Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  The tribesmen regrouped, and then charged the hovering goumiers, who turned tail (as they were expected to). The trumpets of the two pale-blue-and-crimson cavalry squadrons yelped them forwards into a counter-charge with the sabre, but the crowd of Arab riders parted and sucked them in, and when the troopers rallied and cut their way back out of the mêlée the saddles of both the captains were empty. Demesloizes’ bugler cracked his cheeks to call in one of the disordered squadrons as they fell back past the blue-and-white line of légionnaires, and the colonel formed what was described as a ‘small, irregular square’, with about 70 légionnaires in each of three faces, the troopers in the fourth, and the two guns in the centre. Covered by the other squadron, this little formation then retreated slowly across the grassland, pausing to fire when the enemy got too close, until they reached a rise where they could take up a proper defensive position. They held off further mounted and foot attacks for about an hour, until the tribesmen gave up; the steady conduct of the young Germans in their first action was particularly praised.17

  Reunited with the baggage and the nervous Mobiles, Demesloizes continued his mission, not reaching a rendezvouz with another Legion company at Tlemcen until June. Both finally returned in late August to the HQ at Mascara, where they found the three Legion battalions that had returned from fighting the Prussians and Communards. Oran province was not troubled further during the uprising.

  THE TROOPS FIGHTING IN THE ALGÉROIS had needed support against the Kabylies, however, and in May the governor-general ordered the Foreign Regiment to provide a 500-strong detachment. With only two battalions in total this was easier ordered than accomplished; however, three companies of III/RE were scraped up from Mascara and Saida, and these 12 officers and 585 men formed a marching battalion under Major Gache. Reaching the village of Alma on 27 May, they were incorporated into a mixed column under Colonel Desandre, along with six depot companies of Zouaves and Algerian Skirmishers. The column marched on 30 May, to link up with other troops under General Cérez and relieve the besieged village of Dra el Mizan; this was accomplished on 5 June, when the Legion battalion pursued the Berbers back up the heights above. Until mid-July they carried out aggressive sweeps – in General Grisot’s euphemism, ‘visiting’ villages – along the Oued Sahel and on the southern slopes of the Djebel Djurdjura, the southern wall of Greater Kabylia.

  The troops suffered a modest but continual drain of casualties in this hill fighting. Skilled snipers from concealed positions, the Berbers never willingly defended ground, preferring to fall back into thick cover after doing as much damage as they immediately could to the leading company. Then they would disperse, only to close in again on the flanks and rearguard, by day or night; indeed, a favourite tactic was to tempt troops forward to occupy exposed ground that they would later have to abandon at dusk, giving the Kabylies a chance to pounce as they fell back. Only converging columns had a hope of forcing them to stand and fight; cavalry were no use except for couriers and escorts, and to get results columns ideally needed up to half-a-dozen battalions of infantry, with mule-packed mountain artillery, engineers and medical troops to make them self-sufficient, and several thousand pack-mules – lines of communication were too vulnerable in the wooded hills to count on any resupply catching up with the column later.

  Ideally, the force was led by an infantry vanguard marching without packs, followed by a detachment of sappers to clear natural obstacles, and then the main force. Behind these came what the French called the ‘convoy’ – the baggage train, escorted by cavalry and infantry on its flanks: first the artillery, then the ambulance unit, then the service troops, baggage and led animals. Last of all came a strong rearguard, again marching without packs; both vanguard and rearguard were accompanied by cacolets – mule-litters for casualties.18 As the column reached each dominating height to right or left, infantry had to leave the line of march and struggle up through rocks, scrub and trees to ‘picket’ the hilltops, climbing down again to form the rearguard as the column passed them, in a constant rotation on both flanks. When the column had to thread through a pass it halted until strong pickets had been pushed through and beyond the defile and up on to the heights on both sides. Units took turns for these exhausting duties, but by late in the day every battalion was tired out.

