by Hew Strachan
A process of inversion took place. Because in 1914 the main German armies were grappling with those of France on French soil, the need to undermine France’s power through its colonies was less pressing. Because Germany could not come to grips directly with Britain, the use of revolutionary warfare against its possessions assumed a much higher priority. Russia, through Germany’s need to back up Austria-Hungary, occupied an intermediate position in the rank order of subversive schemes.
There were, in addition, practical constraints. When the Goeben and the Breslau bombarded Philippeville and Bône the French feared rebellion, but that had never been Souchon’s mission. Thereafter, the German naval presence in the western Mediterranean (and, for that matter, off the Atlantic coast of Morocco) was negligible. The first U–boats were sent to the Mediterranean in April and May 1915, but their activities (and their bases, at Pola and Cattaro) were concentrated at its eastern end. Their numbers were not significantly augmented until spring 1917. Turkey was neither contiguous nor particularly influential in the region. Both Algeria and Morocco had claims to be independent states before the French arrived, and the Sultan of the latter averred that he—not the Sultan in Constantinople—was the true Caliph.118 Strong Islamic sentiments meant respect for the Turks as religious leaders, but this did not extend to their temporal authority. ‘Le panislamisme que nous connaissons en Afrique du Nord’, wrote an Algerian nationalist, Victor Barrucand, in 1912, is ‘un sentiment de legitime défense, [qu’] il a son siège, non pas à Constantinople mais dans la coeur de tous les mussulmans.’119
MAP 29. FRENCH NORTH AFRICA
Enver’s response was to bypass existing leaders and give direct support to any rebels. But in Morocco the Germans at first took a different line, preferring to develop their pre-war links with Moulay Abd al-Hafiz, who had been ousted from the Sultanate by the French. The Turks had to co-operate with the Germans because the latter had money and arms, and the Germans had to work through the Turks because they had the personnel. Asif Tahir Bey, who had headed a short-lived Turkish military mission to Morocco also dislodged by the French, made contact with Abd al-Hafiz in October 1914. The former Sultan had just moved from Tangiers to Spain, and he showed no eagerness to return to Morocco. The hazards of an aeroplane flight or passage in a submarine were much less attractive than quiet retirement.120
The lure of Morocco was its accessibility from Spain. Spain’s frustration at the poor deal it had got from France in the area made it sympathetic to Germany. Ernst Kühnel, an archaeologist and art historian, was dispatched to Larache, on the Atlantic coast of Spanish Morocco. His task was not only to work with the consulates of the Central Powers in Larache and Melilla in the distribution of propaganda (a job complicated by the fact that the German and Austrian consuls in Larache suspected him of being a French spy rather than a German one), but also to foment rebellion and to blow up railways in French Morocco and Algeria. Kühnel stayed in Larache until 1917, but he was too remote from the interior to have a major impact. Moreover, although Spain was prepared to overlook the distribution of propaganda and the dispatch of financial subsidies to tribal leaders, it took exception to gun-running. Weapons could be turned against the Spanish as easily as against the French. A plan to ship 5,000 rifles and 500,000 rounds from Argentina to Morocco via Spain was blocked, and the police at Malaga impounded 3,000 carbines. Ultimately, Germany’s principal intermediary in these deals, its naval attaché in Madrid, was expelled.121
Almost as problematic for the Germans were their allies. Austria-Hungary restricted its support to a rather feeble summons by its ambassador in Madrid to French—but not Spanish—Morocco to launch a holy war.122 Turkey, which Germany badly needed to legitimize its standing as an insurgent rather than colonial power, proved lackadaisical. Teskilat-i Mahsusa was reported to maintain large numbers of agents in North Africa, but in reality they seem to have numbered no more than eight: at best, two were operating in Morocco.123 In November 1915, after much German prodding, the Turks established a mission in Spain. Its second-in-command was Asif Tahir Bey, but its leader, Prince Aziz Hasan, was a liberal opponent of the Committee of Union and Progress. During the course of 1916 the Turkish mission broke up, clashing with its allies over its funding, and its Arab members sympathizing with Hussein’s revolt in the Hejaz.124 From 1916 onwards German propaganda had little alternative to working through the committees for national independence in Berlin rather than mouthing the pan-Islamic objectives of the Caliph.
