Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  Since I am not an academic, the period described here is not bounded by strictly defined academic limits, but it suits my purpose. I have taken as my point of departure the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 – 71; since this shaped French military affairs (and to a large extent, the consciousness of the French nation) until 1914, it seems impossible to omit an introduction both to the army that fought it, and to the Legion’s modest part in it. After the next decade of total preoccupation with preparing for revenge on Germany, from 1881 France began to make a parallel investment in its previously haphazard drive to acquire a second overseas empire, to compensate for the loss of its first to Britain in the 1760s. For various reasons, I believe it can be argued that its earlier conquest of Algeria between 1830 and roughly 1860 stands rather apart, although this is summarized in Chapter 2. I have ended the story in 1935, the year following the submission of the last undefeated tribesmen in Morocco, since that Hadrianic moment marked the end of the period when France was acquiring rather than seeking to hold its empire.

  While the raising of the Legion predated these campaigns by 50 years – and while it had already won a strictly local reputation in Algeria, the Crimea, Italy and Mexico – its huge enlargement, and its widest employment, were a direct consequence of the dynamic expansion of the French colonies that started in the early 1880s. In 1875 the Legion was a single regiment of 4 battalions totalling 3,000 men; by the early 1930s it was a corps of 6 regiments with 18 battalions and 6 cavalry squadrons, plus 5 independent companies of mounted infantry, 4 of sappers and 2 artillery batteries, with a peak strength in 1933 of more than 33,000 men. It was those colonial campaigns that created the image of the Legion that we still recognize: the Legion of sun-flapped képis and agonizing desert marches, of fever-haunted jungle forts and desperate last stands. It was for those campaigns that the Legion provided the ultimate insurance – the ‘heavy infantry’ backbone, often rather ponderous but completely reliable – within the mixed columns and expeditionary forces that France assembled.

  When I first considered the old Legion’s campaigns as a subject for a book they presented, of course, a particular problem. Some years ago I wrote an account of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the culmination of the French Indochina War of 1946 – 54. That subject had an obvious progression – the classic ‘three-act story arc’; by comparison, the story I was now addressing seemed less shapely. I only began to relax into the task when I recognized that after France’s episodic lunges for the components of an empire before 1900, the second part of the story moved towards a natural climax, as the task, the instruments and the man (in the person of General Hubert Lyautey) all came together. France’s overseas adventures led it, and eventually the greater part of the old Legion, to Morocco – the last and greatest theatre of the drama, where for thirty years the Legion undertook some of its most intense and characteristic soldiering.

  THE NATURE OF THE OLD LEGION’S CAMPAIGNS was naturally dictated not only by terrain and climate but by the adversaries it was sent to fight. Westerners think in terms of a war – a finite historical episode; it has causes, both sides have aims and objectives, and it follows a roughly linear progress. But to many of the peoples whom the colonial armies confronted a century ago, the idea of a specific war had little meaning; they regarded warfare as a normal, often a more or less constant aspect of their way of life. The novelist Charles Frazier has put into the mouth of a nineteen-century Native American character the complaint that, ‘These new white people took all the fun out of war and just won and kept winning, as if that was all that mattered’.1 One of the most characteristic figures of turn-of-the-century Morocco, the great robber baron Ahmad er Raisuli, was quoted to the effect that the colonialists brought security, but at the cost of narrowing a man’s horizons: ‘In the old days everything was possible. There was no limit to what a man might become. The slave might be a minister or a general, the scribe a sultan. Now a man’s life is safe, but he is forever chained to his labour and his poverty.’2

  Given that during Raisuli’s lifetime the limited Spanish penetration of his territory put purely notional constraints on his continued accumulation of gold and spilling of blood, this lament must be understood as poetic rather than literal, but it does illuminate a particular view on life. It is a view that is still encountered in some parts of the world even today. After returning from some months spent ‘embedded’ in an infantry battalion in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in 2007, Dr Duncan Anderson recounted conversations with local fighters. One of them refused to believe that the British Army’s deployment there was anything more than an (entirely honourable) revenge for the costly defeat of the Berkshire Regiment at Maiwand in July 1880; and another asked, in honest puzzlement, who – while all these British warriors were in Afghanistan – was doing the fighting back home in Britain?3

  Another intriguing parallel between the French colonial experience and the current situation in Afghanistan concerns civil development. In his important study of British operations there in 2006 – 7, A Million Bullets (London; Bantam, 2008), James Fergusson quotes a British officer as urging that development personnel cannot achieve anything if they are forced to wait until peace is firmly established over large areas. They, too, should be embedded with the troops, with the remit and the resources to begin work immediately any local success is achieved, because it is precisely that work that will give the local people a stake in the establishment of stability. (A Cabinet Office appreciation released in April 2009 seems to recognize the force of this argument; it is, of course, the pure Galliéni/ Lyautey doctrine of the ‘oil patch’, described in Chapter 6 of the present book.)

