The Two Marshals: Bazaine & Pétain

By Philip Guedalla

A brilliant study of France and French military power through four generations. The careers of the two Marshalls span the years from Napoleon’s downfall to Verdun and Vichy France.

“This biography of two soldiers of France is, in effect, a history of the French Army for a hundred years, as well as portraiture of marked differences and striking contrasts. There are strong touches of irony and emphasis in Bazaine’s life and army career, his strength, and innocence in face of public blame following the surrender at Metz in 1870 — and Pétain’s, whose weakness and mediocrity contrast baldly with his predecessor. “The first Marshal was made a scapegoat by his defeated country, and when the second Marshal came to power, the scapegoat was France”. The elaborate sketching of background material, the bird’s eye views of each successive era in French history provide a three-dimensional setting for each man. Bazaine’s is a more thorough characterization, for Petain’s seems more often guesswork and speculation through lack of early factual material. However there is justice and judgement in this study of “the psychology of defeat” and Guedalla’s lively style and personal approach to his subjects is good reading.”-Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781786254894

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Text originally published in 1943 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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THE TWO MARSHALS

BAZAINE — PÉTAIN

By

PHILIP GUEDALLA

Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé. VERLAINE. Colloque sentimental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS 6

INTRODUCTION 22

CHAPTER I — FOREIGN LEGION 23

I 23

2 25

3 26

4 27

5 31

6 42

7 44

CHAPTER II — SECOND EMPIRE 51

1 51

2 53

3 57

4 59

5 61

6 64

CHAPTER III — MEXICO 66

1 66

2 68

3 73

4 79

5 84

CHAPTER IV — METZ 91

1 91

2 95

3 98

4 100

5 108

6 112

7 117

8 120

9 125

CHAPTER V — COURT MARTIAL 136

1 136

2 139

3 143

4 147

CHAPTER VI — DIMINUENDO 151

1 151

CHAPTER VII — VIDI 156

CHAPTER VIII — VICI 166

1 166

2 169

3 172

4 177

5 182

6 184

7 187

CHAPTER IX — VICHY 190

1 190

2 194

3 196

4 199

5 201

6 207

7 209

8 212

AUTHORITIES 213

CHAPTER I 213

CHAPTER II 214

CHAPTER III 215

CHAPTER IV 216

CHAPTER V 218

CHAPTER VI 218

CHAPTER VII 219

CHAPTER VIII 219

CHAPTER IX 221

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 223

DEDICATION

À toutes les gloires de la France

"L’ÉTERNEL.

"Dis à cette pauvre France que je ne lui ai pas encore retiré son mandat, qui est d’étonner le monde par ses volte-face et ses relèvements; j’ai mis en elle le principe de résurrections sans fin. Ses défaillances pourraient être suivies d’étranges explosions d’énergie, et si alors un homme se rencontrait...." — RENAN. Le Jour de L’An 1886

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

Bazaine and Pétain

Bazaine in Mexico

Bazaine in Disgrace

Bazaine’s Prison

Pétain in Good Company

Pétain in Bad Company

Algeria and Spain

INTRODUCTION

THIS book is more than the story of two French soldiers, although that story is worth telling by reason of the strange inversion of their two careers. For one of them surrendered Metz in 1870 and was sentenced to death, while the other surrendered France in 1940 and was sentenced to become its ruler. The first Marshal was made a scapegoat by a defeated country; and when the second Marshal came to power, the scapegoat was France.

But as the first of them was born a year before the Grande Armée marched to Moscow, when Napoleon was at the Zenith, their two careers follow the whole curve of French military power from the height of the First Empire to the depth of Vichy; and the two life-stories unite to form one unbroken picture of the French army for a hundred years.

Some traces of the subject can be found in "The Second Empire, which I have intended for many years to follow with a study of Bazaine. The task is far from simple, since his countrymen have been at pains to efface all traces of his career apart from his court-martial. But a good deal is revealed by patient excavation in unlikely quarters, and the nine volumes of La Intervention Francesa en Mexico segun el Archivo del Mariscal Bazaine" (Mexico City, 1907-10) are invaluable for that phase of his career. I have been fortunate enough to acquire a few of his unpublished letters as well as to visit the chief scenes of his activities in Algeria and Mexico.