The threat of holy war was something which France, like Britain, took seriously from the outset of the war, and even before. Both powers had, after all, devoted much recent campaigning effort to countering tribesmen fired with religious fervour. In February 1912 Clemenceau anticipated that war within Europe would give rise to a jihad outside it. In Algeria the governor-general, Charles Lutaud, anticipated rebellion as early as August 1914. On 5 November he pre-empted Constantinople’s summons with a declaration of his own, in which he made a distinction between the Young Turks (presented as Jews and Greeks, not Anatolians—lackeys of the Germans rather than true Moslems) and the Turkish people.125 Because France recognized the possible force of German and Ottoman propaganda it made strenuous efforts to intercept and to counter it. Suggesting that French fears were exaggerated may, in reality, be a reflection of French success.
The two pillars of their effectiveness were, first, speed off the mark (and here the battle of the Marne was a vital asset in denting from the very outset the image of German military superiority), and secondly, superior intelligence. By 1915 the French were reading German diplomatic signals from Madrid. Cooperation with the British, given the ability of the Royal Navy to decipher German codes, enabled them to track U–boat movements off the North African coast.126 Thus, much that the Central Powers initiated could be anticipated and pre-empted. Within Morocco, the fact that penetration and pacification were in progress meant that an extensive intelligence network was already up and running when war began. The Bureau des Affaires Indigènes maintained posts on the frontiers of the occupied zone which, as well as pushing French influence forward, channelled information back.
The recent experience of French military prowess, particularly in Morocco, where French diplomatic success had been at German expense, was the bottom line in ensuring North African loyalty. To reinforce it, German prisoners of war were put to work on the roads of Algeria and (especially) Morocco. Indications of support for France for more positive reasons were sedulously exploited by the French. Most of the loyal statements in Algeria came from those already compromised by the French government—the tribal chiefs, the magistrates, the functionaries—and from the more prosperous areas. Nonetheless, the Maghreb was not immune from some of the more spontaneous manifestations of the union sacrée common to metropolitan France. One butcher perched a red fez adorned with a crescent on the ox’s head displayed outside his shop: beneath it was inscribed the legend ‘viande de bocherie’. For each of the main groups in Algerian society the union sacrée had particular force. French settlers were given the chance to reassert their European status by a sense of solidarity with metropolitan France. The Algerians themselves experienced a suppression of racism in the outburst of fraternity generated by military service.127
The Algerian government began the publication of an official news bulletin, Akhbar al Harb, in August 1914. However, this was soon recognized for what it was, and the Service d’Afrique in Paris, in addition to producing its own material, decided to allow in other, unofficial, publications. A propaganda office was established in Cairo in order to work with the British in preparing items for the Arab press. But, inevitably, Britain’s and Egypt’s preoccupations were not France’s, and so relevant articles were selected from the Cairo journals for reproduction in Akhbar al Harb. An Arabic newspaper, Al Mustaqbal (’The Future’), began publication in Paris on 1 March 1916. At the same time all these strands were pulled together with the appointment of Edmond Doutte, a teacher in Algeria, who at last
co-ordinated the Moslem-orientated propaganda of the Maghreb, eliminating its more obvious contradictions. Doutte’s contribution, above all, was to recognize the importance of the picture and of the cinema in the portrayal of France’s war effort. He established a network of press offices in the major centres designed not only to disseminate information, but also to monitor local opinion the better to be able to reflect it in future publications.128
French rule in North Africa rested as much on collaboration as on confrontation. Formally speaking, both Tunisia and Morocco were protectorates, their indigenous and traditional rulers enjoying France’s recognition, and the Islamic faith receiving full support. Algeria was a proper colony, but its conquest had begun as far back as 1830, and particularly around Oran and Algiers its economic life and its political stability were now interlocked. Italy had forced the tribes of Libya into union by insisting on annexation and on sovereignty, and by giving its campaign the status of a crusade. France made no such mistake. Both before the war and again in February 1915 the German ambassador in Lisbon gave it as his view that the Arabs were unlikely to rise against the French.129
French colonialism was nonetheless divided in its philosophy. Some, including Lutaud and his military commander in the Algerian Sahara, Octave Meynier, reflected a belief in France’s civilizing and republican mission. The ultimate objective was assimilation. The peoples of North Africa would be incorporated into the French empire by French education and French political ideas: traditional forms of Arab life would be suppressed. Others, most notably Hubert Lyautey, résident général of Morocco, and Charles Jonnart, both Lutaud’s predecessor and in 1918 his successor as governor-general of Algeria, wanted to proceed by association. Temperamentally, Lyautey was entirely out of tune with the radical jacobinism of Lutaud and Meynier, as well as of political circles in Paris. His sympathies were with the aristocracy; he was a snob; he regarded metropolitan France and the Third Republic as decadent. France’s power should, for him, rest on the traditional elites of the Maghreb. Neither school was interested in an emergent nationalism. Both were united in wanting an extension of the French empire. Their difference was over the most appropriate means—social revolution or aristocratic government.
