by Douglas Boyd
For endurance? After the capture of the important oasis of Timimoun in the Sahara on 7 May 1900, Maj Let led nine officers and 400 men of 2 RE back to base not by the vulture-flying route of 500km, but in a great odyssey that covered a distance three times as great in midsummer temperatures reaching 50O Centigrade in the shade, had there been any shade apart from the shadows thrown by their camels. After a march like that, over sand too hot to touch and long stretches of sharp, cutting stones, they arrived back at base with uniforms and boots torn to pieces.
For sheer nerve? In another raid like that of Bertrand, barely two weeks after the return of those men, Maj Bichemin with a battalion of Algerian tirailleurs was deploying a mounted company of 2 RE ahead of the main column at the end of a razzia in which they had carried off 4,000 camels. The mind boggles at the sheer length of a train of so many camels roped one behind the other, plodding through the dunes and across the stony wastes.
When it became obvious that the desperate owners intended to repossess the beasts which were both their wealth and their source of meat, a section of the mounted company was detailed off to escort the camels out of immediate danger, while the main body of troops engaged the desperate tribesmen. They, however, were not more stupid than their oppressors, and refused to take the bait, using the broken landscape to keep out of sight until the camels and their guards were beyond immediate help from the main column, when 300 horsemen and 600 tribesmen on foot launched an all-out attack. Such was its speed that, before the legionnaires could tether their mules, eight men were dead and another eight wounded. With desperate courage and impeccable fire discipline, they formed a square and fired only to kill. Somehow they managed to hold on long enough for a squadron of Spahis, alerted by the firing, to ride back and put their attackers to flight.
It is to be borne in mind that when small numbers of Europeans, as here, held off large forces of Saharan tribesmen, they had the advantage not only of training and discipline, but also weaponry, for many of the tribesmen were still armed with sword, lance and a small shield of hide carried on the left arm – of scant use against firearms.
On 1 June 1903 the newly appointed governor of Algeria, Célestin Jonnart, was ambushed near Figuig, at the very point inland where the French had begun pushing back the Moroccan frontier westwards. Had anyone asked them, the men of 2 RE included in the punitive column sent out to avenge this outrage two weeks later in the waterless wasteland between Wadi Gur and Wadi Zisfana might well have wondered what such an important civilian was doing in the disputed area. But nobody did ask.
And so it went on, the relentless pushing outwards of the industrialised Europeans and the hopeless resistance of the desert tribes with no concept of owning the land in between this well and that oasis to which they had hereditary rights.
Eccentric Europeans have always been attracted to the emptiness of arid lands. One such was a former officer of 4th Hussars named Charles de Foucauld. As a young blade, his reputation for extravagant womanising that culminated in shipping his mistress to Algeria in a packing case was known throughout the army – as was the lavishness of his table. When younger, his gluttony at family meals had terrified younger relatives, whose food he ate in addition to his own.
Posted to the Chasseurs d’Afrique, this self-indulgent playboy grew bored and resigned his commission, later to return to Algiers and apprentice himself to Oscar MacCarthy, the greatest authority on North Africa and its cultures, who was the custodian of the Moustafa Pasha library of 25,000 volumes. Living native-style in MacCarthy’s house, Foucauld studied Arabic, mastering the language and script well enough to travel, disguised as an itinerant Jewish trader but at risk of his life if his imposture was discovered, to the forbidden city of Fez.
Learning enough of the Koran and Hebrew prayers for the purpose triggered a passionate conversion to Christianity, which led him next on pilgrimage to Rome. Becoming a Trappist monk, he accused his brothers in the Order of not living the ‘life of Nazareth’ in poverty, danger and discomfort sufficient for his excessive temperament. After his return to Algeria in 1901, he founded his own Order named the Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, whose Rule imposed such rigour and discomfort that he was its only member.
For his ‘mother house’, after several trials he chose a squalid and uncomfortable self-build two-metre square hermitage near the most desolate French base in Algeria, at Ben-Abbès on the Wadi Souara. The brand-new fort there looked out over the pink dunes of the Western Erg to the north and east. To the west a rocky wasteland stretched away into Morocco and to the south lay an unmeasured expanse of black rock and shale. Aïn Sefra, the nearest railhead and re-supply point, lay 400km distant.
