1 REP, believes that as many as twenty-three men of 3rd Company were still alive at the time of the surrender.[150] This figure includes the sixteen taken prisoner during the retreat to the ranch. Given the odds against them and the length of the engagement, that so many survived even temporarily is astonishing. However, despite their amazing good fortune at Camarón, few of them ever returned to Europe. Apart from the ever-present risk of disease, violence was their way of life, with duelling the most popular ‘sport’ for the officers. Cpl Berg was promoted after Camarón to lieutenant, but died the following year fighting a duel over a nebulous point of honour.

  In September 1863, Napoléon III came up with the idea of dumping the Legion altogether by giving it lock, stock and barrel to Maximilian – as Louis-Philippe had done with the Infanta in Spain. Under the Convention of Miramar which they signed on 10 April 1864 the Régiment Etranger was to remain under French command until all other French forces were withdrawn, when it would become part of Maximilian’s Mexican army. Wastage from disease and deaths in combat, plus repatriation of those lucky time-served legionnaires fit enough for repatriation, was to be offset by local recruitment in Mexico.

  Like many politicians’ plans for the military, this may have looked good on paper, but any Legion officer in Mexico could have told his emperor it would not work. Few ‘white’ Mexicans of any military experience, born to the saddle, wanted to enlist in a regiment that marched on foot even in the heat of midday. And when the sights were dropped to recruiting ‘Indians’ or peasants of mixed blood, they did not come running, either. An attempt to enlist American former Confederate soldiers seeking asylum in Mexico produced exactly one recruit, who was rejected after he insisted on a six-month probationary period before signing on. To remedy the poor recruitment figures, the initial engagement was upped from two to five years, where it still remains.

  Crowned emperor on June 10 1864, Maximilian declared his intention to rule as a benevolent dictator. In fairness to him, he did uphold Juárez’s reforms of land tenure. This and his determination to abolish the peonage of the Indian peasants lost him the support of the landed families who had brought him to Mexico. He also forfeited Church support by refusing to restore its enormous properties confiscated by Juárez, having found so little in the treasury that he was obliged to dip into his own pocket for his and Carlota’s daily expenses.

  The French force initially 3,000 strong eventually swelled to 40,000 men commanded by Forey’s successor Achille Bazaine. North of the Río Grande, with the victory of the Union over the Confederate armies in April 1865 both arms and volunteers for Juárez’s Liberals began to flood across the border.

  Since most of its enemies, whether regular forces or guerrilleros, were mounted, the Legion was severely handicapped by being an infantry formation. Some officers held that the American Civil War had demonstrated that the heyday of cavalry was past due to increasingly effective artillery developed during that war, so that the need was for mounted infantry who could travel faster and dismount to fight on foot. In April 1864, 1st Battalion therefore formed a dragoon-type company called la escadrón de le Legión.[151]

  After the fall of Oaxaca in February 1865 this nub was expanded by using the captured horses to mount German and Polish ex-cavalrymen. However, simply giving a man a spirited Indian-broken mustang with a Western saddle, when he neither knew how to ride nor how to care for his mount, was not the answer. Some European horses were sent out from France, but many broke their legs on board during storms and had to be shot. Since horses are unable to vomit and cannot be immobilised in stalls for more than a few days without becoming ill, numerous others simply died of seasickness or inactivity on the voyage.

  At its peak in September 1866 the Legion’s rapid-reaction force of ‘cavalry’ numbered only 240 riders, officers and men taken together. Bazaine wanted to introduce the light, fast-moving columns that had been so useful in Algeria, but the Legion’s small numbers and the superior horsemanship of the Mexican regulars and guerrilleros meant that the mounted companies could not risk deploying far from infantry back-up. Their main effectiveness was in relieving the garrisons of beleaguered Legion posts.

  By April 1865 the French army, supported by Belgian troops of Carlota’s father King Leopold I of Belgium, had driven Juárez’s Liberal forces northward almost to the border with Texas. But after the end of the American Civil War that month the United States demanded the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico because their presence conflicted with the Monroe Doctrine. Empress Carlota took ship for Europe, seeking to bring the Church over to Maximilian’s side by lobbying Pope Pius IX. Since her husband had done nothing to restore confiscated Church lands, that failed. Napoléon III now showing a total lack of further enthusiasm for his Mexican intervention, she suffered a nervous breakdown on realising that she and Maximilian had been pawns in a sordid commercial venture.

  A formal protest from Washington at the presence of French troops on Mexican soil reached Paris on 6 November. On 12 February 1866 the re-united United States stepped up the diplomatic pressure by requiring the removal of all foreign troops. But the war dragged on. In March forty-four legionnaires brought to bay in a church north of Mexico City were rescued by their mounted comrades supported by infantry who force-marched the normally ten-day journey in half that time. In July of that year, 125 legionnaires were similarly trapped in a farm near Matehuala in the far north of San Luis Potosí state by a force of 500-plus for two days before they too were rescued by a mounted company. By then everybody knew the campaign was lost.

