Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  South of the mountains, in a vague margin slanting roughly south-west to north-east from Ain Sefra through Laghouat to Biskra, the inhabited world petered out. Below this there was nothing but the silent, mysterious immensity of the Sahara desert, the haunt of scorpions and evil ghosts. There were men who had always crossed it, down fragile chains of wells whose secret whereabouts were passed from father to son, men who risked their lives for the sake of riches to be found in the far oases; there were others there who lived by preying on them; but for the great majority of Europeans and Arabs alike, the Far South was another planet.

  FRANCE’S RESUMPTION of the business of colonial empire, after a 70-year hiatus since the 1760s, had been almost accidental. Its first extra-European conquest was Algiers, one of the lairs of the Barbary pirates and slave-raiders who still preyed on Mediterranean shipping as they had done for centuries. General Bourmont landed his troops close to the city on 14 June 1830 for what was intended to be a temporary and local punitive expedition against the Dey of Algiers. At first the French tried to pacify a few small coastal enclaves on what was then a distant fringe of purely nominal Turkish suzerainty. They installed garrisons resembling human islands along the edges of this bewilderingly exotic, enticing and dangerous world, but they discovered that while Arab chiefs were always ready to accept bribes, they seldom stayed bribed for long. France had no plan beyond extracting some diplomatic profit from Istanbul in return for an early withdrawal. The boundaries of French control were uncertain and temporary, as was the policy of Paris governments, and there was no identifiable Arab leadership with whom to treat on more than a local basis – this was an entirely tribal society, in a constant state of flux.

  The French governorship alternated between hopeful conciliators and adventurers; periodic military defeats provoked harsh revenge and ‘mission creep’, and Paris soon grew indignant about the death rate from disease among the Metropolitan troops.3 This encouraged the raising of local Arab units to take over the burden: spahi cavalry and turco infantry, formed from groups of auxiliaries already serving under their own subsidized chiefs. The same imperative saw the re-raising in 1836 of a certain obscure unit of foreign mercenaries, a year after its original formation had been casually signed over to Queen Isabella II and shipped off to Spain as a political gift.

  In February 1841, the mercilessly clear-sighted General Thomas Bugeaud de la Piconnerie was appointed governor-general of what since October 1839 had been called ‘Algeria’; unenthusiastic about the original expedition, he had previously been sent to buy off (also to his own enrichment, it must be said) the ambitious Amir of Mascara, Abd el Kader. When the policy of subsidy and coexistence failed, Bugeaud was sent back to Algeria with strong reinforcements and a remit to pursue outright conquest. He was a veteran not only of Austerlitz – where he had fought as an infantry corporal – but also of Marshal Suchet’s army in the Peninsula, and his experience of counter-guerrilla warfare in eastern Spain had brutalized him. Bugeaud argued that simply reacting to attacks by the far more mobile Arab horsemen would always fail; instead he sent columns out to destroy their villages and prevent them from planting and grazing. His tactics of mounting these ruthlessly destructive razzias against the tribes were effective but cruel. He himself described them unflinchingly as a ‘chouannerie’, using the term for the French Revolution’s pitiless harrowing of the royalist Vendée in 1793.

  Bugeaud’s long tenure of command, until September 1847, enabled a systematic series of operations and the crushing of subsequent risings in many parts of northern Algeria, and by the time of his departure he had largely broken the northern tribes’ primary resistance. Others continued his ruthless work, and by 1854 French rule (or at least, freedom of movement) extended south as far as the Saharan Atlas range that barred the way to the desert. The Foreign Legion – as just one among other corps, both white and Arab – had fought in many of these campaigns.

  BUGEAUD’S GOVERNORSHIP had a legacy more significant than mere pacification. Like some old Roman, he was convinced of the benefits of ruling the Arab population through their own aristocracy, but he had also encouraged white immigration, dreaming of planting colonia of ex-soldiers. However, among the subsequent waves of settlers, poor peasants from Spain, Italy and Malta nearly equalled the numbers of the French. Despite the generous land grants that were periodically offered to lure small farmers, few Frenchmen other than short-term speculators felt any inclination to seek their fortunes in North Africa.

