Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  PART ONE: - SOLDIERING IN THE TIME OF FEVER

  Chapter 1. - The Tools of Empire

  Chapter 2. - ‘France Overseas’

  Chapter 3. - La Mission Civilisatrice and the Straw Hat Trade

  Chapter 4. - The Year of the Five Kings

  Chapter 5. - General Vengeance and King Zinc-Nose

  Chapter 6. - Tiger Country

  Chapter 7. - ‘A Calling Devoid of Allurement’

  PART TWO: - MAROC

  Chapter 8. - The Instruments of Downfall

  Chapter 9. - Sixty Thousand Dead Camels

  Chapter 10. - Blood and Sand

  Chapter 11. - The Lyautey Drill

  Chapter 12. - Two Kinds of War

  Chapter 13. - Falling towards Fes

  Chapter 14. - The Immaculate Raiment

  Chapter 15. - The Lobster Shell

  Chapter 16. - Flawed Blades

  Chapter 17. - ‘The Most Indomitable Race in the World’

  Chapter 18. - Dropping the Baton

  Chapter 19. - The Reckoning

  Chapter 20. - ‘Obscure and Unknown Sacrifices’

  Epilogue:

  Appendix 1 - Summary of Foreign Legion operations in Europe, 1914 – 18

  Appendix 2

  Appendix 3 - P. C. Wren, 1875 – 1941

  Notes and Sources

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Praise for Martin Windrow’s The Last Valley:

  ‘Hard to praise too highly . . . meticulous and magnificent . . . Windrow is master of every detail . . . gripping reading’

  Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Martin Windrow’s book is nothing less than a landmark in miliary history’

  Richard Holmes

  ‘I know I’m never going to read a better book this year’

  James Dellingpole, The Times

  ‘Martin Windrow has pulled off a remarkable feat’

  John Crossland, Sunday Times

  ‘Enthralling . . . Windrow gives one the very essence of battle . . . His character sketches are deft and acute’

  Allan Massie, Literary Review

  ‘Great lucidity and humanity . . . moving . . . judicious . . . vivid’

  Martin Woollacott, Guardian

  ‘An extraordinarily good description and analysis of the events, so that non-experts can get a real understanding . . . It is Keegan, with footnotes.’

  Colonel John Wilson, British Army Review

  Our Friends Beneath the Sands

  MARTIN WINDROW

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  An Orion ebook

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Orion Books

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  © Martin Windrow, 2010

  The right of Martin Windrow to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of

  binding or cover than that in which it is published without a similar condition,

  including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 2978 5841 6

  Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd, Bridgwater, Somerset

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  Orion Books

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  MAP 1 Neuilly, north-west Paris, April 1871

  MAP 2 North-east Paris, May 1871

  MAP 3 Western Algeria, c. 1871 – 1900

  MAPS 4a & 4b Tonkin, and area of operations 1883 – 85

  MAPS 5a & 5b Vicinity and siege of Tuyen Quang, 1885

  MAPS 6 Dahomey, 1892

  MAP 7 Tonkin, c.1895, with detail of the Yen The region, c.1892

  MAP 8 & 9 The advance from Majunga to Antananarivo, 1895; and general map of Madagascar, 1895-c.1905

  MAP 10 Morocco, c.1900

  MAP 11 Algerian-Moroccan border country, c.1900 – 1905

  MAP 12 Lower Oued Guir and Oued Zousfana, c.1900 – 1905

  MAP 13 Figuig, May – June 1903

  MAP 14 El Moungar, 2 September 1903 (after Holtz)

  MAP 15 Central Western Morocco, from the Chaouia to the High Atlas

  MAP 16 Boudenib, September 1908

  MAP 17 Fes, May 1912

  MAP 18 Northern Morocco, c.1906 – 1921

  MAP 19 The Middle Atlas: the Zaian front, and the Tache de Taza

  MAP 20 The Rif Wasr, 1925 – 26; (detail) the central Ouergha front

  MAP 21 Recommended post layout, Morocco, 1920s – 30s (after Vanègue)

  MAP 22 Remains of post at Astar, 2007

  MAP 23 South Central and South-East Morocco, c.1930 – 34

  MAP 24 South-West Morocco: the Sous and the Anti-Atlas, c.1929 – 34

  Glossary and abbreviations

  Transliteration

  All transliteration of Arabic is basically phonetic; it always involves the insertion of chosen Roman vowels, and there are often several alternative Roman consonants, so sources transliterated into French, English, Spanish and German over the past century inevitably confront the reader with inconsistencies. The choice of rendering the term for a watercourse as oued or wad, for example, for a walled village as ksar or qsar, and tribal name prefixes as ouled or awlad, beni or bani, is clear enough, but others are less so. I lost count of the number of spellings for the Middle Atlas Berber tribe rendered in these pages as the Ait Segrushin, and of the apparently random spellings of place names on both early and modern maps printed in different countries – for instance, the mountain heartland of the Ait Atta Berbers is variously given as the Djebel Sahro, Jebel Sarho or Jbel Saghru.