  Crossing any ridge rising across the line of march was particularly dangerous, since the patient hill tribesmen were past masters at rushing a crest as soon as it had been abandoned and firing down into the retreating rearguard. The rearguard had to follow the column down the far slope ‘by echelons’ – in leapfrogging companies, taking turns to pause and cover each other’s next bound, while scooping up any earlier flankguards as they went. They had to keep in close order (not easy in broken terrain) so as to concentrate their firepower on the crest behind them, always falling back along a flank so as not to mask the fire of the men covering them. Care had to be taken never to muddle companies together during these manoeuvres, so that men were always led by their familiar officers; the senior officer commanding the baggage train had to remain with the rearguard at all times, controlling its progress with an eye on the tail of the column ahead.

  Crossing a river through a valley bottom required a coordinated square-dance by a strong advance guard, flank guards both up- and downstream, and the rearguard. Anyone who has ever walked in any kind of strung-out column knows that it ‘concertinas’ repeatedly, as the terrain slows or speeds up different groups independently. It took skill and unremitting concentration for officers to avoid potentially fatal dislocations to a column of several thousand men and mules; a four-battalion force with support and service units might be strung out over nearly 2 miles, as it moved like an inchworm through broken country full of hidden enemies. Fifteen miles between first light and late afternoon was an excellent rate of progress in the hills, and any temptation to cut corners could be disastrous (in 1856 one careless column in Kabylia suffered the loss of an entire battalion and a half).19

  WHILE MAJOR GACHE’S MARCHING BATTALION of III/RE had been struggling up and down the hills of Kabylia, I/, II/ and V/RE had arrived back from Paris; they were stationed at Mascara, Sidi bel Abbès and Tiaret respectively, thus giving the northern Oranais a garrison strong enough to ensure its tranquillity. On 17 July, Gache’s unit in the Algérois were ordered back to Mascara, but when they marched into Maison Carrée to board the trains on the 25th they found new instructions. They were to march on westwards to Miliana and join a column under Colonel Nicot of the 11th Provisional Infantry – mostly returned prisoners-of-war from Germany – operating against the Beni Menacer tribe between Miliana and Cherchell on the coast (see Map 3). Nicot had ten other companies of odds-and-ends; it took a week to organize the column at Miliana, and only 600 mules were available to carry their ammunition and rations for ten days – about half the usual requirement of pack-animals.20

  The troops marched on 2 August, getting an enthusiastic send-off from the frightened townspeople; they were to climb towards a second column coming up from Cherchell through the steep wooded hills and gorges between the Oued Chélif and the coast. On the 5th, two companies took a dozen casualties as they clambered up slopes thick with holly-oaks to the pass of El Anacer, and reckoned that they only reached the crest thanks to the quick reloading of their Chassepots compared with the muzzle-loaders of the enemy – in thick cover the Berbers’ long-barrelled flintlock bushfars were as deadly in practised hands as rifles.21 On 20 August the Kabylies began submitting, and on 5 September Major Gache marched his légionnaires back into Miliana. No longer in danger, the colons this time gave them the contemptuously cold reception to which soldiers in Algeria were now accustomed.22

  MADE VENGEFUL BY THEIR FRIGHT, the settlers used the crushing of the rebellion as their opportunity finally to destroy the foundations of what remained of Arab tribal independence. Once the Army returned to barracks the Arab Bureau and the caids were stripped of their prerogatives, and many hundreds of thousands of acres of tribal land we
re simply confiscated. Over the years that followed, impossibly severe collective fines forced the sale of as much again; many communities were utterly beggared, and others were still paying off the debts twenty years later. General Hanoteau of the Arab Bureau had accused the settlers of dreaming of ‘a bourgeois feudalism, in which they will be the lords and the natives the serfs’, and after 1871 this dream became reality.23 The settlers’ final victory in their long struggle with the Army limited military control to the remote fringes of the Sahara, and their political triumph under the Third Republic bred in them a well-founded confidence in their immunity from effective opposition in Paris, where Algerian affairs were handled by the Interior Ministry. From the early 1870s many people even in Metropolitan France sincerely believed the jaw-dropping myth that Algeria was simply ‘France Overseas’.

