Drinking to Forget: Wine and the Foreign Legion

(NB: This series of articles was originally published in 2018)

The French Foreign Legion is one of the most famous fighting forces in the world – and one with a strong taste for drink.

Mention the Foreign Legion and the immediate image conjured up in the mind’s eye will be of a soldier in a white kepi, blazing sun and desert sands, holding crumbling outposts against overwhelming odds. Men fighting for reasons they can’t remember. They all joined to forget you see?

A less romantic reading of the Legion’s past reveals the brutish life of soldiering in France’s colonial possessions where disease and melancholy (the dreaded ‘cafard’) laid low Legionnaires by the score and where a Berber bullet or Dahomey Amazon’s cutlass were ever present threats.

Initially founded in 1831 to support France’s colonial conquest of Algeria and to drain the country of various political undesirables, the Legion carved out a reputation for toughness, fighting prowess and no small measure of unruliness on far-flung battlefields the world over.

The pay was poor, leave was rare, and punishment for even minor infractions was harsh.

Desertion and drunkenness were rife. And yet, the Legion has never struggled to fill its ranks, counting on the constant stream of the world’s desperate and dissolute and the promise of escape, adventure, redemption and reform the Legion has always offered – at least in theory if not always in practice.

The Duke of Wellington in one of his famous remarks about the British Army observed: ‘The English soldiers are fellows who have all enlisted for drink – that is the plain and simple fact – they have all enlisted for drink.”

The men who joined the Foreign Legion may not have enlisted for drink per se but drink and the getting of it was certainly the leitmotif of their soldiering lives.

As one wit pithily noted: “The legionnaires drink to forget – but they seldom forget to drink.”

 

The drinkable life

In many ways they didn’t have to forget, for their drinks, passed over the zinc-topped bars of their canteens, were as diverse as their enemies. There was absinthe and pastis; ‘tafia’, fig liqueur in North Africa, the fierce rice spirit ‘choum-choum’ (or simply choum) in Tonkin and Annam, ‘aguardiente’ in Mexico, fortified wines laced with quinine[1] and, of course, the rough red wine known as ‘pinard’, the defining drink of the French army.

It’s not for nothing that one ex-legionnaire remembered an old comrade’s exclamation that: “There is only one place in the world where life is drinkable – in the Legion!”

By the First World War the wine ration was up to half a litre a day and there was always the opportunity for a legionnaire to buy more with their pay.

The problem though was that Legion pay, the cost of wine and a legionnaire’s typical thirst seldom aligned.

Around the turn of the century the basic daily pay for a private was five centimes, 10 centimes for a private first class and 20 centimes for a corporal, rising further for sergeants and sergeant-majors.

Pay was distributed twice a month, on the first and fifteenth day, which gave a soldier a fairly decent lump sum and led to their binges being nicknamed ‘la cuite de la quinzaine’[2] – the ‘fortnightly drunk’.

On pay day it was taken as an inevitability that a good number of the men would indulge in a massive binge and fight either each other (in inter and intra-unit engagements or occasionally along national lines) or men from another nearby regiment especially the hated penal units of the Battalions d’Afrique’ (known as the ‘Bats d’Af’ or ‘Joyeux‘), which, on occasion, ended in fatalities and needed to be broken up by a squadron or two of Chasseur d’Afrique.[3]

Things got really out of hand every quarter when the Legionnaires were given their rebate on whatever was left of their 35 franc uniform allowance.

When the dust settled on the almighty bender that usually followed, the guardrooms of Sidi-bel-Abbés or Saïda[4] were filled to bursting and the least appealing, most isolated forts in the bled[5] had found their replacement garrisons.

In any other army this would simply not be tolerated but given the draconian conditions in which they lived and worked it is to be supposed that more than a few Legion officers considered it the best way for the men to let off some steam and the aggression was seen as a positive sign of fighting spirit.

Not that officers were always much better. Although they might have had more financial means and aristocratic backgrounds than their men, many were just as drunken, dissolute and prone to violence.

During the Second Empire in particular, young officers were keen to cultivate an image as a ’buveur de sang’ – a ‘blood drinker’ – swaggering, fearsome and quick to anger. Duels were common and in fact one was more likely to be reprimanded for even the slightest hesitation in accepting a challenge than partaking in duelling; while to refuse was utterly unthinkable.

One officer, Charles Clemmer, remembered they sought satisfaction, “without rhyme or reason”.

He went on: “Anything served as a pretext in the bars and cabarets: a song begun at another table, a glass poured ‘en quarte’, that is to say the hand turned to the right, a gesture, a look, was interpreted as requiring a duel.”

Clemmer himself experienced a slight one evening in a restaurant when another man completely unknown to him walked up, drained Clemmer’s glass of wine and then insulted him. Instantly, Clemmer smashed a bottle over the challenger’s head. They then fought a duel a few days later.

But although a legionnaire might be flush every two weeks, after deducting the money he needed for necessities such as soap, bootlaces, polish and the like, there was precious little left for the comforts of wine and tobacco – even at the heavily subsidised prices wine and tobacco were sold at in the canteen – and next to nothing for even the most unappealing prostitute that might inhabit a garrison town.[6]

One could go out to the local town as long as one could pass muster on the way back in. Joseph Ehrhart remembered the duty sergeant waiting by the barracks gate as the 9pm curfew approached watching the returnees, “stop several metres from the small door, then take aim to try to get through without bumping into something.” Those who didn’t make it spent a night in the cells.

The local bars sold wine at an hourly rate rather than by the glass which made it potentially attractive but a night in a garrison town was a sure fire way of ending up overcharged or robbed if one’s guard was down – more than one comatose legionnaire was brought back, “in the costume of Adam” from time to time.

In the barracks meanwhile a shot of Pernod was 15 centimes, a shot of absinthe 40, which was a still a steep price for a private whereas a litre of Algerian wine cost just five cents and was the automatic choice for almost everyone.

Still, this was a day’s pay for a legionnaire and the amounts they could drink were prodigious – three bottles was not unusual for a ‘quiet’ evening.

Antoine Sylvère, who stole money from the post office where he worked and joined the Legion under the name ‘Flutsch’, recounted in his memoir how his company of 120 men once consumed 700 litres of wine between them in a sitting – close to six litres each; the gold standard for ‘real’ legionnaires be they officers or enlisted men.

Apart from the few who had some private means or the occasional pay packet from their family, the ways to augment one’s pay in order to buy wine resulted in a wide array of scams and wheezes. Legionnaires might sing or even beg in the local town or even become the unit tattoo artist charging a modest fee for their creative, occasionally lewd and very often crude creations – there are tales of legionnaires tattooing ‘F*ck you’ across the palm of their right hand directing the insult at whichever superior they were saluting. One man even had it writ large across his forehead.

