The French Foreign Legion Page 21
West of the Rhine, a few unheeded voices warned that the real loser at Königgrätz was la belle France, but in an uncanny pre-echo of Léon Blum’s Popular Front policy in the 1930s, instead of preparing for the challenge from Prussia that was bound to come, the French government slimmed down the army. The Legion was reduced from six to four battalions on 4 April 1867, artillery and sapper units being the first to go as eighty-four specialist officers and 387 NCOs transferred to other regiments. Before the summer was out, further cutbacks reduced the rolls from 5,000 to 3,000 men by dint of transferring French-born legionnaires to regular regiments and prematurely sacking 1,000 foreigners.
For what was left of the Legion in a hundred postings throughout eastern Algeria, it was a grim life. Most of the time, legionnaires were employed as cheap labour on civil engineering projects. It was demoralising work for men who had joined up for death or glory. Gen Paul Adolphe Grisot wrote in his memoirs of the boredom and soul-shattering fatigue of the men labouring hard on reduced rations.[155] A poor harvest had pushed prices up to the level where a few home-grown vegetables or a stolen chicken would be the subject of talk for days in the mess. Many of the natives, too poor to pay for imported food, were dying of starvation even before a typhus epidemic broke out and cholera began claiming lives rapidly while the ever-present malaria continued to stalk its victims more slowly.
In the west of the province, beyond Oran and Sidi-bel-Abbès, typhus and cholera raged. Skirmishes with the elusive rebels based across the Moroccan frontier claimed lives, but the country was the main enemy. Algeria is not all date palms and sunshine. On the high plateau south of Oran the winter snow lingers. There, a Legion column returning to base at El Bayadh in April 1868 lost all its pack animals in foul weather and had to abandon most of its equipment after a company commander lost his bearings in a snowstorm and was tortured to death by Arab raiders from Morocco. No fewer than nineteen men committed suicide. In the same region another column policing the Moroccan frontier was lost in blizzards the following February and had the choice of aborting its mission after a total failure of re-supply or starving to death, unless frostbite and hypothermia claimed them first.[156]
But nobody in Paris cared. In the last week of June 1870 gossip in the Ministries and the smart salons was of the candidacy for the Spanish throne of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a cousin of the Prussian king Wilhelm I. At last the French government woke up to the true significance of Königgrätz and realised that this projected extension of Prussian influence into Spain was a pincer movement that would threaten France from both north and south.
On 6 July Foreign Minister Antoine Agénor de Gramont voiced French disapproval of the idea. Wilhelm I responded on 12 July by diplomatically confirming his cousin’s renunciation of the Spanish throne, but Gramont was not satisfied. He ordered the French ambassador in Berlin Count Victor Benedetti to Ems, where Wilhelm I was taking the waters. Although the king politely confirmed the renunciation, Gramont ordered Benedetti to ask for assurances that no other Hohenzollern would ever again be a candidate for the Spanish throne. Politely but firmly, Wilhelm I replied through his aide-de-camp Prince Radziwill that he had nothing to add.
A full account of these exchanges was telegraphed by the king to his Prime Minister in Berlin, authorising him to publish it in whole or in part. Well knowing the sabre-rattling mood in Paris from his brief period spent there as Prussian ambassador to the court of Napoléon III – most of which time had been passed in dalliance with the beautiful wife of the Russian ambassador, Countess Katarina Orlova – Bismarck edited the telegram to give the impression that Benedetti had undiplomatically importuned King Wilhelm and been turned away by a lowly secretary. He also made sure his version was published in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, distributed free in Berlin the following day.[157] The date was crucial, 14 July being the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and a national holiday when Gallic pride is at its zenith.
Why did Bismarck want a war with France? There is no evidence that he intended to occupy the country permanently. Even Hitler did not want to do that. What the devious Chancellor of Prussia wanted was to unite all Germany by sucking the southern German states into an alliance with the North German Federation for a patriotic war against the French – an alliance in which Prussia would be the dominant partner.
