The French Foreign Legion by Douglas Boyd

Author:Douglas Boyd
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18: War on the belly of Dan

Dahomey 1892 – 1894

The Legion’s elevation to the status of a brigade in December 1884 made little difference to the units in Vietnam. In Algeria, 1st Regiment, abbreviated to 1 RE – the letters standing for régiment étranger – was based at Sidi-bel-Abbès with 2 RE in Saïda, 90km to the southeast. In July 1892 each of the regiments was ordered to furnish 400 men for a régiment de marche to be sent to Dahomey, now Benin in West Africa.[191]

There were both pros and cons to this system of temporary units. Its advocates argued that they permitted the best men to be taken for a specific mission without bringing along the dross. Its opponents argued that the effect on morale was bad because it divided legionnaires into two classes – those who always got the plum jobs and those who became despondent lead-swingers. Better, they said, to take a company that had trained together, get the slackers up to scratch and use volunteers to replace those physically unfit for the mission.

Invalided back from Vietnam with blackwater fever, but now cured, Sgt Frederic Martyn could not wait to get abroad again. Dining in town to escape the monotony of canteen food, he learned of this opportunity to escape the boredom of depot life on seeing a copy of the Echo d’Oran newspaper. Reading that the Minister of War had placed at the disposal of the navy a battalion of the Foreign Legion that would be leaving on 4 August for Dahomey, Martyn and fellow-sergeant Ivan Petrovski rushed back to barracks to put their names down as volunteers. Well down the list, they pinned their hopes on knowing the nominated battalion commander Maj Marius-Paul Faurax, under whom they had served in Tonkin.[192]

Rumours that King Behanzin of Dahomey kept a bodyguard of female warriors may have helped fuel their enthusiasm. The Amazons, as they were dubbed, were originally all captives trained as warriors and forbidden on pain of death to have sex with any male apart from the king. Since he had a large harem, this condemned them to lifelong virginity, of which the main compensation was to live in the royal household and eat its food. Such was the status this conferred that important families donated daughters to the royal guard, much as medieval Europeans donated boys to the Church as oblates.

Sir Richard Burton, visiting West Africa in 1861 had described them as less than seductive:

‘… with a development of adipose tissue, which suggested anything but ancient virginity. I saw old, ugly and square-built frows [Frauen] trudging grumpily along with the face of Cook after being much nagged by the Missus.’ He divided them into five categories: the blunderbuss women, each followed by her ammunition porter; the elephant huntresses, said to be the bravest; the razor women, who looked like scarecrows; the infantry, whom he found ‘rather mild in appearance;’ and the elite archeresses. After pointing out that the object of Dahomeyan warfare was capturing

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