Selling medals, uniform parts and equipment was the chief method of earning quick drinking money even though it drove the French military hierarchy to distraction; especially when the Legionnaires of the later mounted companies discovered the sort of bender that could be funded by selling their expensive horse furniture and saddles.

The penalties for doing so were harsh and included docking of pay (usually merely helping to drive the endless spiral of larceny in the inveterate drinker), time in the cells and corporal punishment. But as the historian Donald Porch notes: “When the idea of a collective, or even a solitary, drinking spree was in the air, it deterred no one.”[7]

Legionnaire Flutsch’s company once sold off their underpants in order to fund a communal drunk and for some the practice began before they’d even left France. The American Erwin Rosen remembered waiting at Fort St Jean in Marseille for the next Africa-bound transport ship and one new recruit swapped his boots there and then for four litres of wine.

And if you didn’t sell your own equipment you could always steal and sell somebody else’s.

As failure to have a complete set of kit on inspection day led to punishment the man missing his boots, bandolier or belt simply pilfered them from someone else until one had, as historian Martin Windrow describes, “a constant game of larcenous musical chairs,”[8] that went on until someone, somewhere, maybe even another company, carried the can for it.

This sort of stealing and counter-stealing was, said Rosen: “Considered absolutely respectable and gentleman-like,” but the taking of more personal effects was another matter altogether and any who robbed from their messmates could be treated very harshly indeed; there was more than one cover-up for a retaliatory beating that ended in manslaughter although the savage legend later propagated by works such as Beau Geste that thieves were crucified on table tops using bayonets was pure and lurid fantasy.

Drunkenness was a prime cause of trouble however. The estimate of one chaplain was that during the height of France’s imperial ventures from the 1870s to early 1900s, around 75% of courts martial in the Legion had alcohol at their root.

Men got it into their heads to desert or go over to the enemy while drunk (usually returning pretty swiftly after sobering up), they were found drunk on duty, they insulted and even assaulted their superiors while under the influence and in 1908 the cook of the officers’ mess of one regiment was found passed out on the kitchen floor, completely paralytic – at 11.45am.

If the men got unruly in barracks then the chief cure was either a real or contrived call to arms – the pre-dawn scramble to the sound of bugles and the shouting of NCOs and then the chorus of ‘Merde!’ as the distribution of blank ammunition indicated it was just a drill.

Not that real campaigning necessarily stopped drunkenness either. At the Battle of Magenta[9] in 1859, victorious legionnaires in the manner of many soldiers throughout history quickly descended on the town’s wine cellars, broached the barrels and binged on their contents, to the extent that their officers found a few men floating face down drowned in wine the next morning and Lieutenant Charles-Jules Zédé recalled it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between those lying in the street who were stone dead and those who were merely dead-drunk.[10]

Or there was the equally injurious practice of looting the regimental booze supply during some catastrophe such as a retreat.

During the disastrous evacuation of Lang Son for example in 1885 (in the course of France’s invasion of Tonkin) a legionnaire known as Bôn-Mat remembered, “barrels of wine and tafia…lay all over the floor” and out of control soldiers of all units contributed to the growing madness by getting drunk on the abandoned liquor. Lieutenant-colonel Herbinger who was later court-martialled for the incident singled out the second battalion of the Legion as being “particularly drunk” although its commander, Major Diguet, refuted the charge saying no more than 20 of his men were inebriated and it was those in charge of the barrels who had been most negligent in their duty by not destroying them.

Other senior officers (without a shred of evidence) even insinuated Herbinger was drunk when he had made the unnecessary decision to fall back. Although the embarrassing inquest was quickly brought to and end and Herbinger escaped censure, he died the following year, a broken man, aged just 46 and the episode led to the fall of Jules Ferry’s government.

 

The old sweats

The Legion has fought many enemies during its history: in the 19^th century they included Basques in the Spanish Civil War of the 1830s, Russians in the bastions of Sebastopol, Austrians in the cause of Italian unification, Mexicans during the attempt to put an Austrian on the throne as emperor, Prussians in the Loire; Berber tribesmen across North Africa, Chinese pirates in the riverways of northern Vietnam and Dahomean warrior women to name just a few.

But once the war was over the Legion’s chief purpose was as a colonial garrison, especially in North Africa (always considered the Legion’s spiritual home) and later in French Indochina[11] too.

The main active operations the legionnaires embarked upon were gruelling long-range treks through the roasting bled or sweltering Tonkinese bush in pursuit of rebellious tribesmen and it was something they were trained to do. These were conducted at a smart, occasionally brutal pace and the bulk of legionnaire’s training was gradually building up his endurance to be able to conduct them.

Nonetheless, when the expedition set out from its base it tended to be a bit stop start to begin with and one wonders to what extent the first day’s march was an exercise in letting hungover legionnaires sweat out the booze from the previous night’s inevitable pre-march cuite.

Although the Legion is famously associated with the rather dire motto ‘March or Die!’, in the majority of circumstances men who tired or grew sick on the march were not left behind. From time to time however, when speed was of the essence or the situation desperate, then the sick or wounded might indeed be abandoned.

Knowing that stragglers could expect to be viciously tortured and mutilated by their various enemies putting them out of their misery was considered the kinder option.

Flutsch relayed: ‘When there was one who was on his last legs, we gave him a drink of tafia and then we said: ‘Now it’s your last mouthful.’

‘We would stick the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. Then we could go off with a clear conscience.”

Yet another way alcohol was acquired was as a form of crypto-currency. The chief benefactors in this were invariably the older soldiers, the vieux mustaches. New recruits (known as ‘bleus’) were assigned an older ‘daddy’ to show him the ropes and it was a foolish young bleu indeed who didn’t buy his daddy and section corporal a mug or two of wine at the canteen of an evening.

The kit carried by legionnaires could range from 50 to 80lbs in weight and simply fitting it all into one pack was a daunting task but one could always call upon a veteran to help of course – for the distinctly affordable sum of a litre of pinard. It wasn’t just packing either, extra time in the saddle on a mounted patrol, getting out of unwanted fatigue duties or even the cleaning of kit (known colloquially as getting someone to ‘faire ton truc’) could all be passed on to another man for the sum of five centimes or a mug of wine.

That said, if the Legion counted murder, thievery, drunkenness and deceitfulness among its many sins, it was reckoned there was at least one vice not present in the Legion – gambling, because no one ever had enough cash to wager in the first place.

At any rate, an overawed naïf finding themselves in the company of an old sweat in any dubious looking bar from Sidi-bel-Abbés to Paris via Saigon would do well to heed the old advice: ‘Don’t drink with him and, above all, don’t lend him money!’

Next: Fact meets fiction in the ‘asylum of misfortune’

 

Footnotes to the text:

[1] The French colonial equivalent of gin & tonic

[2] ‘Cuite’ means ‘cooked’ in French but is also slang for being drunk.

[3] Cavalry raised for colonial service in North Africa, they were recruited from Frenchmen unlike the ‘Spahis’ who were North African.