  Raisuli’s complaint ignored another feature of the Moroccan campaigns that might seem counter-intuitive: the fact that as soon as they had been defeated, clans who had resisted the French fiercely, and had paid bloodily, were quick to enlist in French service under their own chieftains in order to continue fighting their neighbours in the eternal cycle of mutual raiding. Throughout their history, weaker tribes had always sought alliances with stronger, and the prestige of a chief rested not only on his physical courage and leadership qualities but on his persuasive ability to achieve such alliances. 4 It is a paradox that a century ago, at a time when most Europeans never even examined what today we might call their racial arrogance, not all relationships across ethnic divides were dictated by today’s sulphurous preoccupation with racial identity. To grasp the character of some of the colonial campaigns visited in this book we have to make a leap of imagination further back than the ideologies of the twentieth century, which have collectively demonized the enemy of the day. The behaviour of some Moroccan groups suggests that yesterday’s enemy might have been seen as no more intrinsically ‘bad’ than the rival runners in a race.

  Given all this, it seemed sensible to introduce the accounts of the Legion’s campaigns with brief descriptions of those non-European enemies, in an attempt to give them a little more dignity than the anonymous brown mass in the rifle-sights with which some commentators have been content.

  A DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC of colonial soldiering was the limited numbers of men involved, and thus the limited scope of combat operations. Attuned to Western military history, we automatically expect the account of a war to build steadily towards a climactic conclusion – a decisive victory and defeat. This seldom, if ever, applied to colonial campaigns. On the European side, the sheer physical difficulty of moving and supplying armies in roadless wilderness, and keeping the troops healthy enough to march and fight in difficult and disease-ridden country, imposed its own limitations. In most cases their opponents were disunited, unable to assemble large forces in the field or to support them for long (a fact that makes the great exception – the Abd el Krim brothers’ campaigns in the Rif hills in 1921 – 6 – all the more remarkable). After the initial advances, the natural rhythm of such campaigns became that of counter-insurgency warfare: an endless cycle of small patrols and convoy escorts punctuated by ambushes, and by occasional
exhausting – and often vain – attempts by larger columns to bring elusive enemies to battle. This does have one compensation for the reader: just as in the American frontier campaigns (a story with some similarities to that of the old Legion), when combat did occur it tended to be dramatic and on a human scale. The names that spring from the dusty pages are usually those of desperate company actions, when no more than a couple of hundred men suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives, against great odds. These incidents tend, with repetition, to get ‘name-checked’ in a fairly perfunctory way; rather than attempt to include them all, I have tried here to bring the specific character of some of them to life in a little more detail.

  Consequently, I have made a number of detours from chronological history to examine a few specifics of how the French Army actually carried out this sort of soldiering, since I have always believed that too many accounts of military operations fail to address the physical and tactical realities as experienced at the level of small units and individuals. I have tried to keep the text digestible by banishing to the end-notes the more relentless detail of weapons, equipment, organization and various other subjects – including some references to a few battlefields that I was able to visit. Hard-core readers who share my taste for this sort of thing can always use two separate bookmarks while reading.

  FINALLY, IN ANY REVIEW of the history of a European colonial military corps, the 800lb gorilla in the corner of the room is, of course, colonialism itself. Since it cannot be ignored, we should be honest enough to take at least one steady look at it, and this seems to me a better place to do so (with an appeal for the reader’s patience) than scattering relevant comments throughout the body of the book.

  The author cannot summon up any interest in attempts to judge long-dead generations by the liberal consensus of our own day, or in adopting shifty pieties of phrasing. Out of its own cultural neuroses, each society and generation chooses or invents its own demons – whether it calls them heretics, witches, degenerate Jewish cosmopolitans, imperialists, godless Commies, infidel crusaders or eco-polluting smokers. Those who insist upon studying our ancestors only through the narrow prism of twenty-first-century racial sensitivity are surely as blinkered in their way as the white supremacist bigots they denounce. By definition, such mental tunnels blind us to context, and context is everything. It is a bleak fact that human life has always depended fundamentally upon competition for territory and resources, and a broad view of history suggests that aggressive ‘imperialism’ has been the default setting of human affairs on most of the world’s land masses for some 7,000 years. Seen against those countless strata of ashes and skulls, any claim that some special wickedness was committed by a few brief generations of white men in pith-helmets must surely fail. Historically, the process of territorial conquest has been as unremarkable as water running downhill; while it is one of the grimmer strands in the human story, it is such a constant that it hardly seems to admit of analysis simply in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. If we wish to understand ourselves we had better face the fact that we are not herbivores.

  In nineteenth-century Africa and Asia the results of such confrontations were obviously decided by the superior weapons and more advanced military organization available to the European invaders. It is equally obvious that we cannot simply stop thinking once we have accepted those brute facts; if we dismiss any moral dimension at all, then we may be tempted towards the sort of perverted Darwinism that rationalizes genocide. We all acknowledge today that the mainspring of European colonialism was ruthless greed. When we confront the long-term consequences in, say, the former Belgian Congo, it is almost inconceivable that any alternative history could have had a worse outcome. But the whole world is not the Congo, and in order to avoid sounding like Nazis it is surely not necessary for us to overcompensate to the point of going into sentimental denial about the nature of pre-colonial cultures. To characterize these in terms of Arcadian innocence is adolescent fantasy. All of the societies conquered by France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were ancient, and some were richly complex, attracting the sympathetic fascination of many cultured colonizers; but it does not necessarily follow that they were the more admirable in any absolute sense.