Elements of both can be found in French policy in North Africa in the First World War. Clashes were not infrequent, but the war also introduced an element of pragmatism. Proposals for political reform in Algeria were adumbrated throughout the war, ultimately to little effect; but in this way the assimilationists had their run and the ambitious young Algerian bourgeois, the jeunes algériens, were kept in play. The corollary of citizenship would have been full conscription. But, at least until 1918, the call-up was kept small and the right of exemption if a substitute could be bought was maintained. The sons of chiefs and notables who did join the army received privileged treatment. Incorporated into a particularly useless form of irregular cavalry, the spahis auxiliaires, or (from 1916) drafted into a special military school, either way they were spared the horrors of warfare experienced by humble tirailleurs on the western front.130
If, politically, French colonial rule drew from both points of view, militarily it had less choice. The challenge confronting the ambitious soldier was no longer in the Sahara but on France’s own frontiers. It had been axiomatic for many colonial conquerors that aggression and boldness, finding their culmination on the battlefield, were the methods with which to overawe a native opponent. In North Africa Charles Mangin embodied such a view. He went to Europe to apply similar precepts on the battlefields of Verdun and the Marne, but he left some of his disciples behind. In the circumstances of 1914–18, however, France wanted not fighting but pacification. This, at least ostensibly, was the method of Lyautey. His strategy was to combine the occupation of permanent posts with the formation of mobile columns. Without the latter, the former could do little more than protect the ground on which they were erected: the columns enabled France to dominate the area beyond the posts. But, without the posts, France’s military presence would not be transformed into something more enduring. Lyautey said that his posts would become centres of commercial activity, drawing in the tribesmen, and so converting them from war to trade. The soldier was to become the agent of civilization. When Lyautey lost most of his regular troops in August 1914, and received aged territorials instead, he was not displeased. Both the Arab respect for seniority and the territorials’ civilian skills made them assets, not liabilities. Much of Lyautey’s strategy—his celebration in May 1917 of ‘the grandeur and beauty of colonial war... [which] ... on the very day following the cessation of fighting . . . begins to create life’131—was rhetoric. In reality, his opponents were happy to trade one minute and plunder the next; in reality, raids and rape were as much part of his repertoire as of any other colonial conqueror. But the words had a role to play. They convinced Paris of the virtues of the empire, and made it prepared to compromise when the corruption of the Caids or sherifs seemed at odds with France’s civilizing mission. Furthermore, Lyautey’s persuasiveness won sufficient allies within Morocco for ‘native politics’ to be a partial substitute for manpower.132
However, the new military threat which confronted French North Africa in 1914 was not on Lyautey’s patch but to the east, on its frontier with Libya. French expansion into the Sahara, both south and east, had forced the Senussi to concentrate their activities in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. The possibility in August of 1914 of setting the Senussi on the French rather than on the British occurred to the Germans. But the Germans, unlike the Turks, were respectful of Italian neutrality, and the Turks themselves were more anxious to gain Libya and Egypt than Tunisia and Algeria. Moreover, the Senussi were for the most part happy to leave the French alone, recognizing that the defeat of Italy was a military target quite sufficient for their slender powers.