[4] The main Legion garrison towns in North Africa.

[5] The North African hinterland beyond the pale of French influence.

[6] The famous (or perhaps infamous) authorised brothels, the Bordel Contrôle Militaire (BCM), were not introduced until after the First World War.

[7] Porch, Douglas, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force, New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1991, p308

[8] Windrow, Martin: Our Friends Beneath the Sands: The French Foreign Legion in France’s Colonial Conquests 1870-1935, London: W&N, 2010,  p140

[9] After which the colour and countless squares, streets and stations in France are named.

[10] Porch, op cit, p130

[11] Today known as Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with Vietnam usually referred to then as Tonkin (the north), Annam (the centre) and Cochinchina (the south).

Following on from part one the casual observer may be wondering how the French Foreign Legion managed to build up a reputation for being an elite fighting force rather than a ragtag bunch of paralytics.

Despite the problems caused by drunkenness the culture of heavy drinking clearly did not conspire to impede the Legion’s overall operational effectiveness – if it had then there were only too many members of the army brass who would happily have seen it disbanded and forgotten.

A more pertinent and overriding question to ask – and one Donald Porch sets out to do in his seminal history of the Legion – is, why?

The psychology of legionnaires in the early days of the Legion and even up until the present day can be difficult to fathom. Who were these men? Why did they choose to fight in the service of a foreign army for causes that weren’t their own? And to what extent, if any, was drinking a cause or a symptom of various aspects of Legion life?

Part of the problem with an institute such as the Legion is the cloak of lore, mythos and mystique that has built up around it – fuelled in no small measure by old sweats only to happy to tell a newspaperman or novelist anything they liked in exchange for paying his bar slate and by the Legion itself which instituted and even invented a number of ‘traditions’ in the 1920s and ‘30s in a bid to legitamise the Legion in the eyes of an ever-sceptical French public and government.

The wave of novels such as PC Wren’s Beau Geste[1] that appeared in the early-20^th century, particularly soon after the First World War, have absolutely cemented the image of the Foreign Legionnaire in popular consciousness; harking back as they did to what was already seen as a ‘lost’, almost chivalric age in the ‘clean’ deserts of North Africa before the mechanised slaughter of Passchendaele and Verdun in stinking mud wiped away that supposedly gentler Belle Époque.

The problem is this image is one of a Legion full of romantic idealists, all clean cut, handsome and fundamentally decent rogues (Gary Cooper’s 1939 rendition of ‘Beau’ Geste or Burt Lancaster’s ‘Mike Kincaid’ in the 1951 film Ten Tall Men are perfect archetypes).

Life in the Legion is forever an exotic adventure or comedic caper where the heroes are bold and noble and if anyone is sticky-fingered it’s always in a good cause or as light relief.

Even Laurel and Hardy got in on Legion-mania with their 1931 film ‘Beau Hunks’, which lampooned even as it pandered and added to the Legion myth that foreign legionnaires all joined because of unrequited or lost love; in this case having Oliver Hardy, the entire company and even the Riffian[2] war chief all finding out they’re in love with the same woman – the capricious Jeanie-Weenie.

The Legion high command abhorred the “abracadabran fantasy” the golden age of Hollywood wove around it; especially the idea of enlisted men casually drinking wine in the company of NCOs, officers and “semi-nude native women jumping around in the streets” – though to little avail as the fiction was lapped up in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries and rarely to the Legion’s detriment.[3]

One might of course be tempted to over-correct and say the life of a legionnaire was one of absolute horror but that too would be its own myth, once again perpetuated by the novelists and memoirists gingering up their experiences and, from 1903 onwards, sustained propaganda from the German government who wanted to stem the flow of German volunteers (and army deserters) to the Legion.

Suffice to say the Legion was neither a bellyful of laughs nor continuous torture. But it was a hard life and these were hard men – in the truest sense – and they were treated that way by their superiors, with punishments such as the ‘crapaudine’ and more straightforward physical violence meted out for even minor transgressions.

Legionnaire Flutsch recalled a Corsican named Vittini who after a night out on the town and a skinful of wine in Sidi-bel-Abbés made the mistake of talking back to a corporal on guard duty.

Flutsch recalled: “Two seconds later, Vittini, dazed by a head butt right in the face, sat on the floor leaning against the table. The corporal, taking him by the shoulder and drawing him up, threw him down on his stomach. Holding him down with his knee, he grabbed a fist full of hair, and hammered his face on the flagstones, ignoring the cries of his victim….I saw Vittini, his face completely masked in blood which flowed from his nose, his mouth, his forehead… ‘Warning to you new boys who don’t yet know how to respect a corporal in the Legion,” [said the corporal.] “This is the first lesson.”[4]

From its very inception the Legion was not a romantic getaway for heartbroken lovers and gentleman rankers[5] but a dumping ground for the French government to put its undesirables and political and social radicals.[6]

It filled its ranks with those cast adrift by their respective societies, misfits, perhaps criminally inclined or social outcasts and (very desperate) debtors, sometimes those simply bored and restless or actively seeking adventure, soldiering for soldiering’s sake, those booted out of other arms of the service (usually for drunkenness) or even just the promise of a regular square meal.

A few officers might indeed be the younger, penniless sons of fallen noble houses but the enlisted men were often the scrapings from an increasingly urban, disenfranchised, grindingly poor, uneducated and politically volatile underclass in an ever more industrialised world. And France, the home and beacon of modern revolution and revolutionaries until Russia usurped it in 1917, did not want disaffected domestic or foreign nationals within its borders.

As Porch relates: “It [the Legion] served as a release valve for political and even political tensions, absorbing the unemployed (and the unemployable), the troublemakers and the penniless foreigners who might make mischief.”[7]

Minister for War Marshal Jean Soult, was even more damning in his appraisal soon after the Legion’s founding in 1834. He wrote: “As the Foreign Legion was created with the only purpose of creating an outlet and giving a destination to foreigners who flood into France and who could cause trouble… The government has no desire to look for recruits for this Legion. This corps is simply an asylum for misfortune.”

The notion of the Legion as a cast of noble castaways was partly created by legionnaires themselves through free and occasionally wild (mis)use of the anonymat, by which men perhaps seeking to escape the law or debt could sign up under a false name, with which often went an elaborate back story.

If a lot of Legion lore is fabricated then the amount they drank is perhaps the one thing that is not embellished. It was a time when people drank more than they do now as a matter of course and serious alcoholism was endemic in many societies – although even the amount that was consumed in the Legion was considered extreme.

The drinking culture of the Legion in its early days was undoubtedly fuelled not only by exaggerated social norms but the harsh discipline, dismal surroundings and the stress induced by the very real threat to life and limb through violence and disease.

There was also boredom and melancholy, known in the Legion as, ‘le cafard’ – ‘the cockroach’ – which was to be feared as much as any enemy ambush or psychotic martinet.