Whatever his former fellow-officers felt about his back-to-Nazareth religion, Foucauld’s personal courage and indifference to illness, malnutrition and danger excited their admiration to the point that he seemed to them sainthood incarnate. The army and Legion officers in the 800-strong garrison at Ben-Abbès gave him ample provisions which he passed on to anyone who asked, be they slaves or free, while punishing himself by a near-starvation diet of gruel, figs and bread made from home-ground barley. His logic was that since the White Fathers and other missionary orders had failed at the cost of their lives to impose the Gospel on the natives, he would do it by his example of chosen poverty and humility. It entirely escaped his imagination that desert-dwellers, being eternally poor and close to starvation, saw no virtue in that condition.
Nevertheless, it seemed that God was on the French side when one of Foucauld’s ex-slave converts was reported to have whispered to him in the hermitage confessional that Sherif Moulay-Moustafa had assembled an army of somewhere between 4,000 and 9,000 men – the impossibility of accurate head-counting was partly due to the tendency for tribes to withdraw from any joint enterprise when their hereditary enemies joined it. The intention was to administer a sharp lesson to the garrison of the remote post at Taghit, who had forced the surrounding tribes to pay tribute taxes.
The Col de Taghit was a naturally flat passage so narrow that only three camels could pass abreast between the huge dunes of the Grand Erg and an expanse of uncrossable, bare windswept rock. The approach to the col was barred by the ksar, or fortified village, of Taghit.[221]
Foucauld passed the alert on to the threatened garrison. At Taghit in the heat of midsummer, from 17 to 20 August 1903, Capt Susbielle with 470 men in an assortment of French uniforms and just two 80mm field howitzers as their sole artillery held Moulay-Moustafa’s army at bay. The last reinforcements to arrive before the tribesmen surrounded the post were a platoon from a penal battalion and 1st platoon of 22nd Mounted Company of 2 RE under Lt Pointurier, who force-marched them 60km overnight to get there in time.
By the end of the brief siege when the tribesmen withdrew, nine defenders were dead and twenty-one wounded. Enemy casualties were estimated at 1,200. The crusader saint of Beni-Abbès wrote in his diary, ‘This is the finest feat of arms in Algeria for forty years.’[222] As news of it travelled rapidly through the army network, it was regarded as a miracle that Foucauld’s charity in ‘giving the Gospel’ to a humble slave-woman should have enabled the forewarned garrison to hold out and lose so few men against such odds.
Like many such legends, this one was false. Foucauld had nothing to do with warning Susbielle at Taghit because at the time he had been haggling with the Vatican for permission to celebrate Mass on a year-long tour of the Saharan oases with one donkey for him to ride on and one servant – a freed slave – walking behind. Hearing of the attack, he hurried to Taghit to fulfil his mission by ministering to the wounded. Arriving on 6 September, he cared for the injured and blessed the dead. The real miracle of Taghit was that none of the wounded died after his arrival, due to Foucauld’s selfless nursing.[223]
Even before he arrived, a mixed column of Spahis and legionnaires had been ambushed on 2 September by 300 tribesmen from Moulay-Moustafa’s army at the bleak, featureless nearby caravan halt of El Mounghar, d
escribed by a legionnaire who was there as ‘nowhere, nothing, a hypothetical point on a map’. Choosing their moment when the legionnaires were preparing coffee at 0930hrs after an all-night march, the tribesmen stampeded the camels and the legionnaires’ mules, together with their water and spare ammunition.
Divided into two groups on neighbouring hillocks – one commanded by Danish aristocrat Christian Selchauhansen and the other by Capt Vauchez – the legionnaires and some dismounted Spahis fought desperately. After the tall, blond Dane was mortally wounded, two of his men attempted to rescue him, but were killed in the attempt. Command now passed to a corporal named Tisserand, who ordered the men to shoot only at certain targets. Thinking this meant they were out of ammunition, the tribesmen moved in too close, enabling Tisserand to lead a desperate bayonet charge that drove them off for the moment.