Marshal Pétain is almost equally elusive, since the literature stimulated by the Vichy Government inevitably errs on the appreciative side. Objectivity is hardly to be looked for in M. Henry Bordeaux’s "Images du Maréchal Pétain (Paris, 1941), and still less in M. Vaucher’s hagiography, Quand le Maréchal Pétain prend son bâton de pèlerin; and General Laure’s massive Pétain" (Paris, 1941) is not unduly critical. But I have endeavoured to correct this unhealthy tendency by a full study of the relevant material relating to his career in the last war and by such personal enquiries as I have been able to make of individuals familiar with his activities before and after 1918.

A number of small points relating to both Marshals, which could easily have been cleared up by a short trip across the Channel, still remain obscure. But any minor errors into which I may have been led by a temporary inability to make it will, I hope, be corrected at an early date.

P. G.

CHAPTER I — FOREIGN LEGION

Beau chevalier qui partez pour la guerre,

Qu’allez-vous faire

Si loin d’ici?

CHANSON DE BARBERINE.

I

IT was the thirteenth of the month. The year had opened on a world almost at peace. For France was an Empire, and in 1811 continental Europe lay securely in the strong grasp of Napoleon. The war was nearly over now. The Emperor’s writ ran from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Lübeck was a French city, Rome the capital of a French Department; and French gunners lounged in Marmont’s forts above Ragusa. Beyond Napoleon’s advancing frontiers, which had just effaced Dutch independence by the deposition of his brother Louis, King of Holland, and the annexation of his kingdom, his brother Jerome was King of Westphalia, his sister Caroline Queen of Naples, and his brother Joseph King of Spain. True, the British, with their customary inability to see when they had lost a war, still maintained themselves precariously in front of Lisbon; and, to tell the truth, Marshal Masséna seemed to have some difficulty in penetrating their position in the Lines of Torres Vedras. But their backs were to the sea; their expeditions practically always ended in evacuations; and when once they had been disposed of, the continent would be at peace. This blessing, when it arrived, would be a French peace. For it was tolerably plain in 1811 that France had conquered Europe. Prussia was a cowed subordinate; Austria, with the, memory of Wagram less than two years old, was the dutiful and anxious parent of a young Empress of the French; Russia scarcely stirred behind the northern mists; and the French Empire was supreme in a respectful world.

With the war nearly over and the Emperor in Paris, France was in her pride. All Europe lay in the shadow of the French army, of the incomparable instrument that had struck down two empires at Austerlitz and broken a kingdom in six hours at Jena. Its guns had rumbled into every European capital this side of Moscow under the resentful eyes of Germans, Dutchmen, Spaniards, and Portuguese; and its officers had jingled spurs across the floor of every palace between Potsdam and Madrid. The shakoes of the Line and the tall bearskins of the Guard had marched to victory across the continent behind its undefeated eagles. An unending cavalcade of big Cuirassiers sat their mounts stiffly beneath great helmets with long horsehair tails or elbowed elegant Hussars in gay sling-jackets furred and braided to distraction. Cuirasses gleamed, plumes nodded, pennons fluttered over Lancer schapskas, as the masters of the continent dangled their sabretaches or tilted an impressive variety of military headgear; and a subject world was suitably impressed.

The master of them all, a plainer figure in the green and white of the Chasseurs of his own Guard, was at the Tuileries; and when Napoleon was there, Paris was the capital of Europe. A continent’s affairs passed through his office, hung for an instant sharply reflected in the bright steel mirror of his mind, and were dismissed with a few words of curt dictation or the scrawl that, increasingly illegible, did duty for an Imperial signature. As 1811 opened, he was concerned impartially with the reorganisation of the Grande Armée in fifteen divisions, and the problem of diverting American sailors from confiscated ships in Baltic ports to man French vessels, and an enterprising private secretary who had been making money out of the citizens of Hamburg, and coast defences along the Adriatic, demolitions near the Louvre, a little trouble with the Pope, and gunnery experiments at Seville. January went out upon an interesting notion of despatching a French frigate to visit his latest colony of Java; and he was soon instructing the police to keep an eye on a new gaming-house in the Rue Richelieu and to stop its patrons wearing masks to gamble in, and ordering a coastal raid on Lissa, and buying muskets from the Austrians to arm the Poles in case he had to go to war with Russia, and instructing literary men (through the Ministry of Police) to write the history of France without prior payment.