The government in Paris fell right into Bismarck’s trap. On 15 July the necessary credits for a war were voted by the French parliament with less than ten dissenting voices. Adolphe Thiers was one of the few to plead for peace, arguing that France had sufficient internal problems without wasting money on a war. In January the funeral of Parisian journalist Victor Noir, assassinated by a cousin of the Emperor, had erupted in Republican demonstrations by a crowd of 100,000 protesters. In May a referendum had curbed the power of the Senate and divested Napoléon III of his functions as head of the Cabinet. Industrial unrest was rife, with troops frequently firing on and killing unarmed demonstrators in the streets outside mines and factories. Another revolution was simmering but the politicians did not want to know that every shot fired at demonstrators was a tick of the clock counting down the end of the Second Empire. For his pains, Thiers was shouted down and called a Prussian, among other things.
As part of the build-up, Bazaine was named commander of 3 Corps[158] in the Army of the Rhine on 16 July, the day before French Prime Minister Emile Ollivier approved a declaration of war to avenge the alleged insult to France’s ambassador. Those with a -sense of history murmured that they were living through a repeat of ‘the affair of the fly-whisk’ when on 19 July the French chargé d’affaires in Berlin handed Bismarck the text of the declaration of war. In Paris, ministers including premier Ollivier talked of feeling light-hearted at the news. In the streets jubilant crowds were forgetting the unrest of yesterday and chanting bombastic slogans. ‘To the Rhine!’ was one of the more modest. ‘Down with Bismarck!’ was more common, while optimists chanted, ‘Onwards to Berlin!’ On 20 July War Minister Marshal Edmond Le Boeuf appointed himself Bazaine’s superior as Général de Division of the Rhine army.
It has been said that Napoléon III’s hurt pride stung him into declaring this war with all the irresponsibility of a headstrong young officer challenging another to a duel, but he no longer had the power to do that. Also, he was at the time so ill – perhaps psychosomatically after the curtailment of his powers as Emperor – that his family feared he would die. He was still visibly suffering when he departed for the front on 28 July, nominally taking supreme command at Metz in Alsace and leaving the Empress Eugénie as his constitutional regent.
As Bismarck had foreseen, the German-speaking states with the exception of Austria rallied to the Teutonic cause. Thanks to the draconian catch-all conscription laws the Iron Chancellor had introduced in Prussia, von Moltke could call on half a million trained men – twice the number of the immaculate French soldiers in their red trousers and blue coats marching along straight Napoleonic roads towards the long northeast frontier with Germany. With the telegraph providing instant communication, Moltke’s logistics expert Count Albrecht von Roon soon had 1,183,000 Prussian reservists and regulars hurtling towards them on the steel rails that now knit virtually every major city in Western Europe into one great network. On 2 August 1870 hostilities commenced at Saarbrücken.
Moltke was a very modern general, eager to exploit all the tools handed him by nineteenth-century technology. Unimpressed by the bravura of cavalry charges at the French army’s annual manoeuvres, he intended employing Blitzkrieg – although the word had not then been coined – to reduce the cities that stood between him and Paris one after the other with the aid of Alfred Krupp’s latest breech-loading cannons. Precision-manufactured in high-quality steel, they made the bronze muzzle-loading French cannons ranged against them in the fortress cities of northeast France look like museum pieces.
Le Boeuf bombastically announced to his Parliament that the country was ‘so well prepared for war t
hat, if it lasted a year, not a single soldier would be short of so much as a gaiter button’[159] but smartness on parade was irrelevant in Bismarck’s new-style warfare. True, margarine had just been invented by the winner of a competition to improve the rations in the French navy, but the only French invention liable to be of use in the coming confrontation was Antoine-Alphonse Chassepot's 11mm Fusil d'Infanterie Modèle 1866, which was more reliable and had a greater range and accuracy than the Dreyse. More than a million of them had been mass-produced by the start of the war, but new weapons on which troops have not trained do not always achieve their potential.
In contrast to Prussia, France had not rigidly enforced conscription since Waterloo. To support the under-strength French regular army, Le Boeuf now ordered the Armée d’Afrique to contribute units of the Chasseurs d’Afrique, the Zouaves and Algerian light infantry. Despite Bazaine’s position in 3 Corps, the Legion was not wanted because recruiting to replace the losses in Mexico had raised the proportion of German-speaking legionnaires to 58% in 1866. Long before Rome invented the legion, commanders had been wary of committing foreign mercenary troops against their fellow-countrymen, so the Germans were out. The percentage of Belgians in the Legion was also high and Carlota’s grieving father, after learning his lesson in Mexico, had made it plain to both sides that he wished his country and its citizens not to become involved in the coming war. So the Legion’s Belgians were out, too.
