Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  At the same time Major Marmet at Ain Sefra tried a significant variation; he formed a 100-strong half-company of his 2nd Algerian Skirmishers with just 50 mules – one for each pair of men. The mule carried its own and both men’s rations and kit; one man rode, the other marched, changing places every hour. Carrying only rifle, ammunition, light haversack and waterbottle, the marching man had no difficulty in keeping up with the mule-rider at a speed of about 4mph. Period marching diaries show up to 50 miles a day over easy going, and an average of 37 miles even in rocky terrain – twice what a horsed cavalry unit could manage in such punishing country. (Horses had to be walked or led for much of the time, and 35 miles per day was about their limit even on good European roads.) The soldiers and their mules (‘brêles’) could keep up this rhythm for several days at a time, if necessary making a forced march over the final stage to close with the enemy. The two-men-per-mule principle had a subtler advantage than mere economy and the halving of the number of mule-holders: by making the men march on their own feet half the time, it reminded them that they were still infantrymen. The need for this reminder would be underlined in red the following spring. 51

  THE ‘SUD-ORANAIS’ was still largely unexplored in early 1882. The nearest substantial French post was at Géryville; that at Ain Sefra, about 120 miles to the south-west, was in the process of being built, but other named spots on the map were simply waterholes. In April 1882, General Colonieu, with a mixed column that included Colonel de Négrier and two Legion battalions, was camped at Ain ben Khelil while his reconnaissance patrols spread out across the wilderness. One party was led by a 32-year-old infantry officer on General Colonieu’s staff, Captain Henri de Castries; he was a scion of a noble family with generations of prominent military service to France, and had recently married into another family of Army aristocracy. 52 The captain led his little column out on 20 April, heading south and west to make a topographical survey. They went westwards through the Djebel Doug pass at Forthassa Gharbia, and by the 26th they were in the large Chott Tigri depression about 60 miles from Ain ben Khelil. (The term chott is usually translated as the bed of a dried-up salt lake, but any mental image of miles of cracked mud-scales is quite mistaken. These low-lying areas may be very large, embracing various kinds of surface, and the only common factor is the largely invisible groundwater that supports vegetation and grazing.)

  The escort, commanded by Captain Barbier of III/LE, comprised his infantry company from that battalion; Lieutenant Massone’s 23-man squad from the Legion’s new mounted platoon, each of them riding his own mule; a peloton of Africa Light Horse, and a few goumiers – perhaps 250 men in all.53 Arab drivers led pack-camels, and drove a few sheep on the hoof for the pot. They were moving at a leisurely rate of about 10 miles a day, to allow Captain de Castries to make his observations and draw his maps, and this also gave the escort the chance for some opportunist sheep-rustling. On 25 April a trooper carried back to Colonel de Négrier the report that there had been a slight encounter near the wells of El Merir: some Beni Gil tribesmen had fired a few shots before ‘abandoning’ about 1,800 sheep, a flock so large that it obliged the captain to disperse numbers of his infantrymen as shepherds. (It is hard to believe that this was not provoked by the bonanza enjoyed by the mounted infantry four months earlier).

  At first light on 26 April the party broke camp at a spot called Temid ben Salem and marched on across the Chott Tigri. In the early years of the twentieth century Professor Augustin Bernard described its terrain as ‘seamed with gulleys – the waterholes are numerous and the pasture generally abundant’; the account from the Legion archives mentions sand dunes, deep gulleys and clumps of dwarf palm – ‘a curious region, full of hidden dangers’.54 By 6am the sun was already hammering down, and in this broken, low-lying ground the men struggled to drag the superheated air into their lungs. In the vanguard even the mules of Massone’s mounted squad were panting, struggling almost knee-deep up soft dunes and slipping on the down-slopes. Suddenly, from ahead and then on both flanks, a fusillade rang out: the Beni Gil sheep-guards had not been alone. The estimates of Arab numbers at Chott Tigri vary widely, but the lowest guess is some 900 riders and 1,500 on foot, neither figure being intrinsically impossible.55