February was a busy month, with an expedition concentrating at Toulon for Sicily, and Soult groping at the gates of Badajoz, and Masséna starving in a brown wilderness of empty villages in front of Lisbon. It was the thirteenth of the month, when Lord Wellington wrote acidly from his headquarters to Beresford about a general who seemed to find it disagreeable to be out in bad weather. Perfectly aware that he commanded the last army of England and that, if it was driven off the continent, the war would follow it to British soil and that he commanded it because (as he wrote) he was Lord Wellington, he rarely spared himself and calculated coolly that his continuance in the Peninsula must eventually transform Buonaparte’s whole system and dispel his dream of Empire. That day the Emperor, sublimely unaware, was writing to the King of Spain about new powder-magazines in the park at Madrid and directing the Viceroy of Italy to occupy stray islands in the Adriatic, to say nothing of ordering troop movements in Provence and Brittany, a fresh divisional commander somewhere in the Pyrenees, the discharge of an insolvent tax-collector at Rome, and a new army corps in Central Europe. The last was highly secret, with orders for its ammunition-stores to be built up and a hint of bridging-train in readiness at Danzig. For his mind was ranging eastward now towards the Russian border; and the Corps of Observation of the Elbe shifted its axis to become the Army of Germany, with fifty thousand foot tramping through German towns behind the tricolour and French drums rousing German echoes.

That winter morning in 1811 (it was a Wednesday), French trumpets sounded for the dawn across a sleepy continent. The Tuileries began to stir; curtains were drawn, candles lit, and floors polished, as the palace came to life. The Emperor would be dictating soon. Another day had dawned for Paris, and beyond the palace windows the busy murmur of the city rose again. But as the chilly dawn came through the trees beyond St. Cloud, another palace hardly stirred. The winter light crept silently across its floors, where dust gathered in the long galleries of Versailles. Dim mirrors gave back tarnished gilding; empty terraces watched idle gods recline by empty fountains; and a still perspective drove between the silent alleys of the park towards the colonnade of Trianon that February day in 1811. In the little town beyond the palace and the park a child was born by the name of François-Achille Bazaine. It was the thirteenth of the month.

2

His father, whom the birth certificate described incorrectly as chief engineer of the Department of Seine-et-Oise, had left some time before for Russia. A man of some attainments, Dominique Bazaine was a national prizewinner in mathematics. But a French career failed to attract him, although he had a wife and family in France; and he preferred to serve the Czar. The emigrant applied his engineering knowledge to some purpose, achieved distinction in the public service on the side of architecture and education, and was sometimes credited with designing the defences of Sebastopol, with which Achille was to have some acquaintance. But Dominique saw no more of his family, which he elected to leave in France, together with a slight doubt as to how far his younger son was strictly entitled to bear his father’s surname.

The Bazaines came from Lorraine. Indeed, their village lay, by a strange fatality, between the spires of Metz and the bare upland of Gravelotte; and since opportunities at Scy were limited, the latest member of the family was quite correct in subsequent allusions to his humble origin. For in later years he wrote bitterly to his sister (and few men indulge in fiction on the subject of their family when writing to a sister): "...mon origine toute plébéienne et c’est sans doute parce que je sors du rang du People et du Soldat que les jaloux s’acharnent après moi depuis surtout mon élévation à la dignité de Maréchal." His mother, Marie-Madeleine Vasseur, maintained the mathematical traditions of the family, since her sister’s husband’s achievements in this forbidding field positively raised him to the Institute. But there was a higher symmetry about this birth within a mile of the Grand Trianon into a family that came from Metz. For the child lived to see a siege of Metz and a court-martial at Trianon.