If the long stretches spent rotting away in sunbaked forts in the bled or in the malarial swamps of Madagascar and Tonkin was dreaded by the average Legionnaire, so too was the indignity of being used for menial labour by the French high command.

Being used as labour for road building was one thing – the tradition of soldiers building important infrastructure goes back to Roman times[8] – but being farmed out by unscrupulous officers to break their backs in quarries or fields while the locals looked on and mocked them was a smarter blow to their martial pride than any petty punishment for defaulting and it contributed to not only reduced operational effectiveness but also that most serious of all military problems – low morale.

Bad morale and melancholy was the canker that ate away at the heart of units left out of action too long and without officers and NCOs with the wherewithal to keep their men suitably occupied and motivated drunkenness and insubordination was often the result.

The view of the Legion as a home of dangerous malcontents and social outcasts also meant that in the early days there was very little interaction between the men and the locals wherever they were based. Girls from local European communities that emigrated to North Africa (the ‘colons’ or ‘pieds noirs’) turned their noses up at invitations to a drink or a dance and her watchful brothers would quickly descend on the would-be gallant with threatening intent.

This brutality and forced isolation no doubt partly explains, “the inclination of the legionnaires toward drunkenness,” wrote the Italian veteran Aristide Merolli (the high proportion of Germans was thought of as another by French generals), but, as ever, unpicking whether drink, “was a cause or a symptom of a deeper institutional malaise,”[9] is a Gordian task that defies easy answers. Suffice to say both drink and melancholy exacerbated the other.

Nonetheless, despite it all the Legion survived and prospered[10], carving out a reputation for itself built in no small measure on sheer bloody-mindedness.

A good example is the Legion’s defining moment, the Battle of Camarón (or Camerone) on 30 April 1863 during the French intervention in Mexico.

In what became a classic of the famous last stand genre Captain Jean Danjou and 64 legionnaires trapped in a little hacienda held off 3,000 Mexicans for 10 hours until nearly everyone was dead or wounded and the water and ammunition had run out. The Mexicans were so impressed by the legionnaires that they let the three survivors go – Danjou not among them. Before he was shot dead he is reported to have inspired his men with fine words and a good deal of wine. His wooden hand is a treasured relic of the Legion today and paraded before the legionnaires every 30 April at the Legion base in Aubagne.

If alcohol was the bane of Legion life it could also be its boon. There’s no doubting that legionnaires gained the fighting reputation they did thanks to the strong bonds that grew between them as a result of shared hardships and getting good and drunk together – all of which coalesced into the absolute intangible every military strives to cultivate; ‘esprit de corps’.

If the Legion was despised then it despised everyone else back twice as much and its members took pride in being able to march further, fight harder, drink more and swear more imaginatively than any other unit in the metropolitan or African armies. The Legion came to view itself as a band apart and, naturally, one that was superior to other units.

Never has the scornful chant of the terraces and bleechers, ‘everyone hates us and we don’t care,’ been more appropriate.

It was often noted that drunk legionnaires roaming the streets went quietly when picked up by a Legion patrol but were liable to kick up a stink if manhandled by men from other corps.

March or die might have been the order of the day in Madagascar or Tonkin but between themselves to turn down help to a fellow legionnaire was tantamount to treason.

As much as they may have fought each other during their fortnightly ‘cuite’, the rallying cry of ‘a moi, La Légion!’ echoing down a back alley was enough to bring every nearby legionnaire homing in to rescue a brother-in-arms and give his assailants (be they other French soldiers, police or the young local toughs) a thoroughly good kicking and tales of outnumbered legionnaires defending themselves against impossible odds in bar brawls were as revered as any Camarón.

As ungovernable as the legionnaires sometimes made themselves when in barracks, when in action they were transformed and many Legionnaires remembered how even the most hard-bitten brawler and inveterate drinker was transformed into the image of a perfect soldier when the bullets began to fly; kepi tipped back on his head, cigarette dangling from his lips as he calmly worked the bolt on his rifle and fired into the mass of enemies to his front.

The social lubricant of alcohol also had its uses in bridging the language gap between the polyglot recruits – an idea put forward by French psychoanalyst Roger Cabrol in a dissertation of 1971.[11]

Singing was the other and one actively nurtured by the Legion to this day. The Legion has a number of sombre but moving ‘chants’ either French or ‘borrowed’ from other countries especially Germany.

Despite French being the nominal language of the Legion, many soldiers in the early days only learnt enough to understand very basic words of command and these were as likely to be given in German much of the time given the high number of German and German-speaking legionnaires.

Although many men became good linguists, a large group of Germans of Poles in one unit might see no reason to learn much French which could make life rather lonely for a French, English, Spanish or Italian speaker with few compatriots around.

Flutsch described Legion life as a silent one, “punctuated by periodic periods of drunkenness.”[12]

Then again, just as it was in the equally linguistically diverse saloons of late 19^th and early 20^th century America, shared drinks in the canteens and local bars of Legion bases were important places for the men to get to know one another, their imperfect French anyway transformed into a unique Legion ‘argot’ peppered with all manner of buckshee words from the many homelands of the legionnaires (with ‘Goddam’[13] being the most popular English word).

Language skills are often touted as improving with a certain amount of moderate drinking and then past a certain point (when language skills of any sort are out of the window anyway) what anyone was speaking presumably didn’t matter. No doubt many generations broke the ice with fellow foreign (quite literally) legionnaires over a bottle of wine or two – when they weren’t breaking them over each others’ heads that is.

Next: The Legion tumbles through a tumultuous 20th century and acquires a taste for ‘Tiger blood’.

 

Footnotes to the text:

[1] Published in 1924.

[2] The ‘Riffians’ were tribesmen from the Rif Mountains in Morocco who resisted Spanish then French incursions in the 1920s in a brutal and largely forgotten conflict.

[3] ‘Beau Geste’ was made into a silent movie in 1926. The film was so disliked by the Legion high command and subsequently became so controversial in France for its depiction of villainous Legion officers and NCOs and mutiny in the ranks that the classic 1939 version of the film starring Gary Cooper was banned in France until 1977. Incidentally, the name of the character that sets the plot of ‘Beau Geste’ in motion and is the central character in the sequel, ‘Beau Sabreur’ is Major Henri de Beaujolais.

[4] Porch, op cit. p190

[5] Although in 1857 Lt Charles Zédé (of dueling fame) claimed rather entertainingly that his company was “permeated with the wreckage of vanquished parties” and included in its ranks a defrocked bishop of Florence, the descendant of an Eastern European dynasty and a Hungarian general who’d picked the wrong side in the revolution on 1848, as well as Spanish Carlists, Parisian revolutionaries and even a Chinese whose pigtail hung down beneath his képi. (Porch, op cit, p121)

[6] So too, in a way, were the penal battalions known as the ‘Battalions d’Afrique’ – the ‘Bats d’Af’.