  After a brief moment of insanity when I contemplated trying to standardize all spellings, I recalled that this book is not intended for linguistic specialists, and I took an entirely arbitrary decision: linguistic purity and consistency have been ruthlessly sacrificed to clarity of recognition. Most Arabic names are given in the French forms found in general sources (using, e.g., djebel, oued, Chaouia, Tahami el Glaoui rather then jbel, wad, Shawiya, T’hami al-Glawi), but even so I have not been rigidly consistent (e.g., preferring Dawi Mani over Doui Menia). For Berber names I have usually copied the forms used by Professor Ross E. Dunn and/or David M. Hart. I have omitted diacritical marks; and I have sometimes deliberately chosen among alternative spellings to reinforce the differences between similar names for different persons and tribes (in a very few cases a common alternative spelling is given in parentheses after the first use of a name).

  A similar problem faced me in the chapters on African and Indochinese campaigns, where I have adopted a similarly cavalier solution. Vietnamese names are usually given in their separated syllables without hyphenation, e.g. Tuyen Quang, but these days it would be pedantic to insist on Ha Noi or Hai Phong instead of the familiar elided forms.

  In this, as in all other matters, any errors and infelicities are entirely my own.

  Glossary

  Abbreviations of French unit titl
es, etc

  Picture captions

  Photograph Section One:

  1 The Legion’s unexpected battlefield in the streets of Paris, spring 1871. This is the Rue Peyronnet in the western suburb of Neuilly (today, Rue Peronnet, three streets north of the Avenue Charles De Gaulle). During 16 – 19 April 1871 it marked the left-hand edge of the Foreign Regiment’s perimeter in the street-fighting against Dombrowski’s National Guards; this and the parallel Boulevard d’Argenson one block south were the most heavily shelled part of the regiment’s sector, where four days in the line cost the Legion 129 casualties.

  2 The ruins around the canal harbour of the Basin de La Villette, crossed by the Foreign Regiment on the morning of 27 May 1871. Most of the visible devastation was caused not by shellfire but by the previous day’s massive fires and explosions in the large grain warehouses. (Both images Eugene Schulkind Paris Commune Collection, courtesy University of Sussex Library)

  3 A gateway of the citadel at Bac Ninh in Tonkin; the town was stormed by General de Négrier’s légionnaires on 12 March 1884, but the Chinese regular garrison fled without defending the citadel itself. The outer defences of the town – and of Son Tay, which the Legion did have to storm – were almost identical. Note the fringe of bamboo spikes projecting downwards from the wall parapets, and the huge pile of bricks raised to block access to the gate tunnel for troops assaulting across the moat bridge. (Engraving Lancelot, from Hocquard’s photo)

  4 Small single-screw Navy gunboat on the Clear river, probably at Phu Doan, December 1884. French troops relied upon the rivers for many tactical movements, and on the gunboats themselves for fire support and some transport – here several dozen troops are shown crowded onto the deck. This is presumably the same class of vessel as Mitrailleuse, the gunboat anchored off Tuyen Quang fort during the siege; note the single gun at the bow, and the armoured crowsnest mounting what looks like a light ‘Gatling’-type revolving cannon. With a crew of 12 ratings, these boats were an ensign’s command – a dream posting for any adventurous young officer. (From Hocquard)

  5 The fort at Hue Thué in the Yen The highlands was skilfully held by troops of the Tonkinese rebel mandarin De Nam, and a major French operation was required before it was captured at the third attempt in January 1891; the Englishman Frederic Martyn of II/1st RE had taken part in a failed attempt the previous month. The drawings made later by a 2nd Brigade intelligence officer show elaborate Chinese-style brick walls protected outside by panji-sticks, both in the open and concealed in ‘wolf-traps’ (left); beyond these were a palisade and a thick abatis. (From Manington)

  6 This squad, probably from II/1st RE, are halted in the jungled Yen The hills near Cho Trang in 1892. They wear white sun helmets and grubby khaki-drill jackets from Naval Infantry stores, and only the lightest patrol kit, with a single cartridge pouch to save weight. The Tonkinese Skirmishers wear their dark blue cotton uniform with a flat-topped bamboo ‘salacco’ hat. Cho Trang was a notoriously dreary and unhealthy post, where the English légionnaire George Manington narrowly survived blackwater fever. (Jean Vigne)

  7 To keep the forts in the Sud-Oranais supplied, single convoys of up to 4,000 camels, spread out over miles, were not unusual – and neither were losses of up to 30 per cent during the round trip. A working camel with a load of c.300lb needs water every third day and at least 60lb of forage daily, and these were often impossible to find on the Zousfana tracks. A camel can go for up to five days grazing on camel-thorn alone, but it then needs grain feed and a couple of days’ rest in good pasture, and if it gets thirsty it stops eating. Many drivers skimped on grain to increase their profits; losses were also aggravated by careless loading and overwork by the drivers, who for the sake of the French compensation (and the saleable hide) sometimes deliberately ill-treated beasts that could have survived with proper treatment. (SIHLE, courtesy Jacques Gandini)

