BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. No. MCXLVII. MAY 1911. VOL. CLXXXIX. THE FOREIGN LEGION. "IN other regiments soldiers can conquer, in the Legion they can die." Thus did General de Négrier sum up the reputation won by the famous corps he loved so well, a reputation borne unsullied through threequarters of a century of warfare. In all the armies of the world no regiment has a history more glorious, more crowded with deeds of heroism. Thrice has the Foreign Legion been wellnigh wiped out of existence, and in the Salle d'Honneur at Sidi-bel-Abbès, its headquarters, amongst trophies won in every quarter of the globe and marble tablets bearing the names of its officers killed in action, pictures of forty-eight battles recall the splendid deeds which have made its name famous in the annals of France. To have numbered on its muster-rolls MacMahon, Canrobert, Saint Arnaud, Chanzy, de Négrier, VOL. CLXXXIX.—NO. MOXLVII. Saussier, were enough to render any regiment illustrious; and it was in the Legion, in Africa and the Crimea, that Bazaine won the renown eclipsed for ever in the tragedy of Metz. The nations of the Continent know the Legion well. Spain, Russia, Austria, and Germany, each in its turn, have learnt to respect its prowess, and the soil of Italy has run red with the blood of the exiles fighting for her freedom. But in England its splendid story, even its very name, is almost unknown. In ranks where men of every race in Europe may be numbered by hundreds, Britons, happily for themselves, are almost unrepresented. To write the history of the Legion were almost to write the military history of France during the last eighty years, for, except in the Siege of Rome and the Chinese War, wherever the Tricolor has flown in battle, there, in the thickest 2 P of the fighting, has the Legion been found. In Algeria and Morocco, in the Crimea, in Mexico, in Tonquin, Formosa, Madagascar, and West Africa, in Spain, in Italy, and on the sacred soil of France itself, have the legionaries fought and died; by bullet and sword, by pestilence and famine, in numbers untold, untellable, for, amongst its records, the French War Office keeps no tale of the countless lives of the strangers laid down in its service, and only the memory of their heroism remains. And ever the fame of the Legion, won in the first years of its existence, its reputation for endurance, for dash and dauntless valour, have grown with the years, nor has it ever acknowledged defeat, save when defeat was almost more glorious than victory. The Legion is the direct descendant of the mercenary regiments Scottish, Irish, German, and Swiss-which for centuries formed part of the standing army of France, though it differs from them in being a colonial corps. Its immediate forerunner was the Royal Foreign Legion, formed at the Restoration from Swiss and other foreign troops in the service of Napoleon, which, becoming successively the Legion, and the Regiment, of Hohenlohe, was disbanded in January 1831, its place being taken by the 21st Light Infantry. It was a time when France could ill afford to lose the men who had served her so long and so well. Launched on a career of adventure in Africa, in the hope that the glamour of foreign conquest might save a tottering dynasty, she had passed through the throes of the Revolution of July which had driven Charles X. from his uneasy throne, only to be faced by danger abroad and disorder at home, imperatively necessitating the recall of every soldier who could be spared from Africa, no matter how much the safety of those who remained behind might be imperilled. Algiers, indeed, was in French hands, but its capture by a Christian Power had been the signal for a general rising throughout Mohammedan Africa, so that the French commanders were hard put to it, not to extend their conquests, but to hold what they had already won. The formation of the first Algerian regiments the Zouaves, recruited from a friendly Arab tribe; the African Light Infantry, composed of the bad characters of the French Army, and the Chasseurs d'Afrique, of time-expired cavalrymen—had indeed given some accession to the strength of the army of occupation, but the numbers obtained by these expedients were altogether inadequate. In this emergency it was decided to re-enlist for service in Algiers the men of the Regiment of Hohenlohe, and to fill up the ranks from amongst the foreigners who, from every nation in Europe, had sought in France a refuge from the reactionary tyranny of their own rulers, and who, those who had been soldiers more than the rest, were suffering great privations. On the 4th February 1831 a law was passed authorising the formation of a Foreign Legion for service abroad, the command of it being conferred upon Colonel Stoffel, a Swiss veteran of the Empire. The response to the call for volunteers was immediate. From all parts of the Continent exiles and refugees flooked to enrol themselves in the new regiment, some thankful to obtain a livelihood at the only trade they knew, some lured by dreams of adventure and of plunder. In a few months seven battalions were formed-three of Germans and Swiss, one of Spaniards, one of Italians and Sardinians, one of Dutchmen and Belgians, and one of Poles; and before the end of the year the first four battalions of the "Légion Etrangère" left Marseilles for Algiers, under the heroio Colonel Combes, fated a few years later to announce in one breath, like Browning's Trumpeter of Ratisbon, the fall of Constantine and his own death. which disembarked eight days thirty-five were absent from mean Yet in one respect the mistrust of the French commanders proved only only too well founded. With no feeling of patriotism to restrain them and subjected to a discipline exceptionally severe, the legionaries deserted in large numbers; and desertion, always a serious military crime, was a grave danger to the French in Algeria, and one which was to cost them dear. Escape by sea being impossible, the fugitives had no choice but to throw in their lot with the Arabs, and to place not only their arms, but their knowledge of