Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  Among primary accounts, I was lucky enough to find the vivid and absorbing memoir of Dr Charles Édouard Hocquard – Une Campagne au Tonkin (Hachette, 1892, reprinted by Arléa in 1999 with meticulous annotation by Philippe Papin). Those who are enthusiasts for the novels of Patrick O’Brian would discover in Dr Hocquard a sort of real-life Stephen Maturin, whose boundless curiosity is matched by the wonderful clarity of his written French.

  Just as I recognize the obvious limitations of sanitized official accounts of events, and the often self-serving nature of senior officers’ memoirs, I am all too conscious that junior ranks frequently tell lies about their own lives – on the page, as well as in the pub. When reading veterans’ memoirs I have allowed a discount not only for lapses of memory but also for the tendency of story-tellers or their ghost-writers to reshape, embroider or simply invent in order to give the public of their day the type of material that they expected. Some cross-checking has occasionally been possible, but in the end the sifting process can only be a matter of reasoned guesswork. When in doubt, I have tended to omit particular anecdotes; I am thankful that much of the real historical value of such memoirs in fact lies in their more mundane passages.

  I owe my publisher particular thanks for allowing me an unusual amount of space both for the photographs that I have collected over the years, and for proper captions; I hope that both will help bring alive for readers the men and the events described. I am equally indebted to John Richards for his patient and careful work on the sketch maps. The names of many obscure spots mentioned in early accounts are absent from modern maps; in fact, of course, some may only have figured in the handwritten notes of junior officers, who were obliged to include in their after-action reports some roughly phonetic version of a name told them by a camel-driver or a goumier. However, the sites of several historical engagements can be located, at least to within a mile or so.

  MY OPPORTUNITY TO VISIT even a handful of the Legion’s Moroccan battlefields in the autumn of 2007, through the generous and patient help of my nephew Graham Scott, has been among the greatest pleasures of this project, and in Graham’s unique case I am happy to make an exception to my usual rule of listing my acknowledgements in strictly alphabetical order. Our travels in the south of the country taught me valuable lessons about the unique conditions of desert visibility, immediately answering questions that had long puzzled me in the bald accounts of several actions. That I was able to find the hilltop of Astar in the Rif, and to walk the ground described in Captain Pechkoff’s account of the fighting of 5 – 6 June 1925 – ground still scattered with artillery fragments – was due to Graham’s determination; to the efforts of our interpreter Hassane el Khader; and to the pure good luck of an encounter in the hillside scrub with a remarkable paratrooper-turned-farmer named Abd el Malek. In the Middle Atlas, on one of the more memorable afternoons of my life, it was Graham’s experience of driving 4x4s in extreme terrain on six continents that got us across the Tichoukt Massif to El Mers before the pursuing thunderstorm could wash out the rudimentary track zigzagging along 16 miles of sometimes unstable ledges.

  My other grateful acknowledgements for help during the preparation of this book are as follows: to John Ashby, for generously sharing his files on P. C. Wren; the late M. Raoul Brunon, of the Musée de l’Empéri, for photos; Dr Simon Chapman; René Chartrand; Dr Anthony Clayton; Roger Cleeve; Major Gordon Corrigan; Captain David Craig; Mick Crumplin; Adjudant-Chef Philippe Dalfeur, 1er RE (Chef du Secrétariat de Képi Blanc); Kerry Denman; Jim Dowdall; my agent Ian Drury, of Sheil Land Associates; Martin Earl, of HP Bookfinders; Peter Edwards; Gerry Embleton, for locating – yet again – an elusive and indispensable source; Will Fowler, as so often; John Franklin; Penny Gardiner, warrior-queen of editors; Andrew Grainger, editor of the British Commission for Military History journal Mars & Clio, for sharing his photos of the Djebel Sahro; John Hadidian; Ian Heath; Vincent Lieber, Château de Nyon, Switzerland; Keith Lowe, of Orion Publishing; the late Adjudant-Chef Charles Milassin (4e REI, RMLE, 2e REI); Kate Moore; Dr David Murphy; in particular, Thamaz Naskidaschvili, Paris, for his tireless researches on my behalf; John Neal; Brian Nicholls; Dr David Nicolle; Ronald Pawly, Antwerp; Alex de Quesada, Tampa, Florida; Frank Reeves; Sylvan Rossel, Swiss National Library, Berne; Philip Smith; John Thompson; Francois Vauvillier, Paris; Jean Vigne; Rosemary Weekley; my brother Dick Windrow, for his patient and generous assistance in the virtual world; the late Jim Worden, and John Robert Young, for photographs. In Morocco: Abd el Malek, Hassane el Khader, Takki el Bakkali, Frédéric Sola and Jurgen Moller. Finally, to the staff of the London Library, the British Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University of Sussex Library.