[7] Porch, op cit, p172

[8] At least one Legion colonel roped his men into excavating old Roman sites in North Africa as it happens (which might at least have been somewhat interesting).

[9] Porch, op cit p

[10] Barring when it was briefly disbanded in 1838 after being effectively destroyed in the Carlist civil war in Spain. It was reconstituted in 1839.

[11] L’adaptation a la légion etrangère; etude socio-psychologique, 1971; Porch, op cit, p308

[12] Porch, op cit, p186

[13] Strangely enough echoing the Hundred Years War when the French referred to the English as the ‘Goddams’ after what was clearly the medieval English soldiery’s favourite invective.

By the late 19^th century the Legion was fully ensconced in its two main bases. The first and most famous was North Africa – more specifically Algeria – with the homebase or ‘ville mère’ at Sidi-bel-Abbés.

This was the hard, ‘real’ Legion life of the bled, long marches, isolated outposts and payday binges fuelled by rough local pinard and pastis that had become emblematic of the Legion in the popular imagination.

Following the conquest of Tonkin in the late 1880s, however, the Legion set up a second home in the more sensual surroundings of Indochina, where life was somewhat easier – Legionnaires were given more time off due to what was considered a less healthy climate and their colonial service pay (North Africa was considered ‘home’ service) went further so that more menial chores, ‘ton truc‘, could be done by local boys for a paltry fee.

Furthermore, whereas in Algeria, dalliances with local women were rare in the extreme, in Indochina many legionnaires were able to keep a mistress also known as a ‘congaï’[1] or simply ‘co’ who would accompany them to the bars of Saigon or Hanoi for evening drinks: beer or ‘choum’ the local rice wine that cost 35 centimes a litre. And there was opium though to what extent it replaced the Legion taste for booze is not clearly documented.

In the aftermath of WWII it was Indochina that was to be the stage for the Legion’s first great test. French attempts to re-impose a colonial regime after the war was the trigger for a general uprising and attempt at a seizure of power by the Viet Minh – led by Ho Chi Minh, the icon of Vietnamese independence.

Militarily, economically and socially exhausted by war and occupation, France essentially stumbled into a low level guerilla war in late 1945 and then found itself fighting a full-scale insurgency by 1949 and it leant heavily on the Legion, whose ranks swelled in the post-war era with the flotsam of displaced peoples and more than a few fugitives – however, tales of the Legion becoming a haven for SS war criminals in yet another embellishment, though an estimated 60% of the Legion was composed of Germans in the late ‘40s so it is one not entirely without merit.

In total, over the course of the seven-year war, over 70,000 legionnaires would fight in Indochina and over 10,000 would be killed and many more wounded.

The Legion got its first taste of the sort of war it was in for and the enemy they were up against in 1948 during the Cao Bang campaign.

As in North Africa, the French scattered small garrisons around the country in with the aim of imposing troops all over the countryside to ‘stop the rot’ of infiltration by communist guerillas. In many ways this was ‘old school’ Legion fighting in the best traditions of French North Africa but instead of suppressing communist insurgents the outposts just tied down vast numbers of troops (over 82,000 by 1954) which would have been better utilised elsewhere and became beacons for ceaseless attacks, as did the convoys sent to resupply them up Route Coloniale 4 (RC4).

Faced with vicious ambushes fought at close quarters with an enemy that struck without warning and then melted back into the jungle leaving the convoy, “nothing but a tangle of disemboweled corpses and burned out machines,” the survivors often drank themselves into oblivion when they limped into their destination.[2]

As well as beer and choum, French troops were still issued with a wine ration, even in the field. When out on operations carrying around bottles of wine in large quantities was impractical so in their combat ration kits soldiers were issued with a dehydrated wine concentrate called ‘Vinogel’, sometimes nicknamed ‘Tiger blood’.

The idea was to mix the vinogel with two parts water to one part wine (many preferred one to one of course) but there were some who simply ate it in its dehydrated state.

In 1947 the French war minister, Paul Coste-Floret, had visited Indochina and became somewhat distressed at the idea of vinogel.

‘You see’, he lectured the French commander in chief, General Raoul Salan: ‘It’s not something you drink, it’s something you eat. I’m going to send you some decent wine.’

‘You might send a few battalions as well,’ Salan suggested. His own practical anxieties, juxtaposed against the often frivolous and muddled concerns of successive French politicians, would prove well founded.[3]

As so often with army rations, vinogel may not have been the best quality but in a choice between that and nothing at all most solders knew which they preferred, as an incident at the battle of Dien Bien Phu clearly illustrates.

Dien Bien Phu was designed by the French chiefs of staff as the decisive set piece battle to draw out the Viet Minh and destroy them.

Thousands of troops, principally paratroopers and legionnaires, would be parachuted and then landed into the Dien Bien Phu valley in northwestern Vietnam, athwart the Viet Minh’s supply lines into Laos, thereby daring the enemy to come out and fight to dislodge them.

The troops would dig in, fortify the valley and let the waves of Viet Minh attackers break themselves against barbed wire, pillboxes and concentrated artillery, while roving columns struck out to spread fire and destruction on the enemy’s bases and tributary supply lines.

The French defenders would be kept resupplied by air, two airstrips having been constructed for the purpose.

It was a tactic that was found to have worked at the much smaller battle of Nà San in late 1952 but the crucial flaw, of course, was that France did not have sufficient aircraft to repeat it on this much larger scale and their belief that the Viet Minh possessed no anti aircraft capability proved a fatal and terrible mistake.

Nonetheless, the logistics of the operation make for impressive reading. Between 20 November 1953 when the French began landing in the valley and 8 May 1954 when the battle ended, nearly 4,000 tons of supplies had been dropped to the garrison. Included in the supplies were 199,760 rations of bread, 12.5 tons of canned sausages, 875 tons of fresh fruit and vegetables, almost 60,000 gallons of wine and 8,480 gallons of vinogel.[4]

On Christmas Day 1953, with still no sign of the Viet Minh launching an attack, the garrison was able to enjoy a lengthy lunch which included, cold beef, fried potatoes, cheese, cakes, wine and Champagne. It made good copy for the accompanying war reporters back in Hanoi but it was an illusion soon to be too rudely shattered.

When the battle began on 13 March the French plan went immediately awry and the lack of adequate preparations became apparent. As their troops had dug in in a series of forts with names such as ‘Beatrice’, ‘Eliane’, ‘Isabelle’ and ‘Gabrielle’ (named after the commander’s mistresses was one theory), the Viet Minh had hauled artillery up into the surrounding hills – something the French had believed impossible. They completely overlooked the French positions and were too well camouflaged and entrenched for French artillery to neutralise. Béatrice was overrun on the first night, the initial enemy bombardment causing flimsy trenches and bunkers to collapse before Vietnamese infantry attacked in human waves, swamping the remaining defenders who called down supporting artillery on their own positions and then tried to break out. The French artillery commander, Colonel Charles Piroth, committed suicide out of shame. From then on there was no respite.