But in 1811 Metz was far behind the frontiers of the Empire, and Trianon had no more cares than whether the Emperor and his young Empress would be coming back to stay that summer. For they had spent three weeks there soon after their wedding in the year before. (Napoleon made one of Pompadour’s rooms into his library and sat beneath its painted allegories to devise one more solution of the eternal problem of American neutrality.) The winter days slipped by; and February, 1811, passed into March over the small head of Achille Bazaine in his mother’s house at Versailles. When he was five weeks old, the Paris guns were booming for another infant; and a happy father at the Tuileries wrote proudly to Vienna that the French Empire had an heir. Besides the Emperor of Austria, who was the baby’s grandfather, two kings, a queen, a grand-duchess, and a princess were favoured with the same intelligence under his hand; and when a lonely woman who was once his wife wrote wistfully congratulating him, Napoleon replied to Josephine without affectation that the child had his father’s eyes, mouth, and chest and would, it might be hoped, fulfil his destiny. The small Bazaine was just two months old when the Emperor decreed unlimited festivities in honour of the Imperial christening—a state ceremony at Notre Dame, a banquet at the Hôtel de Ville, fireworks, loyal deputations, and the Te Deum sung in every corner of the Empire. Then his round resumed; and orders rained once more upon alarmed subordinates about Dutch luggers and new forts and church discipline and a Prefect who had really gone too far in vaccinating nervous citizens, the rising price of salt in Alsace, troop movements in all directions, the theft of six dozen cannon-balls from Bergen-op-Zoom, deficiencies of army clothing (there were only ninety-eight pairs of breeches in one store), and arrangements for a raid by 30,000 men on Ireland in the autumn.

The infant at Versailles had splendid neighbours after midsummer, when the Court came to Trianon. The Emperor was thinking of rebuilding part of the Château, if he could only do as well as Louis XIV. The fountains played; they risked themselves in boats upon the ornamental water; and the King of Rome took airings, suitably escorted, in the grounds. Versailles was growing modish once again. One night there was a play in the small silken theatre where Marie Antoinette had acted to her little world; and afterwards they walked about the garden, which was all illuminated under the summer sky.

In 1811 the Empire rode on the crest. For a brief interval it seemed to hang motionless above the depths. But the tide drew it on. For the war failed to end that year. The British still fought on in Portugal and forced the gates of Spain; the thunder of the guns rolled eastward, as the Russians swept into the game once more, drew off, fought at the gates of Moscow, and then came on again under the black winter skies of 1812. The war, the never-ending war that had been sending young Frenchmen out to die for twenty years in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Poland, and Russia, was nearer now. It crept towards them across Germany; it passed the Rhine; it gathered on the road to Paris, where Marmont showed them how a Marshal could betray. Then it fell silent, until the drums of 1815 came beating up the road from Elba, and the Emperor sent his last army roaring up a trampled slope in Belgium towards the waiting redcoats. After that the war was over; and before the small Bazaine had his fifth birthday, France returned to count her dead.

3

His mother vanished early from the story. But a kindly Baron Roger, who professed a vague paternal interest, saw to his schooling. Not that Achille’s scholastic progress was particularly calculated to gratify a guardian, since after passing through the Pension Barbet-Massin (where he had a dark-eyed schoolfellow named Bourbaki) he failed to follow his elder brother into the Ecole Polytechnique. This fatal entrance examination barred the front-door to a professional career; and the failure rankled all his life. Forty years later, in the stormy evening of his long career, he could still write resentfully of "les officiers sortis des ecoles spéciales." But the back-door still remained. Nineteen and penniless, he tried his luck as a grocer’s boy. Yet though it was the golden age of tradesmen, when César Birotteau rose like a rocket, and young Popinot married his master’s daughter and purveyed a splendid range of hair-restorers to a nation which had just enthroned the very image of M. Joseph Prud’homme in the person of King Louis Philippe, grocery made little of Bazaine. So, with the Ecole Polytechnique closed to him by the examiners and commerce failing to attract, he took the broad path of adventure and one spring day in 1831 enlisted as a private soldier.