  MCW

  RINGMER, EAST SUSSEX, MAY 2009

  Prologue:

  ‘Bloody Week’

  The public deludes itself with the most erroneous ideas about the true nature of military valour. There are no heroes . . . I have never seen any. What I have seen is men doing their duty worthily and conscientiously, that is to say aiming and firing, taking cover just enough to have some shelter but not enough to hinder them from shooting, standing up when ordered and advancing without allowing themselves to stop because of the enemy’s fire, even at its most intense.

  Captain Léonce Patry, 18971

  IN THE END, it had hardly taken an hour to capture the hilltop gun battery that had threatened the advancing French troops for days past. Below, staff officers murmured in pleased relief as their sweeping binoculars picked out blue figures with tell-tale red képis and trousers spreading out over the summit – searching the undergrowth, herding groups of prisoners, or simply resting around the captured cannon, swigging from their waterbottles in the muggy heat. From the brow of the hill, the soldiers could gaze curiously down between the unfamiliar oriental trees over the ancient city that spread out for miles along the loops of the river. To the west, great columns of dirty smoke rose to meet the low late-afternoon clouds from the fires that had destroyed the central district, still glowing sullenly here and there despite the torrential spring rains of the past two days.

  The hill had been planned as tomorrow’s objective, but the leading infantry had made faster progress southwards than expected, reaching the bottom of its slopes by mid-afternoon that day. With enemy cannon thundering from the summit, General Montaudon had decided that whatever Corps had at first intended, he could not keep his division simply sitting there under fire. His Metropolitan regiments of young conscripts had done surprisingly well, but they always needed careful handling, and the past few days of street-fighting had put a continual strain on their nerves. Men forced to remain inactive under fire for too long have time to listen to their fears; a contagion of uncertainty can pass from man to man, and it becomes difficult for their officers to persuade them to leave cover and move forward when the order is finally given.

  Montaudon had formed his brigades in a semi-circle around the north and west sides of the hill; his flanks were secured by other divisions; on his left, his colleague Grenier had led his men nearly a mile further southwards, bringing the hilltop under artillery and machine-gun fire from behind. At 4pm Montaudon had given the signal, and his infantry had surged forwards willingly enough. In the centre of the north slope one of his three battalions of the Foreign Legion had shown the way, ignoring caution and simply charging with fixed bayonets. In the event, casualties had been remarkably light.

  WE MAY PERHAPS ALLOW OURSELVES to imagine a handful of those légionnaires on the hilltop in the aftermath of their assault. Lieutenant Dupont of the 5th Battalion is about to order them to make sure that no armed adversaries are still hiding under cover – there is supposed to be a big cave somewhere nearby. These were the first soldiers to reach the battery, and their officer is in high spirits; with any luck this exploit will earn him a citation for the coveted red-ribboned Cross, which will help him towards promotion. His eye falls on a squad sitting around a cannon tipped sideways on a patch of torn-up tur
f, one spoked wheel splintered and its bronze barrel splashed silver by the hail of shot from one of General Grenier’s mitrailleuses. There are a couple of ripped corpses in odds and ends of blue uniform tangled up in the trash of broken ammunition boxes, dropped shells and gun-tools. The thought occurs to Dupont that these salauds had been as lazy as they were ignorant – they had been here for weeks, yet they had built no breastworks around the guns to protect the crews.