Before too long the airfield was untenable and planes could no longer land. Supplies of men, equipment and rations had to be parachuted in and while men could steer themselves to land among friends, boxes could not and many fell in and around positions occupied by the enemy.

This led to a faintly comic episode amid the otherwise gruelling and desperate backdrop of the battle.

On 30 April, as the historian Bernard Fall[5]relates, the legionnaires of the 13eme demi-brigade were faced with the prospect of celebrating Camerone with just one miserable bottle of wine per platoon. Then word came through that two crates of vinogel were among the para-drop that had fallen into no man’s land opposite them that day. A recovery party was put together (everyone volunteered one veteran remembered) led by a Major Coutant.

To ensure the safe retrieval of the crates, the legionnaires first had to head over to the enemy lines and destroy several bunkers, a task that was completed with plastic explosives and 10 enemy killed and many wounded for no loss of their own. The vinogel was recovered and day’s celebrations were saved.

The French commander, General Christian de Castries, radioed his superiors in Hanoi that evening detailing the raid’s success – though omitting the actual purposes for which it had been staged.

Despite the ever-shrinking perimeter, the drops, including occasional deliveries of fresh fruit and vegetables and even many luxury items, never let up. Other alcohol dropped in included: 135 litres of ‘aperitifs’, 72 bottles of Champagne, 72 bottles of ‘fine wine’, 148 bottles of Cognac and rum and 7,680 66cl bottles of beer as well as powdered milk, asparagus, mustard, biscuits, pencils, writing paper, razor blades, shaving soap, 12,000 packets of cigarettes and 949 bottles of eau-de-cologne.

Nonetheless, it was as the battle progressed that the bulk of vinogel was dropped, practicality belatedly taking precedence over frippery and pedantry – but too late. Too late.

Inexorably, despite heroic resistance, the Viet Minh tightened the noose around the French in that unhappy valley, which now resembled the shell-blasted wastes of Verdun or Stalingrad from previous wars. Although the Vietnamese suffered enormous losses in their attacks, they were too numerous and their position too strong.

By contrast there were not simply enough men (though no shortage of volunteers), supplies or the planes to fly them in on the side of the French. Dien Bien Phu as a concept had failed totally and it took French colonialism in Indochina with it.

On 7 May the shattered garrison surrendered. The very next day the Geneva Conference began and by August the war was over and Vietnam partitioned along the 17^th parallel.

The Legion life in Indochina was over and the units prepared to return to Algeria – straight into another, though altogether bloodier and more vicious, war of de-colonialisation that was to bring its world crashing down around it.

Next: War comes to the Legion’s doorstep and with it the pain of forced departure

 

Footnotes to the text:

[1] Literally ‘young girl’

[2] Porch, Douglas, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force, New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1991, p519

[3] Morgan, Ted, ‘Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu’, New York, Random House

[4] Shrader, Charles, ‘A War of Logistics: Parachutes and Porters in Indochina, 1945-1954’

[5] Fall, Bernard, ‘Hell in a Very Small Place’

As India was the jewel in the crown of Britain’s old empire so was Algeria to France. Its oldest overseas territory, the birthplace of the Foreign Legion and with a huge wine industry vital to France’s own. Yet as the de-colonialisation movement gathered pace in the post-Second World War world, the stage was set for a drama of shocking, bloody violence and worlds turned upside down.

France had granted autonomy to its other North African possessions, Tunisia and Morocco, in 1956 after sustained political pressure. Both had been protectorates rather than colonies but Algeria was considered, at least by the French, as much more integral to France.

Indeed, Algeria was thought of not just as a mere colony but as part of France itself – yet the rights of French men and women were not extended to Africans.

From a viticultural standpoint too Algeria was vitally important to metropolitan France and had been the country’s saving grace when Phylloxera and then powdery and downy mildew began to take hold in the 1870s.

Until that point, although there had been vineyards producing the rough local pinard for the French garrisons which became so emblematic of Foreign Legion life, viticulture was not widely practiced in the colony.

As France’s vineyards suffered however there came an explosion in plantings in Africa, its sandy soils largely impervious to the little louse – and when the pest did arrive in the early 20th century, the knowledge and expertise in countering it through grafting meant its impact was quickly nullified.

In 1872 the land under vine covered some 16,600 hectares. By 1881 this had almost doubled to 30,482ha and by 1890 it was up to 110,042ha and the growth continued into the 1930s and a peak of 400,000ha and a production of 18.9m hectolitres a year.[1]

Although a chunk of this land was always owned and managed by local Muslims, the vast majority of vineyards in Algeria were operated by the colons or ‘pieds noirs’, who as often as not were of Spanish, Maltese or Italian extraction as they were French.

Many of the French as it happens did not come from France’s own Mediterranean littoral, from Languedoc, Roussillon or the Rhône, places not too dissimilar to coastal Algeria, but from the rather colder north in Alsace.

The devastations of Phylloxera and disgust at German occupation as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 were the chief reasons for this emigration.

Needless to say, whether Alsatian, Italian or Spanish, the European colons included a large number who came from wine producing areas and backgrounds which helped them turn Algeria into such an important wine producing region itself so quickly.

One of the more fanciful suggestions as to how they got their nickname pieds noirs in fact is that their feet were supposedly deeply stained from endless trudging in dark-skinned grapes each harvest. Another explanation is that they tended to wear black shoes, whereas most Africans wore sandals or nothing. The truth, as ever, being lost to time and whimsy.

As a result of this European viticultural dominance, the vast majority of Algerian wine production was naturally centered around the more European Oranais region in the west of the country.

What wasn’t consumed in Algeria itself was sold off in bulk and contributed hugely to the Algerian economy. Wine’s share of the agricultural income was as high as 49% (by 1959-60), it was responsible for 25% of gross investment in Algeria in 1955 (in 1880 the Bank of Algeria’s charter had been renewed solely on the condition that it increased its loans for agricultural – especially vineyard – investment)[1] and provided a fifth of the employment in the agricultural sector.

Morocco and Tunisia had also become major wine producers during their time under French control though not nearly to the same extent as Algeria because, as protectorates, French rule was not direct but went through the local royalty.

By the 1930s France was importing more than 10m hl of Algerian wine, largely for blending the more robust Carignan and Cinsault produced there with the more insipid Aramon being mass produced in the Languedoc at the time and which provided the petit rouge (small red) which was the civilian equivalent of pinard and the engine oil of France’s agricultural and industrial labourers.

In 1938 these imports peaked at 17.1m hl and even on the eve of independence in 1962 imports were as high as 14m hl and worth 1.1bn francs.