The unheroic and exhausted years that followed Waterloo were over now, and French gallantry had found a new theatre. There could be no more rides across the continent behind a small, grey-coated figure, no more marched into conquered capitals with clanging bands and shining eagles. All that was buried in a lonely grave at St. Helena beneath the island willows. But if an armed and watchful world denied them European adventures, there were other scenes and bluer skies. Beyond the southern shores of France the brown bulk of Africa climbed slowly into view; and the July Monarchy surveyed with curiosity the last conquest of the Restoration. France had a foothold, where the white city of Algiers-lifted from the sea and Bourmont’s men had scrambled ashore with their muskets held high out of the water and a distressing tendency to sing rude songs about their general, because he had deserted to the enemy three days before Waterloo.

An epoch of stray fighting followed, opening with impetuous advances and frequently concluding with uncomfortable rear-guard actions. For Africa showed little sign of a desire for liberation under the tricolour; and it was clear that if King Louis Philippe wished to succeed the Dey of Algiers, his troops would have to fight for the succession.

That meant that there was something better for French soldiers to look forward to than uneventful days in provincial garrisons; and when Achille Bazaine enlisted, his regiment was on active service overseas. But it was back in France before the year was out, and the recruit began to learn his business on the barrack square. A private in the 37th of the Line, he shouldered a musket, wore the long blue greatcoat and tall shako on which the Citizen King had just replaced the eagle of the Empire with a more blameless fowl, and marched in the red-trousered ranks. In three months he was a corporal; a year later, in 1832, he rose to be a sergeant; and as young Bazaine progressed sedately through the non-commissioned ranks, bells were tolling in Vienna for the pallid youth, whose early promenades had come so close to him under the trees at Versailles. But if the army seemed less difficult than the Ecole Polytechnique, this decorous ascent was not enough. For his regiment was still stationed in France. There was another unit, though, to which the tedium of home service was denied by law. An enterprising youth without parents found it more attractive; and at twenty-one the young sergeant transferred to the Foreign Legion.

4

Romance has many children; but of all—Crusaders, highwaymen, explorers, airmen, duellists—perhaps she loves the Foreign Legion best. A regiment of waifs, a vow of silence on the past and active service in the future are strangely attractive. No questions asked, no quarter given enhance the charm; and it is hardly to be wondered at that novelists, screen-writers, and even poets invariably succumb.

Our fathers they left us their blessing—

They taught us, and groomed us, and crammed;

But we’ve shaken the Clubs and the Messes

To go and find out and be damned

(Dear boys!)

To go out and get shot and be damned.

Half exile and half pugilist, the legionnaire appeals alike by his weakness and his strength. His visible deficiencies—no home, no family, and (best of all) no name—are fascinating; and when he compensates for any lack of civic virtue by an excess of martial qualities, he is irresistible. The background of a doubtful past, the foreground of the desert rarely fail; and no audience can be expected to spoil its pleasure with the untimely thought that these interesting ne’er-do-wells must be incorporated in a cadre of respectable professionals or that it was more than a generation before they ever saw a desert.

The Foreign Legion, when Bazaine joined it in 1832, fell a trifle short of the high standards of its later romance. For one thing, the desert was still a long way off, since French expeditions rarely penetrated far into Africa beyond the coast. Besides, it had not yet occurred to anyone that the Legion was particularly romantic, as it had only just been raised by the most unromantic monarch in French history. When King Louis Philippe deftly substituted himself for the less progressive Bourbons of the elder branch in the swift transformation-scene of the July Revolution, he was confronted with the slight embarrassment of a Swiss Guard. This had been natural enough for the ageing brothers of King Louis XVI, who were his predecessors on the throne of France; but it would never do for their enlightened cousin. Such emblems of the past were out of place in the bourgeois paradise over which he now presided; and the new King of the French promptly disbanded his Swiss regiments. But there was something to be said for retaining these extremely useful fighting men in some less suggestive form. Besides, the latest revolution had attracted quite a number of hopeful foreigners to Paris, whose enthusiasm for the sound of breaking glass was not shared in official circles and could be more usefully employed elsewhere. So hurried legislation conveniently authorised the enlistment of a Foreign Legion for service outside France. That could only mean Algeria; and the small army of occupation was presently supplemented by a new unit consisting of the martial Swiss, together with a fair number of Poles, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians, to whom the French service was more congenial than their own unhappy politics.

