To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  No sooner had Moinier and Alapetite, the French resident in Tunisia, surmounted one crisis than they faced another. Italy requested that France co-operate in the blockade of Tripolitania by stopping the caravans which entered from Tunisia and southern Algeria. Both recognized that to do so would weaken Suf’s hand with Khalifa ben Asker, inflame the Senussi, and inflict economic hardship on their own domains. However, a combination of Entente loyalty and pressure from Lutaud and Meynier overrode wiser counsels. Khalifa ben Asker was then released and the Senussi attack on southern Tunisia resumed in 1916. The exiled jeunes tunisiens had come to rest in Berlin, and through their national independence committee stepped up anti-French propaganda. The French garrison—although mostly local troops deemed unusable on the western front—peaked at 15,000 men. By October 1916 they had regained the upper hand, and the Turkish leadership in Tripolitania persuaded ben Asker to concentrate his efforts on Italy. In 1917 the French strength in Tunisia fell back to 8,000 men. Khalifa ben Asker had a final flurry in August and October 1918, renewing his attacks in response to Prince Osman Fuad’s call.

  The effect of the fighting and, principally, of the blockade was destitution on both sides of the frontier. To the south, Senussi and Touareg joined hands to defend their way of life. The Touareg of Air, across the border of southern Algeria in Niger, had never submitted to French rule, and one of their leaders, Mohammed ben Khaossan, had taken refuge in Fezzan. In December 1916, with Senussi support, Khaossan struck south-west from Ghat, raising the banner of holy war from Ajjer through Hoggar to Air. Tagama, Sultan of Air, joined the insurgents. The whole French position in the central and southern Sahara, from Lake Chad to Timbuktu, and as far north as Fort Polignac, was threatened. On 17 December 1916 Khaossan and 1,200 men, accompanied by Turkish and German advisers and equipped with captured Italian artillery and machine-guns, laid siege to Agades. The French garrison of ninety men was devoid of artillery and encumbered with 165 women and children. In an independent development, resistance to recruiting and to its concomitant— the extension of French rule—had thrown the mountainous areas of Dahomey, Togo, Haut Senegal, and Niger into open rebellion, and French West Africa was ill-prepared to meet the new threat. France appealed to Britain. Movements of the Nigeria Regiment to East Africa were halted, and in January 1917 the British columns marched northwards from Kano and Sokoto into French Niger. They in turn relieved the French garrisons of the Niger, 2,000 of whom were freed to relieve Agades. On 3 March the siege was raised.

  The Touareg broke up, some returning whence they came and others fleeing into northern Nigeria. Kano had been affected by the suppression of Saharan trade, and Senussi lodges had been established there and in Borno. During the war years 20,601 Nigerian Muslims made the pilgrimage to Mecca, but 24,633 returned. The Germans, raiding across the Cameroons border at the beginning of 1915, had distributed pan-Islamic propaganda. The possibility of influences subversive to British rule entering from the north and west, therefore, created grounds for concern in Nigeria. The French claimed that the Sultan of Sokoto was in league with Khaossan. But the emirs of northern Nigeria did not move. Lugard’s policy of indirect rule, like Lyautey’s of native politics, provided a dyke against which the tide of Senussi influence broke and then retreated.139

  In Algeria the rebounding of Meynier’s forward policy resulted in his removal. ‘The main danger in the Sahara’, Moinier reported at the end of 1916, ‘is Meynier.’140 The French minister of war, albeit briefly, was Lyautey. He created a temporary joint command for the whole Sahara, thus bypassing the governors of Algeria, Mauretania, the French Sudan, and the Niger, and gave it to his own protégé and a veteran of the region, Henri Laperrine.