  Viewed in any objective light, the Legion’s activities in the sovereign federation of Mexico, against which Napoléon had not even bothered to declare war, amounted to brigandage. That their opponents were often bandits who raided convoys and lone stage coaches, killing and robbing the passengers, does not alter the fact that this was not war as it was understood in Europe. Yet even those legionnaires who escaped the hell of tropical illness, the inhuman pace of the forced marches, the tyranny of officers who had no private lives but lived only for ‘honour’, the adrenalin-rush of combat and the near-certainty of their own imminent deaths – even they
came back for more.

  Captured after the totally pointless massacre of 102 officers and men due to a wrong command decision by Maj Paul-Aimable de Brian at a strategically unimportant and unreconnoitred Mexican position called Santa Isabella, a group of legionnaires was ordered by their captors to bury their fallen comrades in mass graves. Marched from there to a remote POW camp in desert country not far from the Río Grande, they overpowered their guards and hotfooted it into Texas, making their way to French-speaking New Orleans, where they took ship with God knows what funds for Vera Cruz. There, they reported for duty and re-entered the dreadful cycle all over again. The German sergeant who had organised the escape and held the group together received a medal for his service.

  But few deserters returned voluntarily. This was not Algeria, with torture and death the likely fate of runways, for the guerrilleros welcomed trained soldiers who turned their coats. To the individual legionnaire able to ride a horse, what difference did it make on whose side he fought in this messy war? Future Mexican President Porfirio Díaz even formed a corps of 300 French deserters to fight for Juárez, most of them ex-legionnaires.[152]

  Logically enough, the rate of defection rose as the Legion moved into the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and Coahuila that had a common border with Texas, causing the French vice-consul in Galveston to complain about the flood of deserters passing through. Desertions ran as high as eighty in one day when the Legion occupied Matamoros on the Mexico-Texas frontier in 1865. Although runaways were officially punished by the firing squad when recaptured – and many were shot pour encourager les autres – some officers regarded desertion as a natural wastage that rid a regiment of its less desirable members. Yet the Legion’s desertion rate was not comparatively high. In the year after Camarón, it was 11.6%. In 1865 the figure was only 6% and in 1867 it was down to 5.8% – well below the figures for line regiments in Europe serving in far better conditions.

  One alleged motive for enlisting to serve in Mexico was that men thought it would be easy to desert once there and make it into the United States, a land of milk and honey, but this hardly holds water, given the hundreds of thousands of impoverished Europeans who managed to emigrate to America even during the Civil War – so many that 500,000 soldiers in the Union armies had been born in Europe.

  More to the point was that large numbers of male refugees arriving in France were given no option other than to enlist, and began causing trouble as soon as they reached the depot in Aix-en-Provence. Deprived of the civilian clothes in which they might run away – as engagés volontaires still are – they so frequently stole clothing from the local residents that Napoléon III was petitioned for the base to be moved. Repeating all the scandals of the Legion’s first base at Langres and Bar-le-Duc under Baron Stoffel, 200 recruits went on the rampage in Aix-en-Provence after five trouble-makers were arrested. Echoing Stoffel’s concern that his men would desert on the march to their port of embarkation, the recruits of 1865 were marched under escort to their port of embarkation like the convicts shipping out to Devil’s Island, but so many men took any chance of escaping en route that the port of departure was changed from distant St Nazaire on the Atlantic coast to the much nearer Toulon on the Mediterranean coast.

  By now, in France only Morny’s business friends dreaming of Mexican gold wanted the war to continue. In Mexico, there can have been few people apart from Maximilian who did not give an inward cheer when Napoléon III ordered the repatriation of all French troops in December 1866. Leopold I made sure that all his troops left in January 1867.

  Bazaine showed a similar concern to keep what remained of the Legion intact. In a remarkably co-ordinated eight-week operation, the fragmented force was withdrawn from all its isolated outposts and re-grouped into six battalions in Mexico City and elsewhere before marching to Soledad. From there, a recently constructed railway whisked them through the fever belt, past uncounted marked and unmarked graves of their predecessors who had died of vómito negro, and down to the port of Vera Cruz where they shook the dust and mud of the New World off their boots and uniforms for ever.

  As they had been since 1831, the vast majority of Legion officers in Mexico were unmarried. The tough and brutalising life they led, the duelling over dubious points of ‘honour’ and the raids that must have seemed to the local population no different from the predations of bands of outlaws, left them little time for a home life, even had women wanted to accompany them to such depressing and dangerous postings.