This military babel, in the red trousers and blue greatcoat of France, was organised with perfect logic, but poor prospects of regimental discipline, according to its varied races. Each battalion spoke its own language, retained its national prejudices, and looked down accordingly on the remainder of the Legion. Unfriendly to esprit de corps, this system was scarcely improved by the inevitable circumstance that desertion from a foreign army had often been the due preliminary of enlistment in the Legion. That formed a poor initiation in obedience; and it was small wonder that commanders viewed these martial Ishmaels with some misgiving, although they were embodied in a strong, unbending cadre of French officers and sergeants, and their softer side appeared in an intermittent tendency to cultivate the land.

Their ranks received the addition of a broad young sergeant named Bazaine in 1832, although he saw no active service until the next year. His long musket and big red epaulettes cast a sharper shadow now in the dusty glare of Africa; and he had exchanged the heavy shako of home service, redolent of the Empire and strongly conducive to apoplexy in hot climates, for the tall red kepi of the Legion. His colonel was a Napoleonic veteran named Bernelle with an explosive temper, which had produced a marked improvement in the Legion’s discipline, and a wife who was a feature of its life. Once, it was said, a lady-in-waiting or (as some preferred to think) a humbler member of the household, the colonel’s lady exercised a strong ascendancy over both her husband and the formidable unit of which he was in command. One unhappy légionnaire, detailed for duty in her garden at Algiers, received fifteen days’ imprisonment for the misdemeanour of arriving while she was reposing on a garden-seat in light attire; another incurred penalties for looking irreverently in the direction of her balcony. For a lady could not be too careful with the Foreign Legion, although her predilections were believed in some quarters to account for the high proportion of good-looking officers upon her husband’s staff. But though he was a sergeant-major now, such heights were far beyond Bazaine.

The Legion’s avocations in 1833 were arduous and varied. The Spanish companies were at Oran, the Belgians in insanitary quarters up the coast at Bona; but the bulk of the regiment was stationed round Algiers, where they alternated between turns of duty in unhealthy outposts and their billets in some native houses on the sunny heights of Mustapha. One hot May morning the King’s birthday was duly celebrated by a service in the open air, a brief allocution, and loyal cries of "Vive le Roi!" after which the Legion resumed its common round in the ring of fortified posts enclosing the small hinterland of Algiers. A fortnight later they were busy harvesting under armed protection. For agriculture out of sight of Algiers was palpably unsafe without a covering force of Zouaves, Chasseurs d’Afrique, and guns. But that year it passed off without accidents; a large native audience assembled to enjoy the unusual spectacle of men at work and hung about their camp to taste the novelties of European diet; and vast quantities of forage for the cavalry were safely carted to the coast and shipped to army stores. The tribes were restless; and a visiting commission, which risked itself as far afield as Blida, twenty-five miles inland, was slightly damped by the murder of a friendly Kaid and an encounter with three decapitated Europeans on its homeward journey. Elsewhere life for the Legion was no less crowded with pleasing incident. The dusty outskirts of Oran, the rocky coast, and lonely blockhouses saw them at work; and in November the young sergeant-major received another grade. For Bazaine was a sous-lieutenant. Now he had outflanked the Ecole Polytechnique as, his musket laid aside, Achille became an officer at twenty-two. True, he had risen from the ranks; but that need not prevent him rising further, since there were always opportunities, and the Legion was perpetually on active service.