warfare, learnt in the service of France, at the disposal of Clad as they were in oldtime uniforms, often in little but rags, the arrival of the legionaries was hailed with contempt by the Arabs; with astonishment, not unmixed with dismay, by the French, for which the indiscipline and the want of training of many of the men afforded no little justification. In his diary a Staff Officer wrote of them: "We have a battalion of foreigners here her implacable enemies, thus an avenging themselves for the oppression and ill-treatment which made them doubly exiles. At its baptism of fire two German deserters were found by the 3rd battalion amongst the Arab dead; and on one occasion a party of thirty Spaniards went over to the enemy in a body, after & murderous assault upon officer. The armies of Abdel - Kadir numbered in their ranks hundreds of these men, many of whom rose to high position in his service. The first of the Emir's regular battalions, raised in 1835, was trained and commanded by a German from the Legion, and proved itself, on many a bloody field, fully a match for its adversaries; and each of his six other regular battalions included an European company. At a later date, when the power of Abd-el-Kadir was broken and the chief a fugitive, the deserters found a ready welcome with the Sultan of Morocco, For this state of affairs the French had only themselves to blame. The organisation of the Legion in national battalions, under officers unable either to speak the language of their men or to sympathise with them, afforded exceptional opportunities for petty tyranny on the part of unscrupulous non-commissioned officers and for concerted action on the part of the soldiers; whilst a discipline which tolerated punishments almost Chinese in their barbarity, goaded its victims to despair, madness, and crime. ar, After an existence of little over four years the Legion became the subject of the strangest "deal in history since Hessian princes ceased to traffic in the lives of their subjects. For the sum of 612,727 francs, the price of its arms, uniform, and equipment, it was sold by Louis Philippe to Queen Maria Christina of Spain, to fight in defence of the throne of her infant daughter, Isabella, in the bloody struggle known as the first Carlist Wa and, by royal decree, was struck off the strength of the French Army. French Army. Protest was unavailing. The orders were peremptory, and though the officers were given the option of obedience or dismissal, the men had no choice at all, and on the 16th August 1835 the Legion, 4000 strong, landed at Tarragona, to serve for the next four years as part of the Christino Army. So completely did the French Government wash its hands of the men it had sold like so many slaves, as to reply, with rare oynicism, to Colonel Bernelle's appeal that the Carlists might be compelled to accord to his men the ordinary rights of belligerents, that as they were in Spanish service all intervention on their behalf by a foreign Power was impossible. To the Carlists the Legion was an object of especial detestation. By express order of the Pretender, it was excluded from the benefits of the Eliot Convention, the humane agreement negotiated by Great Britain to put an end to the frightful massacres of prisoners which had horrified the world at the commencement of the struggle; and, its status as part of the Queen's regular army unrecognised, all prisoners made by the Carlists were summarily shot. Nor was its treatment by those it served such as to make amends for its sufferings during a campaign of extraordinary ferocity. To Bernelle it speedily became apparent that if the Legion was to continue in existence it must be prepared to stand and aot alone. Not only were the men unpaid, unclothed, unfed, but they could not even depend on the Royalist leaders for the protection and assistance which infantry needs from the other arms. From amongst his Poles, therefore, Bernelle raised three squadrons of cavalry, and with help from France he armed and equipped & mountain battery, in addition to organising a small ambulance corps. At the same time, by abolishing the national battalions he put an end to a potent cause of disorder and danger in the Legion itself, and inaugurated the system, ever since in force, of posting the men to companies and battalions as they were wanted, wholly irrespective of their nationality. This done, worn out and disgusted by Spanish arrogance and incapaoity, Bernelle, whose wife had shared his dangers and privations, resigned the command to Colonel Conrad, and retired to France. Of the men, sufficient, ere long, to form a battalion in the Carlist Army, deserted a cause they had been sent to serve against their will and a sovereign who requited that service so ill. Yet whenever there was fighting to be done the Legion behaved magnificently. At Terapengi blockhouse a battalion triumphantly repelled the repeated assaults of five times its own numbers; and at the disastrous battle of Huesca, it was the heroism of the Legion and its steadfastness in retreat which saved the Christino Army from destruction,-at such cost, however, to itself, that only sufficient officers and men survived to form a single battalion. It needed but one more such battle-Barbastro, where Conrad was slain-for the Legion to exist no more as an independent corps; and in the spring of 1839, when the war came to an end, of all who had landed in Spain four years before, only five hundred survived to testify in France, by their rags and penury, to Spanish gratitude and Spanish faith. Meanwhile a new Legion had come into existence, orders for the formation of which were issued within a few months of the departure of the old one, and which, for the next twenty years, was constantly engaged in the long struggle with Abdel-Kadir, and after his surrender, in the conquest of Grande Kabylie. Kabylie. Coudiat - Aty, Constantine, the most gallant feat of arms in all France's African wars, commemorated in the Gallery of Battles at Versailles, Djejeli, Zaacha, a hundred fights, of which the very names are almost forgotten, each added to the renown of the |