Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  A well-fitting pair of boots was vital – broad in the foot, about half-an-inch longer than the toes, snug at the heel to prevent slipping and blisters, with the uppers heavily greased with tallow. No socks were worn; the men were issued with Russian-style foot-cloths to wrap round their feet, but hardened marchers often preferred to go barefoot inside their greased boots. Despite the regular route-marches during their basic training the newer men found marching for weeks on end hard going. The campaign packs weighed about 80lb, with big dixies and other camp gear teetering on top; the men wore coarse linen blouses under their coats, and when these became sodden with sweat the pressure of the pack straps chafed the skin raw. The folklore about stragglers being left to their fate was just that; one of the company subalterns always rode at the rear to keep men moving, and Silbermann describes NCOs pulling young men along by their waist-sashes while their packs and rifles were divided among their stronger comrades.37

  Within a few years French tactics on the southern plains, for which this tiring but uneventful excursion by III/LE had been textbook training, would be tested once again.

  THE ESSENTIAL NATURE of any French column on campaign was that it was composed of mixed arms, and always had a scatter of native auxiliary horsemen to act as forward scouts. The ideal mix of regulars was a colourful box of soldiers: a pale-blue-and-crimson squadron of Africa Light Horse and one of red-and-white Spahis, for solidity and superior acclimatization respectively; at least three battalions of infantry – pale-blue Algerian Skirmishers for agility and dash in the attack, and blue-and-red légionnaires for a rock-like base of firepower in the defence; and a two-gun section or four-gun battery of black-and-red artillerymen, for ‘shock and awe’.38

  The potential enemy on the plains comprised both concealed crowds of warriors on foot and highly mobile Arab horsemen – sometimes more than 1,000 of them. Expert at judging a marching column, they were easily able to fall back from a contact and hook around the flanks and rear, and dangerous when they did so. Marching across the plains, the column had its auxiliaries swirling well ahead as a mobile ‘door-bell’; the goumiers would always flinch from a sudden contact, but their task was simply to race back with the warning. Half the regular cavalry rode within sight but some way off on a flank, while the other half hovered in a protective line behind the infantry. In dangerous country the infantry marched in a single large open square – up to 1,000 yards on a side – enclosing the baggage-train and the guns. The foot soldiers still had to mamelon (literally, ‘to tit’), sending out platoons or companies to the flanks to picket any high ground as the square advanced; enemy warriors on foot were skilled at lying in wait under apparently minimal cover, and the goumiers were sometimes careless.

  If enemy horsemen were encountered, the French cavalry engaged first, but it was important that they remained well within range of the infantry’s massed rifles. To the frustration of these sabreurs they were seldom able to charge home against adversaries who simply drifted apart like smoke, seeking to lure them on and then close in from flanks and rear to trap them. Five hundred yards from the infantry, a single squadron of 160 (if kept on a tight rein) could safely attack 1,000 native riders; at twice that distance, it was risky to tackle half that number – the troop horses were much more heavily laden than the Arab steeds, and when they got blown and slow their riders were always vulnerable to surprises.

  It was unusual for the tribesmen to press home an attack on the main column. War for them was motivated by a mixture of machismo and hard-eyed economics, so their chosen prey were small detachments and isolated convoy escorts. When they did strike a column their aim was normally to divert it from a line of march that threatened the tribes’ villages or nomadic camps and herds. If they did try to break up the column the infantry battalions each formed their own smaller squares, ideally in a mutually supporting diamond or triangle pattern, with the baggage, guns and cavalry between them in the centre. Protected from all sides by the volley-fire of the infantry, the gunners could fire shrapnel to break up enemy concentrations, while the cavalry awaited a chance to charge out and pursue a retreat. Once it became clear that the cost of securing any loot was going to be prohibitive, the attackers usually sheered off.