On the other hillock, Capt Vauchez was also among the early casualties. Command passed to Sgt Maj Tissier, killed shortly afterwards. The desperate survivors held their attackers at bay until 1620hrs, when Capt Susbielle returned with the Spahis who had been sent to get help and a group of volunteers, plus Capt Bonnelet of 1 RE at the head of his mounted company. By the time the tribesmen had been driven off, thirty-six men lay dead, forty-nine were wounded and only twenty legionnaires were still able to stand on their feet.
The subsequent enquiry placed the blame squarely on Capt Vauchez, while Tisserand’s heroism was recognised by posthumous promotion to second-lieutenant. Since officers promoted from the ranks were customarily transferred to another regiment to avoid disciplinary problems with former comrades, 2/Lt Tisserand (deceased) was gazetted to 1 RE.
Chapter 21: In the kingdom of the west
North Africa 1901 - 1914
To establish a political alibi, French accounts of cross-border incursions always stressed that the attackers – as at Taghit and El Mounghar – were ‘Moroccan rebels’.[224] This conveniently overlooked the fact that the tribesmen concerned did not consider themselves subject to the sultan or anyone else and had no concept of lines drawn on a piece of paper, never having seen a map. Inside Morocco, or ‘the kingdom of the West’ to translate its Arabic title[225], events were moving in favour of one or other of the colonial powers. After coming of age in 1901 the young sultan Abd el-Aziz surrounded himself with European companions and adopted their customs, which scandalised the more religious of his subjects. Popular discontent was so widespread that the pretender Bu Hmara established a rival court for a while near Melilla.
Col Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey believed deeply in the nineteenth-century vision of European colonial conquest as a civilising force in the world, having soldiered under Gen Galliéni in Vietnam and Madagascar. A cavalryman despite a childhood spinal injury, Lyautey returned to France in 1902 to command 14th Hussars at Alençon. It was apparently Governor-General Jonnart who recommended he be given command at Aïn Sefra, from where the disputed frontier with Morocco was policed.
Whatever Paris thought, Lyautey had no intention of fighting a defensive war. In his book, it was better to take the war to the enemy by laying waste his ground. To show the pacified tribes in Algeria that France could and would protect them from their enemies, wherever they came from, he planned three large bases 150km inside Moroccan territory, spaced approximately 150km apart, from which Legion mounted companies could move out to head off any threatening move into French-occupied Algeria.
These were not to be mere mud-brick blockhouses, but substantial citadels with high walls and gate towers – effectively townships founded for an exclusively military purpose. Although the immense five-storey barrack blocks in bel-Abbès and Saïda were built like barracks in any southern French city, these new bases of Lyautey’s reflected his love of the exotic in their Moorish arches and windows shaded by louvered shutters like a modern tourist hotel. Since the only maps of the disputed area were made by the colonial army, he simply invented place-names for his new bases to obscure their actual locations inside Moroccan territory so that no interfering politician or diplomat would know exactly what he was up to.
He was greatly helped when Great Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale on 8 April 1904 as a way of offsetting conflicting colonial interests and warning an increasingly bellicose Germany to keep its distance. Among other provisions, the Entente granted freedom of action to Great Britain for her colonial plans in Egypt and to France similarly in Morocco, with a proviso that reasonable allowance be made for Spain’s interests there. Other clauses redefined the frontier of Nigeria in France's favour, and gave her control of the upper Gambia valley. The eastern parts of Thailand, adjacent to French Indochina, also became a French zone.
A secret clause of the Entente that was not made public for seven years was a provision that Britain would turn a blind eye to France annexing the whole of Morocco apart from the Spanish zone, should the sultan prove incapable of exercising authority over his own subjects. Since no sultan had ever been able to control either the desert tribes in the south who conducted most of the armed raids into Algeria or the fiercely independent Berbers in the Rif Mountains, this was London’s green light to Lyautey.