  IN FRANCE ITSELF, MEANWHILE, the young republic was wrestling with the task of redesigning the French state. The National Assembly remained firmly monarchist; the moderate Adolphe Thiers presided over the provisional de facto republic – at that date, literally with a small ‘r’ in official documents – from September 1871 to May 1873, though hampered by his minority in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Assembly). In November 1873 the Assembly replaced him with Marshal MacMahon, whom they expected to be friendlier to the monarchist cause; they voted the old soldier a seven-year presidential term, but in the event his loyalty to the rule of law would prove stronger than his reactionary sympathies. The Third Republic, as formally constituted, was belatedly born out of the inability of the wrangling parties to agree any alternative. In February 1875 a constitution was finally approved – by a single vote – and elections in 1876 at last returned a Republican majority to the Chamber (though not yet to the Senate or upper house).

  However, until MacMahon’s honourable resignation from the presidency in January 1879, following a trial of strength with the Chamber over constitutional prerogatives and the spiteful purge of several generals, monarchists of various stripes retained a strong grip over the executive for most of the decade.24 Officers who had been given emergency promotions and commissions in the National Defence armies struggled – usually in vain – to hang on to their ranks and careers as their dossiers were examined by General Changarnier’s ‘revising’ commission of old-school regulars. When the commission had finished its work the officer corps had largely the same complexion as it had in the summer of 1870; throughout the 1870s any officer of ‘exaggerated’ Republican opinions was wise to keep them to himself, and military bands were even forbidden to play the Marseillaise.25

  Inevitably, the post-mortems into the events of 1870 drove some senior scapegoats into the wilderness and reforms were tentatively sketched out, but overall the serious failures of organization and command at the highest levels were not subjected to any very painful parliamentary scrutiny. (There were, after all, nineteen generals sitting in the Assembly, and more than 10 per cent of its members were either active or retired officers.)26 In most respects the Army would make its own mind up, in its own time and in decent privacy. However, there could be no ignoring the huge advantage in numbers enjoyed by the Prussians in 1870 – some 400,000, plus 200,000 trained reservists, against 250,000 with no reserves. The need to remedy that disparity was urgent, since during the 1870s many believed that a war of revenge against Germany to liberate Alsace-Lorraine – ‘la Revanche’ – would not be long in coming.

  Since 1832, the ranks of the French Army had officially been filled by voluntary enlistment for a seven-year term, but (massively) topped up by a conscription lottery of that year’s 20-year-olds. This effectively excused the roughly 20 per cent from the middle classes who drew a ‘bad number’, since for a sum equivalent to about two years’ pay for a labourer they could hire a proxy to serve in their place.27 Bounties encouraged re-enlistment after the first seven years, and the NCOs were found from among these rengagés. The new conscription law of 27 July 1872 stated that all 20-year-old Frenchmen must personally report for military service; proxies were forbidden, though students in higher education might be exempted. On their discharge after five years with the colours, the ‘first portion’, then about 25 years old, would pass successively through the Active Reserve (four years), the Territorial Army (five years), and the Territorial Reserve (six years), until the Republic released them from their obligations at the age of 40.28

  An essential factor in French politico-military affairs during the early decades of the Third Republic was the political Left’s instinctive distrust of all generals, and they resisted reforms to streamline the Army’s system of high command for fear that it might be turned not against Germany but against them. Such fears were understandable – given that anyone aged over about 35 could clearly remember the military coup whereby Napoleon III had taken power – but they were groundless. However instinctively conservative, the officer corps as a whole was far more passionate for national stability and order than for political power (by 1878 even General Gallifet, the ‘butcher of the Bois de Boulogne’, had become a loyal republican and a willing colleague of the socialist Léon Gambetta).29 Though they were never convinced democrats, the chafing of the generals under intrusive political scrutiny was largely a learned response to the political favouritism that had bedevilled them under the Second Empire, and they recoiled from any hint of confrontation with the legitimate government.