  Passing through the town of Soledad on his way to Vera Cruz, Bazaine must have spared a thought for the eponymous wife he had left behind in Paris, where Madame Maria de la Soledad Bazaine had enjoyed her celebrity as the wife of a famous general without letting that handicap her numerous liaisons – until one lover too far resulted in the man’s wife discovering Soledad’s love letters. A spirited actress at the Comédie Française, she parcelled them up and posted them to Bazaine in Mexico, subsequently informing the ‘other woman’ what she had done. In desperation, Soledad went to Napoléon III for help, but he was powerless to halt the mail ship already on the high seas. Eight weeks after being posted, the embarrassing package arrived at Bazaine’s HQ, where a loyal aide read the letters and destroyed them without informing his general. By that time, Soledad had committed suicide rather than face her husband’s wrath.

  Assuming her death to have been from cholera – that scourge of nineteenth-century France – Bazaine mourned for a respectable but brief period. He then repeated his script by courting and marrying another beautiful young girl – but this time from one of Mexico’s richest families. He was fifty-four, with a marshal’s baton as his reward for service to France; she was seventeen, the same age as Soledad when Bazaine married her and took her off to the Crimea.[153]

  Before 1 March 1867 the last troopship had cleared the port of Vera Cruz and was navigating the outward passage between the grim offshore graveyard islands with its complement of legionnaires bound for Algeria. The Legion’s casualties of the campaign included 1,918 officers and men dead, 83% of them from disease.

  A few days later, Juárez and his army reoccupied Mexico City. Chased out of ‘his’ capital and duped by his conservative backers making him commander-in-chief of his dwindling army, Maximilian refused to abdicate from his specious throne. Brought to bay at Querétaro 200km to the northwest, the rump of it was surrounded, starved, and finally betrayed to Juárez’s forces. Maximilian capitulated on 15 May 1867. Despite Giuseppe Garibaldi and many crowned heads of Europe and intellectuals like Victor Hugo petitioning Juárez to let him depart into exile, he was executed by firing squad just outside Querétaro on 19 June. When his Empress Carlota learned she was a widow is uncertain because she never recovered her sanity and spent the rest of her life in various institutions for the insane until her death in 1927 at the age of eighty-seven.

  Chapter 14: With rifle-butt and bayonet

  France, 1866 – 1870

  Achille Bazaine’s luck had enabled him to survive Algeria, the Crimea and Mexico – with each campaign moving him steadily up the ladder of promotion. Returning to Europe a full-blown marshal of France with his young bride, he had no reason to think that his next war would be his last, or that it would be sparked off by a telegram sent from the small spa town of Ems in Germany.

  France had not withdrawn her forces from the Americas solely because of diplomatic pressure from Washington; there were more pressing concerns nearer home. On 3 July 1866 the decisive battle of the Seven Weeks’ War between Prussia and Austria was fought near the East Bohemian town of Königgrätz[154] on the upper Elbe River, 100km east of Prague. This brief, but violent, spat between the fading power of the Austrian Empire and up-and-coming kingdom of Prussia put half a million men into uniform with orders to kill each other.

  Some 241,000 Austrians equipped with muzzle-loading rifles, whose officers believed that the bayonet charge was the best use of infantry, were commanded by Gen Ludwig August von Benedek, who had accepted the post
with reluctance because he knew neither the troops nor the terrain. Against them, 285,000 Prussians split into three armies were deployed in a long arc from the border of Saxony to Silesia. In command was the Chief of the Prussian Gen Staff Helmuth von Moltke, the first European commander to exploit railways to transport most of his troops rapidly to the front so that they arrived there fresh and not worn out by long route-marches. Decisively in this encounter, his infantry was armed with breech-loading 15.43mm Dreyse Zündnadelgewehr Modell 1862 needle guns that could fire six shots to the Austrians’ one. The Prussians also cheated by lying prone to reduce their size as targets for return fire, instead of standing in Wellingtonian close-order to be mown down like ninepins without breaking ranks.

  As a result, on 3 July at Königgrätz the Austrians lost three times as many men as von Moltke. This defeat of what had been the most powerful nation on the continent was enshrined in the Treaty of Prague, under which the balance of power in Europe was drastically changed. While letting Austria down gently, Prussia annexed the territory of Vienna’s allies in Hannover, Nassau, Hesse-Kassel and Frankfurt, thus acquiring the lands that had separated the eastern and western parts of the Prussian state and enabling it to form the North German Federation. This set the scene for the Franco-Prussian War and both world wars, in all of which the Legion had its part to play.

  Moltke’s twin genius in this refashioning of Europe was the devious Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, who had deliberately incited Austria to declare war by engineering a dispute over the administration of the counties of Schleswig and Holstein, which the two powers had controlled jointly since seizing them from Denmark in 1864. With the king of Hanover deposed and the ruling house of Hesse similarly divested of its powers, Prussia was now potentially the greatest power in Europe and Bismarck intended to realise that potential.