  However, like all successful irregulars, the Arabs were accomplished counter-punchers; they understood how to retreat before a strong advance, staying in watchful contact until the chance came to turn and claw at its eventual withdrawal. If a column was retreating – deep in unfamiliar country, tired, far from water, slowed down by its baggage-animals and ration-bullocks, perhaps with significant numbers of sick in its mule- and camel-litters – then the tribesmen would close in eagerly on its rearguard and flanks. They watched like wolves for the slightest opportunity to cut off water-parties or isolated flank guards, and soldiers who straggled or got separated suffered cruel deaths.39 The Arabs might hook ahead to poison the next well with a rotting carcass; night camps would be relentlessly fired on by snipers to rob the nervy soldiers of their sleep, and infiltrated to cut throats, grab rifles and run off beasts. If the troops betrayed real signs of weakness or lack of alertness, allowing gaps to open up, then limited all-out assaults might be attempted. The Arabs did not expect to achieve grandiose massacres, and were happy for the chance to devour even a single platoon; in their culture, prestige was nourished by taking back to their families and elders any kind of material loot – particularly animals, modern rifles and precious ammunition (though sometimes more gruesome souvenirs). The further a column marched into the deceitful monotony of the wilderness, the greater the danger of its vigilance dissolving in the hypnotic rhythm of the march, and the higher the price it might have to pay.40

  IN APRIL 1881, THE QUIET LIFE ENDED for many French garrisons when the government led by Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta ordered a French occupation of Tunisia. This ramshackle and only nominally Turkish coastal beylik, neighbouring Algeria to the north-east, was hopelessly in debt to European bankers. The infant Italian state, desperate for some foreign adventure to give credibility to its claimed nationhood, was taking a predatory interest, but Britain did not want any single power to occupy both shores of the Mediterranean narrows. Bismarck was happy to encourage France into any military distraction from its eastern frontier, especially one that would cost it a potential European ally in Italy. About 5,000 troops from the Africa Army in Algeria (but none from the Legion) were among the 30,000 committed to an overland and seaborne invasion of northern Tunisia in the last week of April, and initial resistance was feeble. From the first, senior Africains were looking back over their shoulders, and in late May and June the War Ministry agreed to send home the troops from Algeria and many from France.41

  At the same time, however, something alarming was happening in the Oranais, and the colon newspapers were shrieking again. Since 1878 a preacher from Figuig calling himself Bou Amama had been attracting followers to his zaouia or religious centre at Moghrar Tahtani, a small oasis on the southern slopes of the Mountains of the Ksour in the south-western Oranais.42 By 1880 he was preaching holy war against the French, in the name of the seventeenth-century founding saint of the Ouled Sidi Sheikh. With many of the traditional chiefs of that confederation either in exile in Morocco, or making their own deals with the French to restrain their warriors’ raiding, his message was appealing to those whose memory of Wimpffen’s reprisals was fading after ten years. The religious prestige of such a charismatic marabout could occasionally weld together pan-tribal alliances; with the whole of Algeria groaning under the triumphalist colons, and tribes being displaced southwards by their land-grabbing, Bou Amama found many listeners. On 22 April 1881 the assassination of Lieutenant Weinbrenner, the Arab Bureau chief at Géryville, sparked a general uprising all over the western high plains. This was vigorously exploited by the Ouled Sidi Sheikh and their allies, for whom it was simply an excuse for a traditional pillaging razzia.

  The Army hastily gathered troops from scattered garrisons, to cover the Tell and to grope
for contact with the main body of rebels. The Legion’s four battalions were then stationed in a wide belt across the south-west of the Tell, with only half of II/LE down on the high plains at Géryville. The III/LE were ordered south from Sidi bel Abbès and IV/LE from Tiaret, thus theoretically guarding the corridors up into the Tell on both west and east sides of the 100-mile-wide Chott Ech Chergui depression. On 24 April, Major Laffont took the other two companies of the 2nd Battalion by train from Mascara to Saida; there he gathered up another two companies from I/LE, and marched this ad hoc battalion south to Krafalla the next day. His plans to march further were frustrated on the 26th by the arrival of a senior officer.