  CAPTAIN BARBIER HAD TO GET HIS MEN OUT from among the dunes and gulleys, where the enemy could fire down on them from every side and riders could suddenly appear out of cover at short range. He turned the column about and headed for a table-topped gara feature that they had recently passed, leaving Massone’s all-mounted squad as the rearguard. The Italian officer made the fatal error of not dismounting his men and, when fighting from the saddle, they were no match for the Arabs. They disappeared among a yelling whirlwind of tribesmen, and within a moment Massone, his NCOs and half his légionnaires were down and most of the mules had been shot or hamstrung. When the Arabs briefly wheeled away to reload their muzzle-loaders, an old soldier led the knot of survivors up a dune, where they shot the remaining mules and used their bodies as a parapet. A second rush ignored their thin volley and simply swarmed over them. At such close range the heavy lead balls from smoothbore muskets could smash through bone with ease; although they did not transmit as much splintering energy as rifle bullets they could, for instance, pass through the skull and carry part of the brain out the other side, or blow a shoulder or hip joint right out of the body. The concentrated force of a sword-cut delivered by a horseman could sever an up-flung arm, cleave the skull down to the eyebrows, or take off the top like that of a boiled egg.56

  Barbier’s leading platoon under Lieutenant Delcroix were fighting their way back towards the abrupt gara or mesa thrusting about 120 feet above the floor of the depression, but some of the Beni Gil were racing them to it. With a few of the Africa Light Horse, the platoon ran a gauntlet of fire from Arabs converging on foot from their flanks and rear, but broke through, and managed to drive the few tribesmen who had arrived first off the top of the gara. Delcroix’s men then threw themselves down on the lip and opened fire on their pursuers, covering the retreat of the rest of the company, who were fighting on the move in a little square. When they finally came panting up the slopes the wounded Lieutenant Weber was among them, but not Captain Barbier, who had been killed when Arab riders overran the baggage-train.

  Captain de Castries took command on the tabletop, which was a strong position with good fields of fire. The Arabs were distracted by looting the baggage-train and the bodies, and now they had lost the advantage of the ground their attacks became increasingly half-hearted as the légionnaires’ steady fire punished each attempt. After a while Sub-lieutenant Mesnil was able to take his platoon back down to try to bring in any survivors; remarkably, they found a couple from the mounted squad, and Private Androesco also carried in Barbier’s corpse on his back. At about noon Castries was able to send off a Light Horse trooper to try to summon help from Ain el Khelil; and at some point in the early afternoon, no longer surrounded, he led his men down the gara and set off to the north-east, with their wounded but not their dead. There was some pursuit, but not in strength, and volley-fire persuaded these riders to shy away; why get shot, when their brothers were busy dividing the loot without them?

  The soldiers pushed on at a killing pace, and Castries did not allow them to halt until they reached the waterhole of Galloul in the foothills of the Djebel Doug during the night. There they were given two hours’ rest before wearily getting on the march once more. Colonel de Négrier, who had been alerted by the message-rider on the evening of 26 April, led 500 men 30 miles south that night, and the two parties met early on the morning of the 27th. After a long halt the whole force marched back to Chott Tigri along the survivors’ tracks; they reached the battlefield that night, later gathering up the dead for burial, and on 2 May the battalion reached the camp at Ain ben Khelil once again.

  The casualties comprised about one-third of Castries’ command: 2 officers and 49 rankers killed, 2 officers and 26 rankers wounded. Again, the higher ratio of d
ead to wounded was typical for a unit that had been broken up and overrun, and the dead were very badly cut up; Barbier’s decapitated body bore 9 bullet wounds and 7 sabre cuts. The Legion account claims that hidden on the body of the old légionnaire who had led the last stand of the mounted squad they found an Officer’s Cross of the Legion of Honour.57 At least one lesson was learned: Colonel de Négrier reduced the mule-string of his mounted company to one for every two men, and he hammered home the message that the Compagnie Montée were infantry, and must always fight as such.

