- from ‘The War Illustrated’, 18th December, 1915
- 'The Death and Resurrection'
- 'of the Foreign Legion'
The Great Episodes of the War
- left : Italian volunteers
- right : Americans on the way to the recruiting office in Paris, August 1914
In the old days the Foreign Legion of France was the last refuge from suicide. Broken young gentlemen from foreign countries, and despairing scamps whom the police prevented from earning a dishonest living, found in the Legion a last foothold on life. Then, as Writers of romance took to glorifying the hard-bitten, iron-disciplined body of foreigners who cleared Algeria, Tunis, and the Sahara of fighting Arabs, young men of an adventurous turn of mind joined the Legion for sport. It was often sport of a desperate kind, for there were a good many warlike blackguards in the corps, and the rule of the French officers could be as harsh as death. Through all the atmosphere of exotic poetry that Ouida and other writers cast over the Legion, one thing only was clear, and that was that the men were magnificent fighters. At the outbreak of the war the fame oŁ the Legion attracted many young fighting lovers of France from the neutral States, and by the time these recruits were fully trained the Legion was somewhat changed in character through wastage and fresh drafts, while retaining its formidable character. The men had a superb pride in themselves, and they lifted each new recruit to their own level in the great charge they made against the Vimy Ridge on May 9th, 1915. The Legion was then set to win the White Works, a great underground German fortress lying between Carency and Neuville. But this job was too small for the Legionaries.
Polish volunteers in the Foreign Legion
Lost and Regained
In one great leaping movement they broke through five German lines in an hour and a half, and completely shattered an entire German division, . taking two thousand prisoners, a large number of guns, and killing or wounding another ten thousand enemies. But after breaking through the German front to a depth of three miles, the two regiments of the Legion reached Vimy Ridge, en the reverse slope of which was the last German line. Between the crest and the line of entanglements, trenches, and gun-pits there was a grassy slope, four hundred yards in breadth. This the Legion could not cross. It was shattered in trying to do so; for the enemy machine-guns, quick-firers, and heavy artillery swept every yard of the ground. After losing three out of every four officers, and having its companies reduced from two hundred and fifty to fifty men, the remnant of the corps crawled into shell-holes on the slopes, and remained in these scattered covers until relieved.
When the survivors were drawn back into reserve, it seemed as if the famous Legion were for ever destroyed. But thousands of volunteers still poured in from Switzerland, America, the Peninsula, and Scandinavia, and at the end of four months the corps was able to take the field again. It was given to General Marchand as a reserve to his Colonial Division at Souain in the Battle of Champagne on September 25th, 1915. The Legion did not like this. Indeed, it regarded it as an insult. It was not used to be in reserve to" any other body of men, and it was with a grudging mind that the Legionaries followed the Colonial troops up the Punch-bowl of Souain.
The men began by being angry; they ended by being in a maddened fury. In marching up the Punch-bowl on September 20th they lost two thousand, men without firing a shot; for the Germans, after checking the Colonial Division near Navarin Farm, maintained a curtain of shrapnel and shell fire over the Punch-bowl to prevent the French general from moving up his supports. After being badly knocked about by their unseen enemy, the Legionaries had to lie all night on their stomachs in the pouring rain, under a pine- wood on the slopes of a down. When morning broke there was a heavy fog blanketing the country, and the French gunners and their observing airmen could not find the position of the opposing batteries. General de Castelnau . was therefore in serious difficulties, for the enemy's howitzers continued to rake the valley with gun fire, while the French artillery could not see what to fire at.
a volunteer all the way from Argentina
The Unlucky Horse-shoe
The Germans held the chain of chalk heights, forming an immense horse-shoe, and all the main German trenches and gun-pits were on the reverse slope of the downs. Nothing of them could be seen, and in, many cases the French troops were allowed to top the crest before an annihilating combination of converging fires was brought to bear on them. The most formidable of these German positions was the western point of the Horse-shoe at a place called Sabot Wood. This clump of fir-trees grew On the sides of a down near Navarin Farm. The works in it were also in the form of a horse-shoe in front, while behind was a maze of trenches and great caverns, dug out of the chalk, with railway-stations into which reinforcements and munitions were brought along two light railways built by the German engineers and connected with the old French railway running along the Py River. It was against the Sabot Wood fortress that Marchand's Zouaves had broken.
the 'Garibaldi' volunteers in the Legion
Suicide or Success !
All this the Legionaries learned as they lay in the rain at night in the fir-wood arid grieved over their wrongs. There was some talk of their acting as supports to Zouave, Colonial, and Moorish columns charging against the Horse-shoe. But the Legionaries could not stand this. They sent a deputation to their colonel, and asked him in a more or less polite way if he had any regard for the honour of the corps. The colonel, who was also fretting at losing thousands of men without having struck a blow, sought for his army corps commander at Souain, and put the matter before him. As a special favour the Foreign Legion begged to be allowed to attack Bois Sabot. It was pointed out in reply that the Legionaries were only asking to be allowed to commit suicide. What could two regiments do against the great fortress which needed at least an army corps to operate against it ?
But the Legion was sick of life. It did not care about tactics. At last it was arranged that the Legionaries should have their way, and make a frontal attack between the horns of the Horseshoe. Then, while the enemy was engaged in repelling this assault, the French general prepared to launch another division on the flank of the fortress. Naturally, it was this flank attack Which the French commander expected to succeed. From his point of view he was sacrificing the maddened Legionaries in an impossible kind of attack, which would simply draw out the enemy's forces, and enable him to deliver a more scientific blow from another direction.
But things did not fall out in this way. The angry Legionaries dislocated the plan of their general. At three-thirty in the afternoon of September 28th they were drawn up in the pine-woods in columns of two, having only eighty per cent, of their original effectives, the others having been killed by shell and shrapnel fire in a long period of waiting in the Punch-bowl. The woods in which they were sheltering were still being shelled as they started to charge. The 1st Battalion leaped over the heads of French soldiers entrenched outside the wood, and amid cheers of encouragement, the narrow columns changed into single file and, quickening their pace, swept out between the horns of the Horse-shoe.
an encampment of legionnaires
The Lodestone for the Brave
The leading battalion was raked front and flanks with machine-gun and musketry fire, and caught in the middle and rear by shrapnel. Whole sections fell to a man, but the other men held on and reached the barbed-wire entanglements. A path was made, but only one Legionary of the 1st Battalion got through it, and he fell headlong into the enemy's fire-trenches with a bullet through his knee.
Almost immediately however, the 2nd Battalion of the Legion arrived at the entanglements and pushed through, and jumped into the trench. Maybe a hundred out of two thousand broke into the German position, but with hand-bombs and daggers they cleared out a hundred yards of the line, then other battalions joined them with fewer losses, and the real struggle for victory then began. The Legionaries worked their way through the warren with so absolute a frenzy for slaughter that the German division, garrisoning the works and supplied with abundant hand-bombs, could not hold any barricade. No prisoners were taken, and the half-shattered Legion, fighting in sheer madness, careless of its losses, was reduced at last to a score or so of men. But when the flanking French division arrived on the scene there was no work for it. The tiny remnant of the Legion was master of the whole fortress.
The Legion had perished in its victory. but such was the power of example of it-dead upon the minds of thousands of living men in neutral States, who had no call to go to war, that the Legion was re-born in Paris: Volunteers came in such numbers that by the end of November it was in training again.
Greek volunteers