  Colonel Innocenti of the 4th Africa Light Horse took command at Krafalla, where a battalion of Zouaves and another of Algerians arrived on the 27th. They were quickly followed by General Colignon, who took control of operations. The general considered Krafalla inadequate as an assembly point, and marched the troops to Tafaroua to organize his column there. On 3 May it was ordered to Géryville, arriving on the 8th and remaining in that windswept and inhospitable spot for a further five days. The légionnaires called it Geléville – ‘Frozentown’; icy in winter and baking in summer, it stuck up in the middle of the dusty prairie like a desolate set for a Western film. Apart from two forbidding stone barracks for a Legion company and a Spahi squadron the village boasted only a single street of low, gloomy houses and shacks, and even ten years later only four Frenchmen lived there.43 The arrival of a couple of thousand men pitching their tents on the flats around the barracks must have put a considerable strain on Géryville’s notoriously sparse supply of firewood, and possibly the chilly nights of early spring were responsible for the fact that General Colignon retired at this point to sick quarters. Command reverted to Colonel Innocenti; it was 14 May before the already footsore column finally began to march to any purpose, heading south-west to follow up reports that Bou Amama was gathering men at El Abiodh Sidi Sheikh, the shrine revered as the burial-place of the tribe’s ancestral saint (see Map 3).

  On 19 May the column, with its 1,800 baggage-camels, made contact with elements of about 4,000 warriors at a place called Moualok, about a day’s march short of the wells at Chellala. Accounts of the action that followed have that lack of unanimity and precision so often found in reports of embarrassing failures. The enemy clearly made a frontal attack on the big moving square, in a corridor between hill features. Major Laffont’s Legion marching battalion, deployed in line as the leading face of the square, repulsed the charge with volley fire; the infantry were then ordered by Colonel Innocenti to drop their packs and advance. Apparently this order was resented as unnecessary – the légionnaires did not like being parted from their essential camping gear, and prided themselves on being able to fight in full marching order. The cavalry colonel’s order to follow the apparently withdrawing enemy also flew in the face of all experience, and it left the prize of the enormous baggage-train in the rear guarded only by a half-squadron of Innocenti’s 4th Africa Light Horse. The exact sequence of events then becomes cloudy, especially the role played by the rest of the cavalry; but the essential fact is that while the infantry were fighting forwards, a large force of Arab riders hooked around their right flank, driving fleeing goumiers confusingly ahead of them, and overran the baggage-train. The French lost 72 men killed (mostly from the cavalry escort), 15 wounded and 12 missing – a killed-to-wounded ratio that speaks eloquently of the warriors’ having time to carve up the casualties at their leisure. The baggage was looted and many of the beasts were run off.

  To the fury of the légionnaires, their dumped packs were also pillaged; when the shaken column camped that night at Tazina they had a comfortless time of it, and their sleep was disturbed by taunting attacks on the outlying grands-gardes.44 On 20 May the force resumed its march to Chellala under nagging sniper fire (most of its screen of goumiers having been dismissed). Arriving within sight of a large Arab encampment there at about 5pm, Colonel Innocenti declined to attack until morning. By dawn on the 21st, unsurprisingly, Bou Amama was gone. He and his warriors rode north, passing within a mile and a half of Géryville, and thence into the Tell – some 200 miles from their starting-point in the south-west.

  During June these raiders made a number of attacks around the settler towns of Saida and Tiaret; they looted, burned crops, killed farmers, and persuaded French-paid irregulars to change sides and join them. This caused fury among the colon leaders and real fear among their isolated constituents. Three French columns lumbered about the prairies trying to trap Bou Amama, but found themselves lunging into empty air behind him as he flickered away again into the broken terrain of the Chott Ech Chergui. (A probably unjust impression of tactical fumbling is not helped when we read of one Sub-lieutenant Scohier of Colonel Innocenti’s command – not a Legion officer – who got himself killed while making his night rounds of camp sentries at Naama by foolishly allowing his sword-scabbard to trail noisily along the ground.) The Legion’s commander Colonel de Mallaret led III/LE down from Sidi bel Abbès to Kreider to link up with Innocenti and General Detrie; for two months Bou Amama more or less played with Detrie and the other two columns, before their converging pressure finally pushed him over the Moroccan border in July to take refuge in the Oued Zousfana valley.45