  The key to Laperrine’s policy was the loyalty of Moussa ag Amestane, chief of the Hoggar Touareg. Moussa had managed to stay on the fence as Khaossan passed through, and in the spring of 1917 co-operated with the French in driving the Senussi back into Tripolitania. Laperrine aimed to solicit local support rather than to antagonize it, but he sustained his efforts with an active military presence. In a previous incarnation as commander in the Algerian Sahara he had formed mobile, camel-mounted columns. Meynier preferred to employ goums, unreliable local levies, in heavy columns. Laperrine now supplemented his original concepts by using cars, aeroplanes, and wireless as the means to ubiquity. With longer lines of communication, mechanization confronted greater difficulties than in the British sphere of operations: camels were still needed to convey the petrol for the cars. But broadly speaking, and despite obstruction from Lutaud and from Moinier’s successor Nivelle, Laperrine’s strategy worked. By the time Laperrine met his death in an air crash in 1920, France controlled the Ajjer.141

  The crisis faced by France on the southern frontiers of Algeria in 1916–17 coincided with the only major threat to its hold in the north of the country. Early German efforts to promote rebellion in Algeria revolved around the reinsertion of former members of the Foreign Legion to persuade those Germans still serving to mutiny. Ernst Kühnel made contact with one former legionnaire, Adolf Staringer, in his bid to sabotage the Algerian railways. But these plots had come to nothing.142 Thus, if the twin crises of 1916–17 were linked by Turco-German agitation (and this cannot be proven), it seems likely to have come via Libya rather than via Morocco. The mountainous region around Batna, in eastern Algeria and inland from Constantine, was close to Tunisia and only 600 kilometres from Tripoli. A proclamation from Sulayman al-Baruni calling for holy war had arrived in the area only weeks before violence erupted in November 1916. But the causes of the Batna rising can be explained in local terms, without reference to external pressures.

  Throughout the war the area around and south of Constantine showed itself the least supportive of France in all Algeria. Oran provided 43.6 per cent of those who joined the army, when it contained 21.9 per cent of the population; central Algeria (including Algiers itself) had 32 per cent of the population and produced 33.2 per cent of recruits; eastern Algeria, however, could only muster 24.2 per cent of the army, although possessing 44.9 per cent of the population. Furthermore, the rate of desertion among the Constantinois was double. When it came to war loans, Oran raised 287 francs per inhabitant, Algiers 270 francs, and Constantine 60 francs. In part, this was no more than a reflection of the backwardness of the region. The real incomes of those peasants who farmed cereals fell to 95 per cent of their 1914 level in 1916, but in Constantine to 80 per cent. Elsewhere the boom in agricultural export crops, particularly tobacco and wine, enriched many Algerians, so that over the war as a whole the real incomes of agricultural workers in Oran rose 50 per cent and in Algiers 30 per cent. But in Constantine they fell 14 per cent.143

  The triggers to rebellion were two decrees issued in September 1916, conscripting the class of 1917 and requisitioning workers for industries in France. Resistance to conscription had briefly flared among the Beni Chougram in October 1914. Otherwise, as elsewhere in the French empire, men took to the mountains and to brigandage to avoid enlistment. What gave the Batna rising its character, and its seriousness, was the element of leadership provided by major families and by the petty bourgeois. Both were concerned by reports that the privilege of buying replacements would be removed. The violence was concentrated in three areas, divided from each other but linked in that French penetration was recent without being complete or militarily strong. Where the French were present in numbers, or where the French had yet to reach, all remained quiet.

  The rebellion found Lutaud in a weak position. There were only 3,000 troops in the area, and about 8,000 in Algeria as a whole. He gave the dissidents until the end of November to come to order, and asked Paris for 16,000 men, artillery, aircraft, and armoured cars. The repression began in December and lasted five months. The effort was out of all proportion to the original end, employing 14,000 men to bring in 1,366 reluctant conscripts (many of whom may have come in by 30 November in any case). What, in reality, was at stake was the extension of French rule. Formally, Lutaud�
��s policy was one of conciliation. Sheikh Beloudini, in whose house the first steps towards rebellion had been hatched, was fined and imprisoned for a year; of 805 men convicted, only eight were executed. But the Senegalese soldiers raped and pillaged. Livestock and grain were requisitioned by the soldiers, fines were levied in kind, and the loss of manpower ravaged cultivation. The 1917 harvest was bad, and famine followed.144

  The rest of Algeria watched. However sympathetic others were to the response of the Constantinois, they were not prepared to revolt against French rule. The First World War may have marked a step in the emergence of an Algerian national consciousness, but the behaviour of the population as a whole was characterized by attentisme, not by action.