In Algeria, legionnaires who had been hoping that the war would summon them to more soldierly duties north of the Mediterranean had their hopes crushed when two battalions were sent to replace the Europe-bound Zouaves at a post called locally El-Hasaiba – the Damned – because so many men posted there died there from malaria.
By 4 August Marshal MacMahon was in retreat with his Douay Division after being defeated by the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm at Wissembourg in Alsace. Two days later, at Froeschwiller-Woerth, where the French 8th and 9th regiments of armoured cavalry were wiped out in heroic but pointless charges against Prussian artillery, Col Raphaël de Suzzoni told his men of 2nd Algerian Tirailleurs in Arabic that they would stand and die for France, but not give an inch. He died. They died. And 6,000 other French soldiers were taken prisoner. The inch was not given, but taken all the same.
The French retreat turned to a rout. On the same day at Forbach in neighbouring Lorraine Gen Charles-Auguste Frossard’s troops were forced to retire when outflanked. The front was collapsing like a house of cards. All the courageous cavalry charges in Alsace were in vain. Modern warfare had arrived. Increasingly ill, on 10 or 12 August Napoléon III signed the order making Bazaine C-in-C of the Army of the Rhine.
Attempting to link up with MacMahon, Bazaine pushed towards Verdun and was wounded on 14 August at Borny. After indecisive battles at Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte on 16 and 18 August, he fell back on the fortress-city of Metz with his army more or less intact. By then MacMahon had been driven all the way back to Châlons-sur-Marne in Champagne. Three disastrous days later Bazaine and his army were surrounded in Metz. On 25 August MacMahon was ordered to break through and relieve Bazaine’s encircled army. It was all in vain.
In desperate need of reinforcements, Le Boeuf turned his eye to Tours in central France. Expecting a rush of foreign volunteers to die for France, he had sited there the depot of yet another foreign legion in the hope of attracting volunteers for the duration of hostilities. The rush had failed to materialise; recruits numbered less than a thousand men, half of them German. The Belgians who had joined up were shipped out of harm’s way to Algeria in deference to King Leopold I’s wishes, but the Germans were kept and the force was gazetted as 5th Battalion of the Régiment Etranger.
On 2 September thirty-nine French generals and 104,000 officers and men were captured at Sedan, where Hitler’s troops would make their breakthrough on 13 May 1940. With them was their ailing emperor, who was driven in a calèche wearing general’s uniform with four staff officers to meet the victorious king of Prussia. Ahead of him lay a brief imprisonment in Germany followed by exile in England.
Hearing the news, Empress Eugénie began packing, while her 14-year-old son the Crown Prince headed for asylum in Belgium. One of her last acts was to sign a decree transforming the battalion at Tours into 5th Foreign Regiment. On 4 September 1870 – just one month after the war had started – the Second Empire entered its death throes when the Paris mob invaded her former home the Palais Bourbon as she was setting up house safely across the Channel in Hastings. With emperor and empress gone, the Third Republic was born inauspiciously with Léon Gambetta and the military governor of Paris Gen Louis Jules Trochu – who had been an outspoken critic of French military unpreparedness – setting up a provisional Government of National Defence in Tours, where 5th Foreign Regiment had been forming up since 22 August.
The Legion’s hour – some say, its least honourable hour – was about to sound.
After its victory at Sedan, 2nd Prussian Army under Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm moved swiftly to besiege Paris. The railways converging on the capital from all directions were in their favour; it was far more difficult for the French to move their forces sideways between the several fronts. By 19 September Paris was besieged by two German armies totalling 400,000 trained soldiers. Whilst Trochu had over half a million men inside the siege lines for the defence of the capital, their quality was highly variable: seventeen line regiments with 200 cannons were supplemented by 15,000 sailors, 12,000 gendarmes and 465,000 men of the National Guard – 135,000 drawn from the provinces and 330,000 from Paris itself.