  COLONEL FRANCOIS OSCAR DE NÉGRIER succeeded Colonel de Malleret in command of the Legion in July 1881. Négrier, wounded at St Privat in August 1870, had shown his impatience of convention when he broke parole to escape from Metz. He would soon confirm it, when he forced Ouled Sidi Sheikh chiefs to exhume the sarcophagus of their hereditary saint from the shrine at El Abiodh that had been the focus of rebellion, and carried it off under an honour-guard for a reverent reburial in a suitable tomb at Géryville. He told the chiefs that in future they could come and pray to it there, where he could keep an eye on them.

  His first tactical innovation was to revise the order of march of the columns he led, breaking up the single large square into two distinct elements. The baggage-train, field ambulance and artillery reserve would move under a strong flank escort of infantry; meanwhile a separate manoeuvre element would be formed with the goumiers, cavalry, the bulk of the infantry and a ‘ready’ section of guns, free to strike out without being tied to the slower-moving baggage.46 Négrier’s interest in every detail of his profession even extended to having his légionnaires make up for themselves, out of scrap cloth or leather, an extra chest rig to carry reserve ammonition for their Gras rifles high across the torso, instead of stowed away inside the knapsack.47 However, the main tactical problem, in what was essentially counter-guerrilla warfare, was the French imbalance between mobility and firepower.

  Arab war parties could carry their few ‘logistic’ needs on horseback, and so could cover the ground much faster than French mixed-arms columns. If French cavalry pressed ahead alone to catch raiders, the troopers often lacked the firepower to defend themselves adequately, let alone to inflict a significant defeat; their squadrons were usually outnumbered, and the Arabs were too wise to stand and meet a sabre-charge. The daily routine of horsed units, more demanding than for infantrymen, left comparatively little time for practising marksmanship on the range; in the cavalry firearms training traditionally had a rather low priority, and the troopers’ carbines were anyway shorter-ranged than infantry rifles (and kicked even harder). When they did dismount to form a skirmish line, one man in four had to serve as a horse-holder for his comrades, and the consequent thin line of kneeling men was always vulnerable to being outflanked and overrun by adversaries who stayed in the saddle. What was needed in action was the massed firepower of steady infantry; but infantry could not catch the nimble raiders.

  One solution was mounted infantry – foot soldiers mounted for travel but fighting dismounted; they, too, needed horse-holders, but their massed rifles and infantry training made them more dangerous than troopers. During the spring of 1881 the 2nd Algerian Skirmishers had tried mounting one company on native ponies; tha
t December, Négrier was in the field with a column including III/ and IV/LE and a battalion each of Zouaves and Algerians, and this time all of them made a limited trial of the mounted infantry concept. At the wells of Ain ben Khelil on 8 December, Négrier formed a platoon of 50 selected men and gave them 50 locally requisitioned mules.48 Mules were cheaper than horses, and plentiful in North Africa, having been used for riding since ancient times all over the Mediterranean world. Intelligent, robust and sure-footed, mules are much less nervous than horses, less fussy about their food, and have hard hoofs that stand up well to stony ground. In every respect except sheer speed a mule is at least the equal of a horse, and speed was not the point – endurance was. Ridden mules could keep going at a man’s marching pace all day long, for six continuous days, carrying their own and the troops’ rations, and delivering their riders still fit enough to go into action instead of wilting under the huge infantry packs.49

  Colonel de Négrier would write: ‘The purpose is not to go fast, but to keep going for a long way and a long time . . . The battle is not decided by the number of riflemen but by the number of kilometres – it is a question of marching.’50 What he called his ‘light group’ soon proved its worth by covering something like 100 miles in a 48-hour forced march; it surprised Bou Amama’s ally Si Sliman in the Chott Rhabi in late December 1881, forcing him to flee into Morocco leaving his complete camp and 4,000 sheep. The livestock were auctioned, and each légionnaire was given 15 francs’ prize money – roughly nine months’ Legion basic pay, and a huge incentive that must have become the talk of every barracks canteen.