  8 On prolonged marches in the Sud-Oranais the men could load their packs on the baggage camels and carried only light equipment, but their fatigue clothing and their boots suffered badly from the thorn-scrub and sharp stones. Even this blurred photo shows the raggedness of their uniforms after a few weeks in the wilderness. (Courtesy Jacques Gandini)

  9 Water camels resting at Boudenib, c.1910. Two of these 50-litre (c.11-gallon) iron-bound wooden kegs was the maximum safe load; up to four times as much could have been carried in native water-skins, but these were not available in sufficient numbers, and white troops did not understand how to care for them. The kegs leaked even if well prepared, and more than 5 per cent wastage per day had to be expected. A battalion of 1,000 men needed at least 300 camels to carry five days’ water, the normal reserve in the Sud-Oranais. (Photo Garaud)

  10 The Taghla pass, looking northwards towards Figuig oasis; the Oued Zousfana flows through it on the west side below the Djebel Zenaga, with the steeper wall of the Djebel Taghla beyond the sandy corridor on the east bank. This was the route followed on 31 May 1903 by Captain Bonnelet’s 18th (Mounted) Company 1st RE. (Photo Bourgault)

  11 Classic image of a sergeant (left) and three légionnaires of 2nd RE at Figuig during the brief occupation following the bombardment in June 1903. This postcard bore the postmark ‘Beni Ounif de Figuig’, from the garrisoned railhead that had been established 5 miles south of the oasis. At that date full decorations were worn on the campaign uniform; the tall légionnaire, second left – whose two re-enlistment chevrons show that he has served since at least 1893 – displays medals for Tonkin, Madagascar and Colonial service, but unlike his comrades he is still a private 2nd class. The covered képi with sun-curtain, and the broad blue body belt, were not actually exclusive to the Legion; they were also worn by the Bats d’Af. (Photo Leroux)

  12 Looking roughly south from the walls of Taghit fort; the minaret at left shows how close the fort was built to the ksar below. At right is the signal station on the summit of the western ridge above. This photo cannot date from earlier than 1905, when General Lyautey ordered the signallers’ station to be improved into the substantial blockhouse visible here, named Fort de l’Éperon; during the attacks of August 1903 it was a much more rudimentary position. (Courtesy Jacques Gandini)

  13 Algeria’s Great Western Erg begins immediately on the eastern edge of the oasis of Taghit on the Oued Zousfana. The French fort there was built in 1901, on a ledge of the cliff rising above the west side of the palm groves – i.e., behind the photographer’s left shoulder. During the attacks of August 1903 the mixed garrison, including légionnaires from 22nd (Mounted) Company/2nd RE, came under fire from the high dunes only 300 yards away.

  14 Père Charles de Foucauld of the White Fathers at his hermitage at Beni Abbès, with Captain Roger de Susbielle, the Native Affairs officer for the lower Zousfana region. Susbielle, commanding at Taghit, kept in intermittent touch with the missionary, who had been a cavalry officer and a resourceful intelligence agent before he found his vocation; in September 1903 Father de Foucauld rode to Taghit to help care for the wounded of El Moungar. After nine years at Beni Abbès, in June 1910 Foucauld would move eastwards into the central Sahara and build a second hermitage c.35 miles from Tamanrasset, 8,500ft up in the Ahaggar mountains, where he wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Tuareg language. He was killed by hostile tribesmen in December 1916 during the Senussi risings. (Photo J.C. Humbert, courtesy Jacques Gandini)

  15 The ‘proprietor’ from a two-man Legion mule team, with their loaded mount (see Fig 22 below for a note on the gear usually carried). Apart from the curtained képi replacing a sun helmet, this man is typical of the légionnaires of Captain Vauchez’s 2nd Half-Company, 22nd (Mounted)/2nd RE who were ambushed at El Moungar on 2 September 1903. He wears the white fatigue blouse and trousers, with his blue waist sash under his rifle belt and Y-straps; the only other items carried on his body are his haversack, waterbottle and slung Lebel. (Musée de l’Empéri, courtesy M. Raoul Brunon)

  16 Lieutenant Selchauhansen, mortally wounded at El Moungar, was an artiller
y officer in the Danish Army who had obtained a Legion commission in 1894, serving thereafter both in North Africa and in Madagascar. The story that the Danish Prince Aage was inspired to join the Legion by a boyhood meeting with Selchauhansen seems to be groundless. (SIHLE, courtesy Jacques Gandini)

  17 El Moungar, looking west towards the djebel; in the foreground, stones cover the mass grave of the légionnaires killed on 2 September 1903. The obelisk, raised later, stands about 13ft high on the central of the three low mounds defended by Captain Vauchez’s half-company – this feature’s undramatic contours gave very little natural protection. Both the monument and the grave received large memorial plaques; these were desecrated by passing tribesmen over the decades, but when the Saharan traveller Ivan Baumgarten visited the site in 1987 the obelisk still stood. (Courtesy Jacques Gandini)