  Most significant was the passivity of the mountains around Oran and of the western Sahara, for it served to isolate Morocco. Oran itself was the most Europeanized of Algerian conurbations; southern Oran and the desert beyond had felt the hand of the French army shortly before the outbreak of war. Senussi influence penetrated no further westwards; equally, the adjacent centres of Moroccan resistance, in the middle Atlas Mountains and around Tafilalat, did not spread eastwards. Morocco, like Lyautey, remained a law unto itself.

  In May 1914 Lyautey declared France master of ‘le Maroc utile’. By taking Taza, he had opened the route from Fez to Oran. The coastal areas, the ports, and the towns were in French hands, and their inhabitants were benefiting from the order and commerce brought by French rule. Resistance was confined to rural areas and was divided—not least by the small Spanish holdings to the north at Ceuta and Melilla, and to the south at Ifni.

  But to achieve this France’s military commitment to Morocco jumped from 38,000 men to 80,000 between 1911 and 1914. On 27 July 1914 the foreign minister told Lyautey that the fate of Morocco would be resolved in Lorraine. He was to withdraw to the line Kenitra-Meknes-Fez-Oujda, abandoning the hinterland and the whole of central and southern Morocco, thus releasing all European, Algerian, and Tunisian units for the western front, a total of thirty-five battalions. Lyautey argued that such a precipitate withdrawal would trigger a general insurrection. Instead, he released twenty of the sixty battalions available to him with immediate effect, promising a further twenty as the situation developed. By June 1915 forty-two battalions had returned to France. Rather than concentrate his forces on an inner perimeter which would still be too extensive for effective defence, Lyautey proposed instead to maintain forward positions and to continue with an offensive posture. This would enable him to strip his interior, the cities, and the coast to meet the needs of metropolitan France. His object, he insisted, was not territorial extension: ‘si nous avons attaqué c’était pour nous défendre mais non pour conquérir.’145 He aimed to hold for France that which France already occupied. In this he succeeded.

  Nonetheless, the main French concentrations were in the north, and their obvious weakness to the south. Lyautey’s defences around Marrakesh rested on the co-operation of the great Caids of the High Atlas. His principal threat was Ahmad Haybat Allah, also known as el Hiba, who used Spanish territory around Ifni as an enclave and had a base at Tiznit. Although he had been roundly defeated by Mangin in 1912, el Hiba was reactivated by the war and its promise of German assistance. Now, however, his former ally Haida ou Mouis threw in his lot with France, and by 1915 Haida had driven el Hiba south of Tiznit. In July 1916 el Hiba made contact with the Germans operating out of the Canary Islands. They provided him with a subsidy. In November 1916 a submarine landed a Turco-German mission headed by the former German consul at Fez, Edgar Pröbster. Pröbster bore the promise of weapons, also to be delivered by submarine, but French cruisers foiled any further landing. Nonetheless, el Hiba triggered a rising along the High Atlas to the Tafilalat, and in January 1917 Haida was killed. Threatened with the collapse of their position south of the Atlas, the French committed 4,000 troops. Formally speaking the policy of collaboration remained unchanged: Arabs still outnumbered soldiers in the mobile column, and whenever it appeared the local tribesmen denounced el Hiba. But Henri Gouraud, who had replaced Lyautey while the latter was minister of war in Paris, refused to create any permanent garrisons, with the result that the situation was no more than contained and el Hiba remained at large.146

  To the north the main apparent threat in August 1914 came from the Berbers of the Middle Atlas. Furthermore, Lyautey had to contend with the thrusting instincts of those raised in the Mangin school and anxious to finish with Morocco in order to return to the real war in France. On 13 November 1914, in direct defiance of Lyautey’s instructions, Colonel Laverdure mounted a raid on Moha ou Hammou and his Zaian followers, the winter having brought them down from the mountains to el Herri, near Khenifra. Initial success turned to disaster. Laverdure and 622 men were killed, and the French garrison driven back to Khenifra for the rest of the war. Only in 1917, when Gouraud penetrated the Middle Atlas from north-west to south-east, dividing the Beni Oudren from the Zaians, did the French again resume the offensive. Lyautey began to plan a second road through to Algeria.