  On the Left, although some Radicals still yearned for the levée en masse in place of what they persisted in regarding as a sinister state-within-a-state, most Republicans recognized the absolute need for strong defence forces, and also that in the country as a whole the Army was now respected and popular. The Left hoped that virtually universal conscription would not only remove the notorious immunities that the wealthy had previously enjoyed, but would also dissolve the mental wall between the rank-and-file and the political nation, thus insuring against any threat of a reactionary clique using the Army against the people. For their part, the Right dreamed not of a ‘nation in arms’ but of a ‘school of the nation’; they hoped that mass subjection to military discipline (and a quiet return of the Church through the barrack gates) would inoculate the youth of France against radical ideas, and return it to civilian life as a new generation of sturdy, obedient and right-thinking patriots.30

  A law of March 1875 fixed the strength of the Line infantry at 144 regiments each (eventually) to be increased from 3 to 4 battalions, each of 4 rifle companies, giving the regiment a peacetime strength of about 2,000, plus officers and depot personnel. The Foreign Regiment, now officially reverting to its old title of Foreign Legion (which had always been used anyway), would conform to this organization, but would have about 50 per cent more manpower.31 The whole Legion was to be stationed in Oran province in western Algeria, with regimental headquarters at Sidi bel Abbès,32 a small town about 40 miles south of Oran city. Significantly, from now on the Legion would be not only the largest European regiment in the French Army, but the only one made up entirely of volunteers.

  IN 1871, FRANCE HAD BEEN ANXIOUS to embrace any Alsatians and Lorrainers who chose to leave the lost provinces. Between June 1871 and 1880, new enlistments in the Legion were officially (though not in fact) completely reserved for Alsace-Lorrainers, who were now technically foreigners but who could qualify for French naturalization by a single five-year term in the Legion.33 The 5th Battalion disbanded in December 1871; its Frenchmen were transferred to Line units, any remaining war-duration volunteers were discharged, and other foreigners were posted to I/RE.34

  The influx of patriotic young Alsatians and Lorrainers made the Legion of the later 1870s a notably willing and well-disciplined force by contemporary standards. Its mettle was not tested in battle, but in February – March 1877 some 500 Alsatians of the 3rd Battalion stood up well to a punishing Legion march in the old style. General Flogny formed the usual type of mixed column to show the flag on the high plains and down into the Sud-Oranais – one battalion each of Zouaves, Algerian Skirmishers an
d Legion, a squadron each of Africa Light Horse and Spahis, and an artillery battery. The III/LE left Sidi bel Abbès on 6 February; a three-week march via El Aricha and Ain ben Khelil took the column down to Ain Sefra and Thiout between the northern fingers of the Saharan Atlas, where they bivouacked for a week. They finally returned to the comparative comfort of Sidi bel Abbès on 26 March after a round trip of more than 350 miles, without encountering any resistance.35

  Such marches covered about 28 miles in each ten-hour day, starting at first light and ending in the late afternoon; the men were rested for ten minutes every hour, and made an hour-long halt at mid-morning to brew coffee. Trained légionnaires took pride in their endurance on these marches along stony tracks or across the grassland, and a number of memoirs from about a decade later describe them. The first few days were hard, but once men got into a rhythm they marched at ease, rifles slung, smoking their pipes, sometimes singing or humming some popular song. The officers, who rode, occasionally ordered the drums and bugles to play if tired spirits needed lifting up the next long slope. Private Silbermann recalled a five-day march over the plains from Saida to Géryville, starting at 5am after a 3am reveille; below Ain el Hadjar, 8 miles south of the barracks, all signs of cultivation petered out into sand and gravel, broken only by clumps of grey thyme scrub, and later the endless sea of halfa grass. (In the whole five days Silbermann’s unit encountered only one other human being: a Spanish settler riding up from Géryville, revolver and dagger at his hips, who passed them unsmiling, without a word.)

  On the treeless steppe there was no firewood at all, and campfires were made with thorn-scrub and the dried camel-dung that was to be found all along the tracks. At the long halt for mid-morning coffee, each man had to tip a quarter-litre of water from his canteen into the squad cauldron – no contribution, no coffee.36 The men were allowed 2 litres per day each, plus 15 litres for each squad to cook the evening meal, from the reserve carried on each company’s three baggage-camels; wells were too far apart to be reached every night, and their yellowish, bad-tasting water needed hard boiling. The food was bulky enough but dull – a typical evening meal might be rice studded with a few lardons of fat pork. The men slept on the hard ground in sixes, wrapped in their greatcoats and a single blanket, in ridged bivouac-tents buttoned together from their individual canvas sections. In bad weather on the high plains the wind blew the tents apart, rain might fall for days on end, and sometimes the cold and discomfort made sleep impossible.