As Keith Sutton notes: “It could be argued that Algeria’s vineyards formed an indispensable complement to French viticulture in that many ordinary French wines required the addition through mixing of a <vin médecin>. Without such blending anything up to 23 million hectolitres of French annual wine production would be downgraded and potentially unsaleable.”[2]

Yet despite this link to the metropole greater political recognition and integration failed to materialise, the French being happy to maintain the status quo in a power dynamic that was to its liking and with the pieds noirs rabidly opposed to any measures that would grant the local Muslims anything like political and social equivalence.

Tired of this hypocrisy and French intransigence, the liberation movement in Algeria, headed by the Front de liberation nationale (FLN), developed along more violent lines than occurred in neighbouring Morocco and Tunisia.

In 1954 Algiers, Oran and Constantine with their sizeable European populations were rocked by bombing campaigns. Europeans and Muslims alike were butchered, disemboweled, mutilated on their farms or in the street, while many other Algerians were threatened and coerced into helping the FLN.

In return the European colons lynched and murdered Muslims in reprisal attacks, often with the police turning a blind eye. As so often in such conflicts atrocity fuelled atrocity until neither side could claim any claim to innocence, and all innocence was just blood on the hands of those holding the knife.

The FLN were eventually rooted out of Algiers by General Massu and his paratroopers in 1956-57, as so famously portrayed in the classic film The Battle of Algiers, and the bulk of the action moved into Algeria’s highlands, especially in Kabylia.

The Legion was at the forefront of the fighting and while it and other French troops proved themselves tough and resourceful in finding and destroying FLN cells, brutal treatment of civilians and the widespread use of torture cast a shadow that lingers to this day – not that the FLN were above such methods either, far from it as incidents such as the massacre at the village of Melouza make clear.

Yet although the FLN was beaten militarily, crushed almost, the war and the means employed in waging it were tearing France apart politically. The crisis was so acute that in 1958 it even brought down the Fourth Republic when a putsch orchestrated by the Algiers deputies and the military opposed the formation of a new government that was in favour of a negotiated solution in Algeria.

With many believing civil war was a possibility, the nation turned to Charles de Gaulle to save it.

De Gaulle was ushered into power under a new constitution, the basis of the Fifth Republic, and with it powers as sole executive of the country and the declaration of a state of emergency for the first six months of his premiership.

‘Je vous ai compris!‘ he boomed to wild adulation from the colons. But if the generals and pieds noirs hoped that de Gaulle would ensure the continuation of an ‘algérie française’, they were to be deeply disappointed.

Despite initially drawing up plans to integrate Algeria and its Muslim population closer to France, continued opposition to the war at home and a reluctance to extend citizenship to all Algerians led de Gaulle to prepare the way for independence. Shocked and betrayed, with the military’s usual decrying of a military victory turned into defeat by meddling politicos, just three years later the generals began planning another putsch.

 

The Centurions

For the Legion itself, as much as France and Algeria, it was a desperately uncertain time.

Indochina was gone, so too Morocco and Tunisia, and now Algeria was almost certainly next. What was the Legion without Algeria? It was Algeria.

The old cavalry, the Chasseurs d’Afrique and Spahis had had their traditions farmed out, “for continuation” to other regiments. The French marine corps, known as ‘La Coloniale’ because of its use as the principal arm of French imperial expansion could revert to its proper title of infanterie de la marine. But what of the Legion?

Sidi-bel-Abbés and Saïda; the exploits that inspired Beau Geste; the bar room Cameróns; the clinking of absinthe glasses on zinc bar tops; the fortnightly cuites; the thousands of petty scams and wheezes, desertion attempts and doing ton truc that made up the cumulative experiences of generations of legionnaires – all worth not a damn to politicians.

Could the Legion survive? Not for the first time the spectre of disbandment raised its head over the corps.

And would the Legion want to survive anyway? How could it, of all units, become yet another of ‘la reguliere’, ‘la biffe’, rotting away in a garrison town in the Bouches-du-Rhône or Provence where nothing ever happened?

Only North Africa, writes the historian Donald Porch, provided the stage grand enough for the Legion ego. And yet, the very reasoning by which part of the Legion tried to save both itself and its North African ville mere was, in the end, very nearly its own destruction.

The great blemish on the Legion’s record was its role in the ‘General’s Putsch’ of 1961 when the seemingly indestructible 1er Regiment Etrangère Parachutiste (REP), destroyed and reconstituted twice during the Indochina War and part of the ‘praetorian guard’ of the French army, the 10^thParachute Division, became embroiled in a desperate coup to try and seize Algeria and ensure the continuation of an algérie française.

But if parts of the army and most of all the Legion, were passionate advocates of the continuation of French colonial rule in Algeria, and saw their calling as soldiers and the cause in which they were engaged as a secular vocation, a ‘national priesthood’, then they were, by this time, little more than the priests of a dead god.

The coup was a miserable failure and for its part in it the 1er REP – thrice destroyed and reformed in Indochinese battles – was disbanded for the fourth and final time by political rather than military action. The hesitation of other Legion regiments to not get involved was the Legion’s saving grace when hard left politicians petitioned de Gaulle for the entire unit’s abolition over the 1er REP’s indiscretion.

A number of hardcore legionnaires, went into hiding and helped found the Organisation d’Armée Sécrets (OAS), later made famous by Frederick Forsythe’s novel and the subsequent film The Day of the Jackal.

A particularly nasty terrorist group made up of ex-soldiers and colons, the OAS killed thousands in both Algeria and metropolitan France before it was broken up by French security services with four of its ringleaders executed in 1962-63 by military firing squads.

But the cause and the violence waged in its name was hopeless. In 1962 Algeria achieved its independence and the Legion bid farewell to its old stamping grounds forever when the last detachment departed in 1968.

The effect of independence on the wine industry in Algeria was dramatic and instant. As previously mentioned, right up until the moment of independence Algerian exports to France remained extraordinarily high.

The first notable effect of independence and with it the departure of nine-tenths of the European population and hundreds of thousands of troops was an utter collapse of the domestic wine market from 1.4m hl to less than 500,000 hl.

The Evian Accords signed in 1962 had agreed in theory that France would continue to take some 8m hl of Algerian wine a year but on a gradually declining basis (of 500,000 hl less per year), which would allow the country to shift its export focus elsewhere.

Viticulture was one of the agricultural legacies of French colonialism and it was still of major importance to the economy of Algeria and one of the main employers.

In practice, however, France completely failed to live up to its side of the bargain. In 1963 imports had already slumped to 6.8m hl, under half what they’d been the previous year. From 1964-66 they fell back in line with the accords but in 1967 they plummeted again to just 3.1m hl and the worth of Algerian exports which had stood at 1.1bn francs in 1962 was down to 234m francs in 1968.

Although West Germany and other European countries began taking as much as five times more wine from Algeria, this still amounted to under 1m hl of wine and was nowhere near enough to stop the enormous build-up of unsold wine in Algeria itself.