  CAPTAIN HENRI DE CASTRIES (1850 – 1927) was an uncle of Brigadier-General Christian de Castries, who on 7 May 1954 surrendered the fortress of Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam to Vo Nguyen Giap’s People’s Army. By coincidence, North Vietnam would be Négrier’s, and the Legion’s, next theatre of war.

  3.

  La Mission Civilisatrice and the Straw Hat Trade

  God offers Africa to Europe. Take it – not with the cannon, but with the plough . . . Pour your surplus of strength into this Africa, and in one blow solve your social problems – transform your proletariat into proprietors. Go on – build! Build roads, harbours, towns; grow, cultivate, colonize, multiply!

  Victor Hugo, 1879, addressing a banquet to commemorate French abolition of the slave trade

  Let me have 600 men of the Foreign Legion, so that if it comes to that, I can at least die with decency.

  Colonel Joseph Galliéni to M. Lebon, Colonial Minister, March 1896, on being offered command in Madagascar1

  MUCH EUROPEAN COLONIZATION in Africa and Asia proceeded by a haphazard series of largely unplanned steps, with trade as the catalyst. Library shelves groan under detailed analyses of particular cases, but – in order to highlight by comparison some aspects of the French case – a sort of generic narrative of a ‘British model’ might run as follows.

  First contact typically led to the establishment of small coastal forts where handfuls of white traders lived on the edge of the great unknown. In sub-Saharan Africa, the pioneer traders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were as often as not the slavers, to whom African rulers willingly sold their captives in return for European goods – above all, for woven cloth and firearms. The slow suppression of the Atlantic slave traffic from 1807, led by Britain, gradually transformed trade with Africa into the pattern that had long been the norm in Asia, with exports of cultivated and raw materials taking the place of the appalling commerce in human beings. (The slave trade remains an indelible stain on European and American history, but it is barely relevant to late nineteenth-century colonialism – except in the sense that the colonizers had some success in stamping out the much more ancient operations of the Arab slavers supplying North African and Middle Eastern markets.) At first the white men relied for protection upon the local rulers whom they enriched, but increasing investment demanded greater insurance, and traders began recruiting and arming local warriors directly. In the interests of profit, white men manipulated local rivalries; white-governed territories were extended, and local peoples were displaced or conquered – though as often by the newly powerful client rulers as by the white men themselves.

  When the investment reached a high enough perceived value to the home government, then events, rather than any long-nurtured imperial conspiracy, would finally prompt the despatch of white government troops – a decision often taken reluctantly, and against vigorous domestic opposition on grounds of expense or diplomatic complications. Once these garrisons had been installed, reasons to expand their areas of control would soon present themselves; this process was urged, or simply undertaken, by the traders, officials or soldiers on the spot, who could usually come up with plausible arguments by the time a slow boat presented the distant home government with a fait accompli. Eventually, however, the home government would accept the need to tidy up the map, usually with an eye on the competitive advances of other colonial nations, and the complete annexation of new territory or a native state would follow. (During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries essentially the same process took place, of course, on the expanding continental frontiers of the United States.)

  THE HISTORY OF FRANCE’S COLONIAL CONQUESTS differs somewhat, even at this comic-strip level, from the outline above; and the difference most relevant to the subject of this book is that while in most territories annexed by Britain in the nineteenth century the soldiers arrived last, in France’s conquests they usually arrived if not first, then certainly a great deal earlier in the process. One of the reasons that this was necessary was the comparative success, achieved in the mid-eighteenth century, of British laissez-faire opportunism over a French obsession with central control .2