  One of the mutilated bodies seems to be rather small and slight, and a pale young soldier, himself only a few months in uniform, is staring down at it in horror, crossing himself and muttering in some foreign gutteral: ‘É hanù en Tad, hag er Mab, hag er Spered-Santel – Elsé revou groeit . . .’. Some of the other youngsters also seem too preoccupied to be of any use as scouts; best let the sergeant pick his own men from the vieux moustaches. The NCO is a man in his late thirties, with a leathery, pockmarked face under his whiskers; he is set apart not only by the gold sleeve-stripe on his threadbare blue greatcoat, but also by a silver medal on his chest, which hangs from a white ribbon with an exotic eagle-and-snake symbol.

  At his officer’s order the sergeant nods, twitches the peak of his képi down, unslings his rifle, grunts at two or three of the other older men, and leads them southwards off the summit. They move in a loose, watchful scatter, down towards the gap between two small lakes; on their left, a dramatic fissured pinnacle thrusts up nearly a hundred feet, crowned by a small, shining-white temple. On his way down the slope the sergeant pauses to stare at a weird, leafless tree that seems to consist entirely of sharp-pointed dark brown scales – they remind him of a lizard he saw once in Mexico. He comes back to himself with a start at the slamming of a volley from behind the trees a hundred yards away; then he relaxes, as he hears a rattle of rifle-bolts and a voice chanting measured orders – it’s just an officer having prisoners shot.

  Even a veteran of the Mexican expedition might have been startled to learn that within a couple of weeks the French generals would have massacred nearly 20,000 men, women and boys. This was, after all, their own capital city – for this imagined scene on 27 May 1871 takes place, of course, in the arboretum on the Buttes-Chaumont in Paris.

  BY 1 APRIL 1867, when this park had been ceremonially opened by Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, his luck and audacity had already been failing him. While Chancellor von Bismarck pressed ahead with the unification of Germany under Prussian dominance, Napoleon’s incorrigible meddling abroad had cost him any chance of foreign alliances. At home, the hectic outward glamour of the Second Empire could no longer conceal the syphilitic decay beneath. With the grip of his dictatorship slipping, Napoleon tried to liberalize his regime, but each easing of controls simply encouraged his enemies to snatch for more. The extremist ‘Red clubs’ that had previously played hide-and-seek with his police in the twilight now openly preached a Jacobin uprising, while constitutional Republicans extended their electoral hold on Paris and most other cities. Meanwhile, the emperor’s long-argued and sensible plans for correcting the Army’s chronic lack of trained reserves were obstructed by a combination of politicians suspicious of any move to ‘bring the population under military control’ and sclerotic generals instinctively defending the status quo.

  Tired, discouraged and painfully ill, Napoleon increasingly let himself be swept along by events, and in July 1870 they dragged his empire over a cliff. A diplomatic quarrel with Prussia was handled with peevish stupidity, of which Bismarck took such expert advantage that within two weeks the Paris crowds were baying for a march on Berlin. To the incredulity of many commentators, on 19 July 1870 France rushed into a war against ‘the greatest military power that Europe had yet seen, in a bad cause, with its army unready and without allies’.2 Nevertheless, even pessimists had never imagined that the gleaming military machine crafted by Generals von Roon and von Moltke would destroy or encircle France’s two field armies within just six weeks. The Army proved itself outclassed in every aspect of preparedness, organization and staffwork, and in much of its operational leadership. Many regiments fought bravely when given a chance to do so; the Germans made costly tactical blunders and paid a high price in lives; but most French generals allowed themselves to be herded blindly around the countryside until their badly supplied armies could be destroyed in detail. By mid-August Marshal Bazaine’s army of 180,000 was already encircled at Metz, and at Sedan on 2 September Napoleon himself passed into captivity with 100,000 of Marshal MacMahon’s troops. Three days later his empire fell, unlamented, and a Third Republic was proclaimed under a provisional ‘government of national defence’.

  Bismarck declined to oblige its ministers with an immediate peace settlement, and Moltke continued to drive a broad corridor across northern France to the Channel and the Atlantic. On 20 September, the cavalry of two German armies linked up to encircle Paris, and Moltke soon established an ‘Iron Ring’ around the capital. The new French government (based first at Tours, and later at Bordeaux) was little more than a title, still trying to invent itself day by day; nevertheless, the response to what was now a ‘people’s war’ was immediate. While Parisians flocked to join the National Guard, the Republic – in the person of the 32-year-old war minister, Léon Gambetta, who escaped Paris by balloon on 7 October – began conscripting men for replacement armies in the south and north-east, to be built around those fragments of the Imperial regiments that remained at liberty.