By the end of the accord agreement in 1968 France had taken 8.6m hl less than had been agreed. The reasons for this were varied. To begin with, starting in 1962, overproduction in France itself and the first influx of embittered pieds noirsconspired to reduce the amount of wine France imported from its colony.

France was also changing its attitudes to its own winemaking practices as well. In 1964 France reformed its ‘statut viticole français’ in order to increase the area under vine to produce wines of the type that had previously been imported from Algeria.

In 1967 the country passed another law which substantially reduced the amount of Algerian wine permitted for use in blending. Furthermore, started in the 1930s, by the 1960s the AOC system was increasingly widely adopted and with it ever stricter guidelines – chief among them the banning of blending wines from outside the region.

Although many of these measures arguably paved the way for the quality controls seen in France today and necessary as they may have been to ween the French industry off its reliance on cheap Algerian imports, they also tightened the noose on Algeria’s own wine industry. And given the nature of the conflict and the timing of many of these laws, one would be hard pressed to claim they were not a little retributive in spirit.

In 1968 the Soviet Union, quick to pounce on many decolonialised countries at this time, signed an agreement to purchase 1m hl of wine and then 5m hl a year from 1969-1975. This certainly drained much of the wine lake but at prices that made Algerian vineyards essentially unprofitable.

Whereas France, for all its inconsistencies and bad-tempered behaviour, had been buying wine at 72 francs per hectolitre and West Germany at 50, the USSR bullied the Algerians down to 32.5 francs/hl.

Although new deals were struck with the EEC (as it was then) the amounts taken were meagre. Algeria’s wine industry was in terminal decline.

From 355,000ha under vine in 1962, by 1984 this had fallen to 143,540ha and production from 12m hl to 1.3m hl, with yields down to 9.7hl/ha (from highs of 30-40hl/ha)

As a predominantly Muslim country, the new government had always been uncomfortable at its agricultural industry’s reliance on viticulture, and there was a move to repurpose as much vineyard land as possible with wheat, fruit and vegetables and date palms, instead. Not all vineyards proved suitable for replanting however and many thousands of hectares of vines, those not repurposed locally for rudimentary table grapes or raisins, were no doubt abandoned. Not profitable to run, not worth grubbing up.

Tourism, which might have provided an outlet for local wine, was a long way off being developed and alongside the switch in focus agriculturally, the final nail in Algerian wine’s coffin was the discovery and exploitation of oil.

There are still a few vineyards in Algeria today, a reminder of both the deep-rooted French legacy and older Roman one but in size and scale it is but a ghost of its former self but, in that respect, it is not the only phantom in Algeria.

 

New beginnings

Having quit its African cradle, the Legion did indeed end up in southern France. The Legion’s new base, where it remains to this day, was Provence and the town of Aubagne near Marseille.

The loss of the old ville mere may have stung but the location of the new headquarters brought it close to a unique institution in the French military – the Legion’s own vineyard.

In 1953, having suffered thousands of casualties in Indochina, the Legion had invested in an estate in Puyloubier near Aix-en-Provence to serve as a care home for badly wounded ex-legionnaires with no one else to look after them and who might otherwise drift into destitution and alcoholism.

The estate is known as l’Institution des Invalides de la Légion Étrangère and today is home to perhaps 100 ex-legionnaires, some in the 80s and 90s and even one centenarian at the moment.

For all the blood-curdling mottos such as ‘March or Die!’ often associated with it, the Legion’s more modern ethos is once you are a legionnaire, “tu n’abandonnes jamai les tiens, ni au combat, ni dans la vie (‘you never abandon your own, neither in combat or in life”).

With the large châteaux came a sizeable chunk of land, over 200 hectares in total, and, being the south of France, a vineyard too. The winery is today known as Domaine de Capitaine Danjou – he of Mexico, Camerone and wooden-hand fame.

The initial production was fairly rough stuff by all accounts, proper pinard, dark and alcoholic, upon which generations of legionnaires had thrived. In the 1980s, realising their own winemaking skills were not good enough, the Legion sent its grapes for vinifying and bottling at the local co-operative.

In 2006, however, two Bordeaux winemakers who are also officers in the French reserves[3] (and one of whom was a friend of the Legion’s then commanding officer) were invited to start consulting at the estate. They now spend 30 days a year working at the estate as part of their service requirements and quality has improved noticeably.

Gradually expanded over the years, today the Legion has 40 hectares of vines and produces around 250,000 bottles a year, making it one of the largest producers in the AOC of Côtes de Provence Sainte-Victoire.

The wine produced there, red, white and rosé, is first and foremost for the Legion messes around the world. Any surplus – the base range appropriately named ‘Esprit du Corps’ and the top cuvée, ‘General’s Réserve’ – is sold commercially to support the upkeep of the institution – bookbinding and pottery are the other key activities for the residents and sources of income. A percentage of drinks sales in Legion messes are also then recycled back to fund the domaine.

The red is a classic southern French blend of Syrah, Grenache and Mourvedre, the white is made from Rolle (Vermentino) and the rosé uses Cinsault alongside some Grenache and Rolle.

The vineyards themselves are looked after by the pensionnaire at the care home and young legionnaires are sent to help out over the course of the season especially at harvest time.

To men inured to regimented life and working outdoors in all conditions, pruning and keeping the vines in neat, serried ranks is no doubt a therapeutic pastime, a peaceful one too yet also one with its own sense of camaraderie and shared endeavour akin to military life.

There is something particularly poetic in the fact that not only have such keen wine guzzlers become winemakers but also that it is the French army’s foreign corps that has adopted that most French of enterprises – viticulture.

Just as the Legion has long boasted that it is a home for those seeking a new life or redemption so it too has been shaped and formed by each successive influx of new recruits, each campaign and its accumulated traditions.

And one tradition that lasts to this day is the Legion toast to fallen comrades, harking back to those African glory days, “a nos amis sous les sables”, ‘to our friends beneath the sands’.

And perhaps it is this simple sentiment that gives lie to that hoary old joke that legionnaires drink to forget, when in fact they are as likely to drink to remember.

 

 

 

 

 

Footnotes to the text:

[1] Meloni, Giulia and Swinnen, Johan, ‘The Rise and Fall of the World’s Largest Wine Exporter’, American Association of Wine Economics, Working Paper No. 134, 2013, p7

[2] Sutton, Keith, ‘Algeria’s Vineyards. A problem of decolonialisation’, Méditeranée, 1988, p56

[3] Sutton, Keith, op cit., p58

[4] He declined to be named explicitly for this piece saying his involvement was not as important as the work done at the domaine and what it stands for, but it is widely publicised elsewhere that it is Philip Baly of Château Coutet in Sauternes. The other winemaker is Bertrand Léon of Les Trois Croix in Fronsac, who also works as technical director at Château d’Esclans in Provence.