Furious at the rapprochement of Britain and France – two traditional enemies Germany had been counting on dealing with separately – Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Tangier on 31 March 1905 and declared his support for Moroccan independence. Thus encouraged, the young sultan revoked his treaties with France. The resultant diplomatic panic was resolved at the Algeciras Conference that lasted from January to April 1906, where the trading rights of German and other nations in Morocco were upheld in principle, but the policing of the country was entrusted to France, with the north of the country being declared a sphere of Spanish influence. Italy’s non-interference in this plan was bought by support for Rome’s claims to Libya. Once these conflicts of colonial interest had been resolved, the European powers concerned met with Moroccan representatives at Algeciras to discuss the country's future, using the sultan’s European debts as a lever to impose French and Spanish Customs collectors in Moroccan ports.
German pressure over Morocco thus achieved the reverse of what Wilhelm II had hoped. For the first time since the Crimean campaign the growing menace of German militarism forced the British and French general staffs to talk to each other. Reflecting their growing concern over the build-up of the Kaiser’s navy, the support of the Royal Navy was promised to France during the amicable discussions, should her coastline and ports ever be menaced by the German Fleet.
Despite Moroccan protests to Paris about his encroachments across the border from Algeria, Lyautey took no notice and was rewarded in 1906 by being appointed commandant of the Oranais military district. What life was like for legionnaires caught up in his manoeuvring comes over quite well in one of the unpublished memoirs in the archives at Aubagne. Sgt Lefèvre’s eyewitness account[226] goes into some detail about an operation commanded by Gen Vigy beginning in April 1908 when three French columns marched and rode across the ambiguous frontier to head off and destroy a harka – a coalition of Moroccan tribes threatening Lyautey’s base at Bechar.
On 14 April the advance column consisting of 24th Mounted Company of 1 RE and a unit of Algerian Spahis encamped in the oasis of El-Menabha on the Wadi Guir. The legionnaires immediately started building defensive walls with the stones lying around, so that there was a semblance of a camp when the main party of Legion infantry, Algerian tirailleurs, some Zouaves and a battery of 80mm howitzers, all supported by a baggage train of 800 camels, arrived at 1700hrs. The harka was only 10km or so distant, its scouts well aware of the French moves. At 0510hrs the following morning shots from high ground overlooking the oasis killed men asleep in their white canvas tents while others grabbed their rifles from the stacks and took shelter behind the perimeter wall on the side nearest the firing in preparation for the onslaught.
It came from behind them. The camp was suddenly full of white-robed figures firing at anyone in French uniform and slashing holes in the tent
s, through which to shoot those still inside. Forty-seven legionnaires of 2 RE holding a section of the wall were forced to retreat back into the camp in the uncertain light, as were the tirailleurs on their flank. The battery was now firing at the hill where the main enemy force was concentrated. Under cover of this impromptu barrage, seventy-five legionnaires from the mounted company assaulted the hill and dislodged the main Moroccan force, losing ten killed and seventeen wounded in the process.
Luckily for the French, the raiders were more interested in grabbing loot than winning the battle. This enabled the defenders to gain the upper hand, more often with bayonet than bullet. As the blood-red sun came up over the arid landscape, they pursued the last interlopers for up to 2km from the oasis, shooting them down like cardboard targets on the firing range before retiring to count their losses. On the way back, they bayoneted or shot all the wounded Arabs before sitting down amidst the corpses in the ruin of their camp to have breakfast.[227] Since French losses were lower than the enemy’s by a ratio of approximately two to one, Gen Vigy claimed the engagement as a victory – which it was not, since the tribes could afford to lose ten times more men than he could.
Northwest of Bechar in the palm groves at Beni Ouzien the harka re-formed in early May. Approaching them along the valley of the Wadi Guir, Sgt Lefèvre had time to notice the comparative fertility of the land: fields of wheat and barley demarcated by low dry-stone walls, groves of palm trees and vegetable patches nestling like children in the protection of a mud-walled ksar. The intrepid photographer Jules Imbert photographed one of them shortly afterwards, in November or December 1908. His glass-negative pictures show the 8-metre-high walls of Bou Denib pocked with loopholes and firing slits, making it an ugly place to assault by a force without artillery.[228] Inside the walls were, not a few mud huts, but substantial lime-washed houses and a mosque whose white minaret rises high over the township.