And yet, Paris held, the citizens digging trenches to turn the city into a fortified camp that somehow managed to keep Moltke’s investing armies at arms’ length for four whole months. On 22 September the revolutionary Socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui called openly for bloody revolution, inciting Karl Marx’ rival, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, to leave Switzerland for Lyon, where he single-handedly declared the abolition of the French state!
Peace feelers came to nothing. Toul fell. Strasbourg fell. With the telegraph lines into and out of Paris cut by the Germans, correspondence with the rest of the world was, as philatelists know, by ‘pigeongrams’ on paper or microfilm that were enlarged and copied down on arrival, by baskets of mail suspended beneath balloons and in waterproof metal spheres floated down the Seine from up-river for incoming mail and re-released to float downstream with outgoing letters. The Prussians used them for target practice. In desperation on 5 August Gambetta climbed into the wicker basket beneath a hot air balloon on the hill of Montmartre and floated over the siege lines to raise a new army in the provinces. He had intended to go south to Tours, but a fickle wind decided otherwise, carrying the balloon northwards and nearly landing him in Prussian territory.
South-west of Paris, on 8 October 15,000 Bavarians under Gen von der Tann with 100 of Krupp’s cannons laid siege to Orleans, defended by 10,000 men and a handful of bronze muzzle-loaders. Among them were 1,350 officers and men of the new 5th Foreign Regiment, about to be sorely tested, as well as some Zouaves and Algerian tirailleurs.
The battle of Tours began 20km north of the city at Artenay, where Maj Adolf von Heinleth’s 4th Division was surprised to see crowds of townsfolk who had ridden or driven out in their coaches with picnic hampers to watch the fighting. At the first salvo of Krupp’s cannons, they hastily fled – as did many of the French troops – causing widespread panic in the city. Bivouacking for the night after the battle, Heinleth prepared to take the outlying suburbs by storm the following day. Here, steel cannons were of limited use and he was counting on his Bavarian and Schwabian infantry to go in with rifle and bayonet at close quarters.
It gives some indication of the new Legion that among officers gazetted without scrutiny in this desperate hour was a lieutenant who defected to the Germans and a Spanish major who went over to the other side with all his arms and baggage. Among the men, one insane Turk spent more time fighting his comrades than the
enemy and one of the hundred Irish volunteers spent most of his time writing newspaper despatches.
More serious than these few eccentrics was the general lack of training. The best NCOs had been siphoned away into regular regiments; those remaining hardly knew their men. And yet, the Legion fell back in reasonable order after being repeatedly outflanked as other units collapsed. By 1700hrs its commanding officer Maj Arago was dead, as were eighteen other officers and 580 men, with another 250 taken prisoner.[160]
In Heinleth’s memoirs, he recorded: ‘The Foreign Legion fought very stubbornly. In the burning and falling houses the gallant Schwabians fell on the brave international mercenaries with rifle-butts and bayonets. . . The French lost about 4,000 men killed, wounded or taken prisoner, among these the Foreign Legion contingent numbering 1,300 men lost . . . nineteen officers and 900 rank-and-file.’[161]
Chapter 15: Blindfolds and bullets on the boulevards
France 1870 – 1871
Wein, Weib, Gesang … It was indeed wine, women and song for the jubilant Germans that night, masters of the town where Joan the Maid had become the symbol of French national consciousness after being burned at the stake by the English in a different war. While the victors celebrated, the survivors of 5th Foreign Regiment sneaked out of the city in civilian clothes. Disguised as a dusty miller was a graduate of St Cyr who had enlisted as Sgt Kara, but would take his proper place in history after being crowned King Peter I of Serbia in 1903.
On 19 October two battalions of the old Legion totalling 2,000 men, but without their German legionnaires,[162] landed in France from Algeria and absorbed what remained of 5th Regiment. Gambetta, now Minister of War, allocated them to the 125,000-strong Army of the Loire tasked with re-taking Orleans, but the people they had come to liberate gave the legionnaires a frigid welcome, foreshadowing the hostility of mayors in Flanders 1914-18, who refused shelter and forage to colonial troops and the Legion until forced to give it, sometimes at the point of an officer’s side-arm. Living under canvas in the cold, wet weather of October 1870, the newly arrived legionnaires must have yearned for Algeria, sun, shovels and all.