  The settlers who did come sweated out their lives, like frontier pioneers everywhere: they grubbed up rocks and stumps yard by painful yard, drained malarial marshes, ploughed and fertilized, and dug lonely graves for their children as drought and pests killed their crops. Some gave up the struggle, drifting into the coastal towns to seek wages, or selling their holdings to the expanding estates of richer men and being reduced to mere sharecroppers; but others toiled on stubbornly to build a future. As their numbers grew (from about 25,000 in 1840 to 280,000 in 1872, of whom some 160,000 were French-born or naturalized), they proved insatiable in stripping the local tribes of their communal farming and grazing land. The colons missed no opportunity to deprive Arabs of their rights to property, representation and justice – by purchase, trickery, and manipulation of both local and Paris politicians. Inducements offered to the Arabs themselves sometimes took the form of pretended access to French civil rights, but these carried the impossible price of giving up observance of Islamic law and were accepted only by a tiny handful of assimilés.

  Algeria’s history presents a remarkable contrast to that of Britain’s overseas dominions; while the latter increasingly sought separation from the ‘Old Country’ and were eager to accept responsibility for their own future, the Algerian colons pressed for ever more thorough assimilation into the polity of France. The Second Republic of 1848 granted universal male suffrage in France, of which white Algeria was blandly declared to be an integral part. The French in the colony acquired the right to send deputies (members) to the Paris parliament from the three départements of Oran, Algiers and Constantine, and non-French whites gained representation in local government. However, the application of much of the French legal code was initially limited to those areas that qualified – by demographic criteria – for heavily settled ‘civil’ as opposed to sparsely settled ‘military’ status. In the former the colons had a large measure of freedom of action, but in the latter the French Army, under the military governor-general, stood in their path.4

  The consequence was relentless pressure, through their deputies and lobbyists in Paris, to free as much territory as possible from the Army control that frustrated their rapacity. The settlers’ spokesmen pursued a long campaign to get the decision-making process called back to Paris, where remote and ignorant ministers would be more amenable to pressure from special interests. Anything that weakened the authority of the tribal chiefs (caids) furthered their cause, and in 1858 they succeeded so well that the incumbent of a newly created (though short-lived) Ministry of Algeria and the Colonies defined his policy as ‘the breakdown and dissolution of the Arab nation’, removing most of the chiefs’ powers and ‘taking the tribe to pieces’.5 One of the emperor’s leading intellectual opponents, Lucien Prévost-Paradol, would write that ‘It is necessary to bring in laws designed exclusively to favour the expansion of the French colony, leaving the Arabs thereafter to compete as best they can, on equal terms in the battle of life’ – a striking interpretation of the concept of égalité.6

  It may be counter-intuitive today, but it is undeniable that the paternalistic rule of the Army district officers of the Bureau Arabe – set up by Bugeaud in 1841 to have sole control, under the governor-general, over relations with the natives – was the latters’ best protection from the settlers; it was certainly recognized as such by the colons. A number of these officers genuinely worked to improve the lot of local populations, not only in terms of security of property and respect for religion and culture, but also by adva
nces in agriculture, infrastructure, health care and education.7 Their reward was the furious hostility of those who saw the Army’s proper role simply as enforcing European privileges.

  This hostility between the colonists and the military reached a climax in 1863 – 9, during a period of reforms instituted by Napoleon III following a personal tour of inspection in 1860. His programme was a typically wellintentioned but muddled attempt to use the Army’s authority to reconcile settler and Arab interests, but he was promptly demonized by the colons as ‘the Arab Emperor’, and his project as a tyrannical ‘régime du sabre’. The settlers more than recovered their lost ground during the weakness of his ‘Liberal Empire’ in 1869 – 70, and news of the collapse of the regime and the humiliation of the Army in the summer of 1870 was greeted in Algiers with furious glee. However, in the aftermath of the German victory the vainglorious local Committees of Public Safety discovered that the Army still had its uses.