  Although the Middle Atlas proved the most protracted and insoluble of French military problems in Morocco, it was too isolated from the coast—and the Berbers too internally divided—for it to be easy for the Germans to aid the insurgents there. Much more accessible were the Mediterranean coastline and the mountains of the Rif, buttressed at one end by neutral Spanish territory. Ahmad al-Raysuni received a total of a million pesetas, in instalments, from the Germans. But it was almost entirely wasted money. Raysuni’s enemy was Spain, not France, and he was quite happy to pass the war playing off the three European powers against each other and drawing in the proceeds. The likelihood of his co-operating with the Central Powers was yet further diminished with the emergence of a rival leader in the Rif.

  Abd el Malek was an Algerian living in Tangiers. More importantly, he had been an officer in the Ottoman army and was the grandson of Abd el Kader, the hero of Algerian resistance against France between 1830 and 1847. In March 1915, accompanied by German and Turkish advisers and aided by German deserters from the Foreign Legion, Abd el Malek left Tangiers for the country around Taza. By the end of the year he had raised a force of 1,200 men, and in the summer of 1916 was reckoned to have 1,500 operating north-east of Taza. The Turks declared him to be emir of Morocco. More helpfully, the Germans gave him 100,000 pesetas a month, rising to 300,000, and by March 1918 to 600,000. Nonetheless, Abd el Malek’s relations with his German advisers were fraught. The first, an engineer called Franz Far, came without weapons and was reported by Asif Tahir Bey to be no more than a mouthpiece for German propaganda; he died in isolation in November 1915. The second, Friedrich Albert Bartels, also did not bring weapons, and his military effectiveness was achieved principally through his rallying of ex-legionnaires. The French persuaded the Spanish to tighten their customs arrangements, thus interrupting the flow into the Rif of smuggled rifles. Nonetheless, arms were abundant. The problem for both Far and Bartels was that weapons were successfully smuggled into the Rif, but that they tended to fall into the hands of those tribesmen closest to the coast. In July 1916, for example, a consignment of 3,000 rifles and 2 million rounds got through to the tribes.147 In early 1918 the German military attaché in Madrid, who co-ordinated the agents in Morocco, decided to push Kühnel out of his lair in Larache in the hope that he could get on better than Bartels. France put a price of 250,000 francs on Kühnel’s head, but he remained at large until the armistice. In June the French concentrated 6,000 men to defeat Abd el Malek, driving him north to Kifan. Germany’s money enabled Abd el Malek to compensate those tribesmen who accompanied him for the crops which they forfeited, but in September 1918 they were beaten again in a five-day battle at Kifan. With the approach of winter Abd el Malek’s tribesmen began to surrender. On 1 November he fled to Spanish Morocco.

  Lyautey’s dispatches to Paris anticipated co-ordinated action by the tribes, prompted by German agents and sustained by German subsidies, in each of 1915, 1917, and
1918.148 This may have been a device to prevent further reductions in the strength of the French army of occupation. In practice, Germany’s activists in Morocco consistently failed in their efforts to produce synchronized action among the tribal leaders. France’s commitment was to guerrilla operations little different from those which they might have anticipated without war in Europe. Lyautey’s penetration of Morocco did not advance, but nor did it retreat. And within the periphery the inner core remained secure. Indeed, the French hold became stronger, not weaker. Lyautey took the threat which Germany posed to the coast and towns with seriousness. In many other colonies, both French and British, German citizens found their activities only gradually curtailed in 1914–15. In Morocco, Carl Ficke, a German businessman, and three colleagues were summarily executed on 2 August 1914. Lyautey became increasingly preoccupied with the U–boat threat to Rabat and Casablanca. But if these were reflections of exaggerated fears, outwardly his demeanour was calm, confident, and authoritative. Morocco played host to three trade fairs during the course of the war. Agricultural improvement and road construction continued. The message to those resident in Morocco’s cities was clear enough: France’s power was immediate, Germany’s remote and apparently ineffective.