  By the early seventeenth century, English and Dutch trading companies had been founded to exploit the opportunities of newly discovered sea routes. English merchant-adventurers, chartered by the Crown but operating without significant home support or control, were happy to give patriotic names to their settlements and to hold them as nominal national property so long as they enjoyed freedom to exploit them. Emigration for settlement, where it occurred, was normally unhampered by state or Church interference. Such a relaxed approach was unthinkable in France, whose overseas traders and settlers were hedged about with restraints unknown to their competitors. There the monarchy (closely partnered by the Catholic Church) attempted, despite the huge distances and glacially slow communications, to retain all meaningful control in Paris. French colonization was, from the start, a state-sponsored geopolitical project, rather than simply an opportunity for businessmen to make money and for emigrants to build a new life.

  By the end of the seventeenth century, England’s violent religious and political schisms had at last given birth to constitutional reforms that broadly satisfied the national instincts for a balance between effective authority and individual liberty. The division of powers enshrined in the 1689 Declaration of Rights set clear limits on those of the monarchy, and would allow forms of representative government to evolve gradually under the protection of the rule of law. Since Britain’s affairs would increasingly be dominated by a productive mercantile middle class secure in its property rights, this system would also benefit the growth of the country’s overseas colonies. France, too, was ripped apart by savage wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but in her case they culminated not in a constitutional settlement, but in the establishment, by Louis XIV (r.1643 – 1715), of an absolute royal and religious despotism supported by a parasitic aristocracy. Two linked consequences of Louis’ triumph were the tightening of arbitrary controls over colonial activity, and the distortion and corruption of national finances.

  The outstanding example of the outcome is provided by North America, where New France (Canada) strikingly failed to attract the number of settlers, or to generate the wealth, needed to counterbalance the growing strength and confidence of the British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard to the south. Conventional explanations always over-simplify causes, but it is broadly true that what became Britain’s Thirteen Colonies were peopled by restless individualists of all classes who abandoned the Old World and risked everything to build new and unfenced lives; consequently they multiplied, pushed the frontiers outwards, and prospered. This did not happen in French Canada, which remained to a great extent a simulacrum of rigid, almost feudal France. Old France always had to subsidize her 75,000 colonists, while by 1750 the population of Britain’s colonies exceeded one million and was playing a vigorous part in the British trading economy.

  The ultimate test of strength and will came in the 1750s, as one front in the sprawling Seven Years’ War. Both Britain and France drew a significant proportion of their riches from the sugar islands of the Caribbean, by means of the infamous ‘triangular’ Atlantic trade – of manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, to buy slaves for sale to Caribbean planters, who provided highly profitable sugar imports to Europe. Old France gave priority to the protection of its Caribbean islands, which in terms of wealth creation were the oilfie
lds of their day, and since it had a weaker and more thinly stretched navy than Britain, this put New France at risk. The colony received too few troops, diverted from those European land fronts that naturally preoccupied Paris more than London, and their transatlantic lines of supply were vulnerable. Britain had the breadth of naval strength to fight everywhere; and above all, while it was much less rich than France in absolute terms, it was willing to spend a great deal more of its wealth on overseas campaigns.3 By 1763 the combination of French colonial mismanagement overseas and fiscal mismanagement at home had doomed both Canada and the small French foothold in India to capture by Britain.

  Ten years of comparative neglect of the Royal Navy then allowed France to take revenge in 1778 – 81, sending crucial help to Britain’s now-rebellious American colonies; but the expense of Grasse’s fleet and Rochambeau’s expeditionary force helped to cripple Louis XVI’s financially chaotic regime in the last years before it collapsed into the flames of the Revolution. In the eighteenth century French anti-clerical intellectuals such as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau had argued that acquiring colonies was a vicious and debilitating habit, and during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars France remained preoccupied by continental European fronts. By the time of its final defeat in 1815 its navy, and thus its transoceanic trade, had long been virtually destroyed; as the Industrial Revolution hit its stride, the world’s wide horizons lay open to British merchants protected by British warships.