But the combination of Senussi success and Italian neutrality made it impossible for France to remain uninvolved. The defeated Italian garrisons from Ghadames and Ghat crossed into the safety of southern Algeria in December 1914. The French policy, that of benevolent neutrality, demanded that the belligerents of either side, whether Italian or Senussi, be disarmed and interned on entering French territory. The French did disarm the Ghadames garrison, but they did not disarm that of Ghat. Instead, in January 1915 the latter re-entered Libya with a view to retaking Ghadames. Furthermore, it was supplied with French military equipment to enable it to do so.
As a European power engaged in a major war, France was understandably anxious to avoid offending Italy in the hope that Italy might be won over to the Entente.133 But the confusion in France’s responses arose less from the split between its priorities as a European and an imperial power, and more from the division in attitudes to colonial government. The ‘associationists’, especially the French resident in Tunis and General Moinier, commanding XIX corps, were anxious not to inflame the Senussi for fear of repercussions in southern Tunisia and the Sahara. They feared that Italy’s savagery close to the Tunisian frontier could have destabilizing consequences for France if France were too closely linked with it. Even after Italy had joined the Entente in May 1915, the governor of Algeria, Lutaud, told Moinier to treat developments in Libya as the result, ‘not of a foreign war but of an internal revolt’.134 Meynier, on the other hand, as the local commander, was anxious to extend French rule, an objective in which Lutaud was prepared to connive. Ghat commanded Ajjer, the southeastern corner of French Algeria, into which French influence had scarcely penetrated. For Meynier, the war was an opportunity to occupy Ghat and Ghadames preventively, and to subordinate the Touareg of the southern Sahara.135
Meynier’s policy was the reverse of Lyautey’s—to harass and humiliate the Touareg of the Ajjer into action, so that they could then be crushed. On 6 March 1915 500 Senussi, using captured Italian artillery, attacked the French post at Djanet, just inside the Algerian frontier from Ghat. Moinier’s corps plan in such circumstances was to abandon all south-eastern Algeria. He agreed, however,
to allow Meynier to form two columns in order to reinforce forts Flatters and Polignac, the latter still 250 kilometres in a direct line from Djanet. Meynier’s force of 600 men required over a thousand camels; the heat necessitated halts between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., and it marched in three- or four-day stages. Movement, at about 50 or 60 kilometres per day, was therefore slow in relation to the distances to be covered. But as wireless was not available in the Saharan theatre until 1916, intelligence was at a premium and direct control from on high hard to enforce. Lutaud asked for Meynier to be allowed to retake Djanet, to suppress the Ajjer region, and march on Ghat. In May Meynier set about doing exactly that. On 3 June, however, Moinier instructed Meynier to abandon his attack on Ghat, and on 30 June the French refused a request from the Italian government for joint action. The whole of the Ajjer was now in revolt, or close to it. With a line of communications 900 kilometres long and with only four useable companies for the entire eastern Sahara, Meynier was in danger of exposing his force to defeat in detail. On 3 July he abandoned Djanet once more, falling back north of the Ajjer to Fort Polignac. Even here supply problems triggered the onset of scurvy, and the post to its west, Ain el Hadjadj, was hemmed in by the Touareg.136
What Moinier had feared had come to pass. Khalifa ben Asker, flouting the wishes of the Senussi leadership, had broken off relations with the French. In September 1915 he crossed into southern Tunisia, raising the standard of rebellion against the French. French rule in northern Tunisia remained stable. Les jeunes tunisiens, a small group of educated, liberal reformers, had shot their bolt in 1912. Protests and strikes had resulted in the arrest and exile of their leaders, and the banning of their publications. Furthermore, their westernizing and modernizing inclinations had driven the traditional Muslims into closer alliance with the ‘associationists’ of France, so preventing the formation of an anti-colonial, nationalist bloc.137 But, if ultimately France’s political position seemed secure, its military situation—with Meynier gallivanting far away in the southern Sahara—did not. France all but charged Italy with complicity with the Senussi, claiming that its new Entente partner was deliberately giving ground in Libya so that the rebels would be encouraged to divert their attentions to French territory.138 Meynier redeployed northwards with deliberate slowness, creating a scratch force near Ghadames, and asserting that the real threat lay to the south, with up to 12,000 Senussi massing to invade Algeria. The southern Tunisian frontier was held by a force of territorials and over-age reservists. What really checked Khalifa ben Asker was the fury of Mohammed Suf al-Mahmudi, who arrested him.