  THE CRIPPLING INCOMPETENCE of the French Army’s mobilization that summer had not prevented white and Arab regiments from the Algerian garrisons from reaching the front, but the four battalions of the Foreign Legion (the Régiment Étrangère, RE) had not at first been summoned. They were legally prohibited from serving on French soil, and many of these 3,000-odd mercenaries were Germans. Since returning to Algeria from Mexico in 1867 they had been used largely as a labour corps, distracted from their road-building only by cholera, typhoid and a few indecisive bandit-hunts. At first they were simply moved around to replace the garrisons shipped off to Marseille; but after the disaster of Sedan orders arrived on 6 October that the RE was to send two battalions to France without delay.

  There was nothing incompetent about the Legion’s mobilization. In just four days, most German légionnaires were transferred into the 3rd and 4th Battalions, and the 1st and 2nd (I/ and II/RE) were landing at Toulon. By 14 October they were 400 miles to the north-east at Pierrefitte, and that day Colonel Deplanque’s 60 officers and 1,457 men were reinforced with a battle-shocked group of about 450 other foreigners. These were the surviving one-third of a 5th Battalion (V/RE) of duration-only volunteers hastily raised at Tours during September, who had been driven out of Orleans after hard fighting on 11/12 October against General von der Tann’s Bavarians. Filled out with various drafts from French units, the Foreign Regiment was allocated to XV Corps in General d’Aurelle de Paladines’ new Army of the Loire.3

  Gambetta, eager to break the siege of Paris from the south, sent d’Aurelle north to retake Orleans; but after winning France’s only outright victory, over the (heavily outnumbered) Bavarian corps at Coulmiers on 9 November, the Army of the Loire was forced backwards from Loigny on 2 – 3 December. Lieutenant-Colonel Canat led what was left of the Foreign Regiment on an agonizing retreat through the snows of the cruellest winter in memory, and by the time the troops reached Saint Florent on the Cher on 10 December they had dwindled to a single 1,000-strong battalion.4

  On 18 December, at Chappelle Saint Ursin, the Legion survivors provided the backbone for a new three-battalion ‘marching regiment’ patched together with 2,000 Breton conscripts – boys who did not speak French, had never fired a rifle, and wanted only to go home. Some of the experienced Legion NCOs and soldiers were dispersed amongst them, but the new regiment’s combat value was limited. On 7 January 1871 the troops were loaded into freezing trains to go and join General Bourbaki’s Army of the East, near Montbéliard in the Franche-Comté.5 On 15 – 17 January, Bourbaki’s attempt to relieve the besieged fo
rtress of Belfort failed in the hills around Héricourt, despite odds of two-to-one in his favour; his freezing, hungry army was pushed back in a near rout, and 85,000 men sought internment in Switzerland. The remains of the Foreign Regiment were not among them; they were at Besancon on the Doubs river when, at the end of January, news arrived of a general ceasefire.6

  DESPITE THE REPUBLIC’S almost unbroken series of defeats, including the surrender of Metz on 27 October, Paris had held out under siege for four months. The capital’s defences enclosed an area measuring about 7 miles by 6, with a population of nearly 2 million; it was never in danger of actual assault, since its ramparts were too formidable and its garrison too large. It was guarded by a ring of artillery forts up to 3 miles outside the walls themselves, which were massive earthworks faced with brick and masonry, surrounded by a cavernous ditch dominated by 93 artillery bastions. Within this ring the military governor, General Trochu, had (on paper) several hundred thousand men, including the equivalent of nearly 30 regiments of regular troops and 6 more of sketchily trained Gardes Mobiles. In theory, he also had under command 59 regiments of the ‘active’ Garde Nationale de Paris, but in practice these were barely capable even of manning the static defences, and were a threat to public order.7 Parisians had rushed to enlist in their district (arrondisement) units, but many from the desperate workers’ slums joined simply for the pay and the food rations, and most received no meaningful training at all. Many were outspokenly hostile to the ‘quitters’ of the regular army, and furiously resisted any attempt to bring them under military discipline.