  IN MOROCCO, FOR EXAMPLE – the arena of many of the events described in this book – indigenous rulers were chronically unable to provide their people with stability or protection. At the end of the nineteenth century, the sultanate was still respected as the focus of religious authority, and (theoretically) as a just arbiter between the feudal and mercantile interests through which society functioned. In practice, however, the sultan’s authority depended on his having the energy, guile and military strength to gather taxes and enforce decrees, and if he lacked these, then local power was quickly usurped by others. Where a national or regional ruler could indeed wield that power, there was no effective check on his behaviour. To say that the machinery of such pre-modern states at every level was, by today’s anglophone standards, brazenly corrupt and self-seeking is simply a category error: government was a structure designed for individual aggrandizement, in the absence of any real concept of a public commonwealth that we would recognize. The whole point of acquiring power in such societies was (as it still is, over large parts of the world) to share advantage and riches with one’s own extended bloodline and followers at the expense of others; this is not recognized as misgovernment, but as a leader’s moral duty towards his own dependants.

  In Morocco the ruling elites were unashamed predators, who competed for dominance in cycles of rapacity that recall those of early medieval Europe. At every level they extended their wealth and power at best by armed protection rackets, and at the frequent worst by massacre and pillage. The far-sighted ruler might keep the exploitation of the ruled within sustainable limits, but he had to balance this against a need to demonstrate and reinforce his authority and the dominance of his group by exemplary violence. This was achieved by putting other men to death, decorating his gates with their severed heads, throwing their women to his soldiery and seizing their goods.

  In the great majority of Morocco that was outside the practical control of the sultanate, robbery with violence and murder bedevilled populations struggling for subsistence. In the harsh northern hills the Rifian Berber farmers glowered at their neighbours – even their relatives – from loopholed blockhouses. In the southern wilderness of the pre-Sahara, where the oasis villages were built as walled castles, the clans of semi-nomadic pastoralists thrived or dwindled by aggressive competition for grazing-land and water, the exploitation of the productive oases and the profitable control of caravan routes. Waging blood-feuds against neighbours, raiding strangers and ambushing unlucky travellers were not occasional aberrations committed by criminals, but simply what many men did when they went out to work in the morning. In an unpredictable and marginal natural environment, life depended upon the calculation and pursuit of short-term advantage. The French may have brought new forms of exploitation to Morocco, but to claim that these were, by definition, ‘worse’ than the old ways seems a perverse stance for humanitarians to adopt.

  On reading the history of the colonial years, we may be repelled by European rhetoric about the white man’s ‘civilizing mission’ when we compare the most idealistic of the words with the most callous of the deeds; but despite many extreme cases to the contrary, the words were not invariably cynical, nor the deeds always shameful. It would, of course, be absurd to claim that any of the nineteen-century colonial armies were motivated by a protective care for their African or Asian fellow humans; but that did come to be true of individual officers, and it is undeniable that in practical terms colonial garrisons did bring at least some protection. We may surely say that to the colonized subsistence farmer, any reduction in the risk of tribal enemies or bandits stealing his flock and crops, looting and burning his home, cutting his throat and carrying off his daughters was presumably welcome. Preventing that happening was a job that could only be
done by hard men, shaped by a harsh world; but the colonial soldiers were still just men like any others, as mixed in their qualities and failings as those of any other time or place.

  With that thought I gratefully turn away, leaving the gorilla in peace in his corner; he has, after all, been dead for some time now.

  AMONG THE SOURCES LISTED in the select bibliography, I must pay particular tribute to the basic orientation guide for anyone interested in French colonial military history: Dr Anthony Clayton’s France, Soldiers and Africa (Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1988), which was recommended to me by a French publisher as simply the most thorough and accessible single text in either language. Another important source is Professor Ross E. Dunn’s Resistance in the Desert: Moroccan Responses to French Imperialism 1881 – 1912 (Croom Helm, 1977), which first opened my eyes to the academic research carried out by ethnographers into peoples who – by happy coincidence for me, if not for them – became the old Legion’s opponents. I particularly wish to record my debt to the researches of Jacques Gandini of Calvisson, France, author of books published during the 1990s under his own name and that of Extrêm’Sud Editions. Monsieur Gandini was most generous with copies of rare photographs from his collection, and his book El Moungar (1999), which draws upon extensive work in the Legion archives and those of the (then) Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre and the Archives d’Outre-Mer, was an indispensable source for Chapters 9 and 10. (All my more recent attempts to contact M. Gandini and his publishers have failed; if by chance any reader can advise me of a current address, I would be grateful.)