  THE DEPARTURE OF HALF THE LEGION for France in October 1870 – on the heels of the great majority of the Zouaves, Algerian Skirmishers and Africa Light Infantry, as well as the Line units that had been stationed there – left Algeria with a total garrison of only 32,000, many of them Garde Mobile militiamen. However, no trouble was anticipated from the desperately weakened Arabs; in 1866 – 8 a series of natural disasters – swarms of locusts, animal epidemics and droughts, followed inevitably by famine, cholera, typhus and the plague – had killed some 300,000 among the Muslim population (perhaps more than 12 per cent). The unconcerned colons believed that the only Arabs who needed watching were those still unsubmitted tribes in the vague military borderlands between western Algeria and Morocco; here no frontier line had been agreed further south than about 90 miles from the Mediterranean coast, and this wild west of Oran province was therefore in a permanent state of uncertainty.8 Some tribes traditionally acknowledged the sovereignty of the Sultan of Morocco, others did not, and in the empty spaces between them herdsmen and raiders circulated at will.

  The French had treaty rights of ‘hot pursuit’, and in 1859 General Martimprey had led 15,000 men against the bellicose Beni Snassen tribe of the hills behind the coast north of Oujda (see Map 11).9 In 1864 the south-west had erupted when the powerful Ouled Sidi Sheikh, a loose confederation of linked clans with high religious prestige, encouraged a large but strictly temporary alliance of tribesmen from eastern Morocco to cooperate in a great raid into Algeria, and their pillaging extended as far north as the Tell. Although the Sultan of Morocco had been willing to leave border security to the French, the diplomats at the Quai d’Orsay had been nervous of invoking French military prerogatives, and it was not until April 1870 that General Wimpffen, commanding Oran Division, had been allowed to march 3,000 troops deep into south-east Morocco as far as the lower Oued Guir valley, a vital grain- and date-basket for all the tribes. Following this reprisal, the tribes astride the southern border were content to lick their wounds during the Franco-Prussian War.10

  In autumn 1870 the Algerian authorities were therefore not unduly concerned that the almost entirely German 3rd and 4th Battalions of the Legion – bulked out with about 500 new German recruits from France, and some Belgians – were now the only white troops in Oran province apart from unimpressive colon Mobile Guards based in the northern towns.11 On 10 October, III/RE were sent to replace a Bat d’Af at the bleak post of Géryville on the high plains (today, El Bayadh), with detachments to smaller posts nearby. Most of IV/RE went to Saida, with one company at the Legion HQ at Mascara. 12 That winter the légionnaires were both chilly and somewhat unkempt, since the stores had been ransacked to outfit the I/ and II/RE for France, and the battalions left behind were short of greatcoats, woollen trousers, knapsacks and belt equipment; they carried their kit in blanket-rolls and ammunition in their pockets until well into 1871. Luckily the tribes of the Oranais remained quiet, if watchful.

  IN OCTOBER 1870 it was the settlers who erupted first. Led by an Algiers lawyer, Vuillermoz, they defied the military authorities and launched a secessionist movement. A newly arriving governor-general did not even dare to come ashore, and commissioners sent out by the National Defence government in January – February 1871 were ignored, despite sweeping concessions that put local military commanders and Arab Bureau officers under the control of the colon authorities. The advances made by the settlers since 1868 had greatly concerned the Arab caids, whose personal authority was directly threatened. The withdrawal of garrisons, the news of the defeat and fall of the Empire, and the open contempt with which officers were now treated by the settlers had all cost the Army, in their eyes, its all-important baraka (that prestige and luck which is earned by strength and the favour of Allah). Now they interpreted the Paris government’s ‘Crémieux decree’, granting collective naturalization to Algerian Jews, as a threat to their religion.13

  The spark was struck in the Constantinois in the east. In January 1871 preparations to ship the 5th Squadron, 3rd Spahis to France led to a mutiny at El Guettar; Arab troopers murdered their officers and, with local rebels, briefly besieged the town of Souk Ahras.14 In mid-February the Ouled Aidoun tribe attacked El Milia, 95 miles north-west of Souk Ahras. On 14 March a chieftain named Mohammed el Mokrani brought his tribal league out in rebellion, and on 16 March some 6,000 Ouled Mokran and allied tribesmen wiped out a village fully 170 miles south-west of Souk Ahras. The rising was reinforced by a Berber religious brotherhood led by the marabout Sheikh el Haddad, who declared jihad on 8 April, and within a few days the rebellion was spreading throughout Kabylia and beyond.15 Tribes of Arabs and Berbers alike came out one by one, from the Hodna right up to the Collo peninsula, and as far west as the hills around Algiers.