The next year opened for the Legion with a sweep in the Mitidja, in the course of which they gratified the friendly natives with the transfer of a good deal of their less obliging neighbours’ property. A successful razzia, in which the charms of cattle-lifting were combined with military operations, was apt to end in a wholesale redistribution of flocks and herds, tents, carpets, and other portable possessions; and the Legion were becoming skilled practitioners in this agreeable form of warfare. But more serious preoccupations were accumulating round Oran. The situation in that area was dictated by a handsome and resourceful Arab named Abd-el-Kader. Son of an influential marabout, whose spiritual authority invested operations with the sanctity of a holy war, he exercised a growing influence in the western territories on the confines of Morocco. From his capital at Mascara he controlled Tlemcen and threatened the French settlements along the coast; and an arrangement with the local French commander at Oran seemed to ensure that he would not be interrupted in the consolidation of a power that would soon be strong enough to drive them out. After a few skirmishes of limited success the French garrison was mainly passive. The Foreign Legion at Oran had been affected by political developments in Spain, where the prospect of a civil war at home was more stimulating to Spanish légionnaires than an interminable vista of discomfort under the French flag. A wise administration having no wish to retain their services against their will, the Spaniards were shipped home to fight their fellow-subjects and replaced by Poles. But the newcomers found Oran un-restful, since a local mutiny in another unit was followed by a bad outbreak of cholera; and in 1834 it seemed extremely doubtful how long Abd-el-Kader would let them alone. For his ambitions were extending rapidly, and the ministers of King Louis Philippe appeared to have some difficulty in making up their minds how far they were prepared to go in order to retain the conquests of King Charles X.

Their doubts were hardly likely to be resolved by the new Governor-General, since Count d’Erlon, who had been indecisive in his prime, was markedly opposed at seventy to precipitate solutions. Owing his new position to his country’s chronic weakness for distinguished soldiers of advanced years, he found its problems no less formidable than those which had confronted him one fatal Friday in 1815, when his command had oscillated all day long between the battlefields of Quatre Bras and Ligny, arrived in time for neither, and thus ensured inadequate results at both. The situation in Algeria was far beyond this veteran. Faced with the growing power of Abd-el-Kader, he simultaneously challenged and conciliated the Emir, who received alternate gifts of French munitions and advice. But it was too late for half-measures, since a fresh victory over a native competitor confirmed Abd-el-Kader’s control of the interior in 1835, regaling his delighted followers at Mascara with large quantities of loot and nine camel-loads of human heads. This thundercloud hung over the coast settlements; and when he proposed to victimise two friendly tribes outside Oran, the French commander decided on firm action and gave sous-lieutenant Bazaine his first opportunity of taking part in an important operation.

It was just after midsummer, when he marched out of Oran with the Poles and Italians of the Foreign Legion. The little column was two thousand strong, with four squadrons of Chasseurs d’Afrique, a few guns, and some more French infantry. It was a fairly hazardous proceeding, since the march of science had not yet given Europeans that marked superiority of armament which was to render savage warfare in the later Nineteenth Century one-sided and unchivalrous. But in 1835 an Arab with a flintlock was not unfairly matched against a Frenchman armed with a Napoleonic musket. Besides, injudicious presents of French arms and ammunition to Abd-el-Kader had done their best to remedy any inequality; numbers were overwhelmingly on his side; and a deserter from the Foreign Legion obligingly imparted European discipline to his infantry. So there was a strong element of risk, as Trézel’s column turned its back on the blue sea beyond Oran and wound its way into the hills.

Abd-el-Kader was waiting for them with six thousand horse and thirteen hundred foot; and this opposition was distinctly formidable for four squadrons and four battalions, encumbered with far too many heavy vehicles. But the first encounter passed off moderately well. The column was attacked in a defile; the Poles were roughly handled; an excited trumpeter sounded the retreat; but the column rallied, and the Italians of the Legion did good service. The heavy transport was a serious embarrassment; but they brought off their wounded and reached the safety of the plain. The night and the next day were quiet. But Abd-el-Kader was watching from the hills; and when the French turned back towards the coast to evacuate their wounded and renew supplies