  This rebuke to Vuillermoz’s initial boast that ‘four men and a corporal’ would be enough to restore order gave Prime Minister Thiers his opportunity to bring the shocked colons back under some kind of control. From the perspective of Versailles in March/April 1871, the Algiers separatist movement must have seemed to echo events in Paris and other French cities as yet another threat of national dissolution. Thiers named Admiral de Gueydon as governor-general, sending him with reinforcements to put down both white and Arab risings – the one by a stern show of force, the other by using it. Gueydon landed on 9 April; the garrison would soon be raised to some 85,000 men, of whom 22,000 would be actively engaged. By the end of April it was reckoned that they were facing about 100,000 rebels actually under arms; in the Constantinois and Algérois many colon farms were attacked or abandoned, civilians were massacred, and half-a-dozen villages and posts were cut off. Army columns now began a pitiless campaign of repression, which had essentially crushed the rebellion by mid-September; the rebels lacked all coordination, and each band was outgunned by the troops sent against it. However, at least 1,000 soldiers (and perhaps twice that number) were killed in the course of 340 engagements recorded between March and December 1871.16

  WHILE NEWS OF THE UPRISINGS naturally electrified the whole colony, the tribes of the Tell and the high plains south of Oran remained quiet; the Kabylies were no kin of theirs, and the local chiefs’ main concern was to deny the Ouled Sidi Sheikh in the south any opening to ravage their territory again as they had done in 1864. However, it was an attempt to counter the magnetic attraction of that formidable tribe that led the Legion into its only battle in the Oranais during the ‘great rebellion’. In mid-April 1871, two small mobile columns were assembled on the northern plains to march west and show the flag among the clans in the wooded border hills. The larger and more northerly, with IV/RE and two companies from III/RE, marched from Saida to Sebdou and back; on the way, 6th Company, IV/RE – almost entirely composed of new recruits, so at this date largely German – were detached southwards to the village of Magenta, where they joined a smaller mixed column led by Lieutenant-Colonel Demesloizes.

  The colonel was presumably glad to see Captain Kaufman’s 218 white-covered caps slogging down the valley towards him: he had two light guns, two squadrons of mainly wh
ite Africa Light Horse, and a couple of hundred irregular Arab mounted auxiliaries (goumiers), but his only infantry were three companies of hardly trained local Mobile Guards. The colonel had reports that an Ouled Sidi Sheikh chief, Si Kaddour ben Hamza, was planning a link-up with men of the Mehaia tribe somewhere south of Sebdou. Demesloizes marched about 50 miles south-west to the southern edge of the arid moorland of El Gor, camping on the night of 16/17 April east of Magoura (see Map 11) . Next morning his scouts brought word of a strong war party not far to the north, heading westwards for Morocco. Leaving the ‘moblots’ in camp to guard the baggage, the colonel took the Legion company, his cavalry and his guns after the tribesmen.

  Demesloizes caught up with them about 3 miles from Magoura. His two small cannon opened fire, and hundreds of Arab horsemen charged – a flutter of robes and head-cloths above the boiling dust, contorted faces, a thunder of hooves and crashing muskets, looming nearer and larger at frightening speed. A cavalry charge was much less dangerous to well-armed and ordered infantry than it seemed, but it took seasoned soldiers to understand that, and it says much for Kaufman’s youngsters that they kept their nerve, listened to the shouted orders, and broke up this first rush with rifle volleys. Even if the Arabs had waited until they were 200 yards away before kicking their mounts into a gallop across the scrubby grassland, the soldiers would still have had nearly half a minute before contact, and with bolt-action Chassepots even green soldiers should have been able to get off three rounds each. Once the charge closed to 100 yards a horse was a sizeable target; many of the 200 légionnaires ought to have made a hit of some kind, while the Arabs’ flintlocks, fired from the saddle, would have been much more noisy than dangerous.