After about half an hour the Dahomeyans fell back to take a breather, but when the French bugles sounded ‘Cease fire’ they imagined the white men were out of ammunition, and charged once again. The Legion were now ordered forward, to outflank the left of the Dahomeyan line. They came under fearless attack from several hundred warriors in a surprise encounter on the edge of the tall grass, forcing the légionnaires to form individual company squares. After being ravaged with several volleys, the attackers fell back to some earth-and-timber fortifications concealed by the elephant grass, which they had been foolish to leave in order to fight in the open since Martyn recalled that even with the Dahomeyans thinned and tired out it took the légionnaires several attempts to capture these works at bayonet-point. The Senegalese cavalry then reappeared to catch the Fon in the open, and shelling from the gunboats finally drove Behanzin’s warriors off to the north.
Lieutenant Jacquot estimated the number of enemy dead at about 200, and guessed that perhaps twice that many wounded had been taken from the field. Martyn gives the French dead and seriously wounded as 9 and 33 respectively; Private Lelièvre judged that they faced more accurate fire at Gbede than at Dogba, especially from tree-snipers, and this may be borne out by the fact that two of the killed and three of the badly wounded were officers. As the Legion companies searched through the scene of carnage on the battlefield, Captain Battreau picked up a discarded weapon with an exclamation of amazement. Corporal Martyn insisted – anticipating the scepticism of his readers – that Battreau found an old Chassepot that he recognized by a distinctive bullethole through the butt, and then by its serial number, as the very rifle he had carried as a sergeant at St Privat in 1870.60
On 6 October the Legion’s capture of a bridge and earthworks defended briefly by artillery and small-arms fire cost 6 killed and 33 wounded; 95 Dahomeyan dead were found, and much ammunition abandoned when they retreated quickly to save their guns.61 This would be the last pitched battle for more than two weeks, but the Dodds column now faced their harshest test of the campaign. They were leaving the river – and thus their line of supply, communication and casualty evacuation – to strike out westwards across perhaps 60 marching-miles of thick, unexplored bush.
THE COLUMN HAD GREAT DIFFICULTY finding clean water; the men were tortured by thirst, and because they could not resist any stagnant puddle at least one in every five suffered from the filth and indignity of marching with dysentery.62 The blazing sun knocked men over with heatstroke, and while several violent night-time rainstorms did periodically allow the soldiers to refill their waterbottles, they also left them soaked and chilled for hours. They were incessantly tormented by clouds of mosquitoes; one source has claimed that of every 100 white soldiers, 92 contracted fevers, and that in the Naval Infantry unit the fatality rate among these cases was a staggering 95 per cent, either on the trail or later.63 This makes the Legion battalion’s rate of casualties from disease – which Professor Porch puts at about 35 per cent – seem almost light, and explains his comment that by mid-October the marsouin companies had simply ceased to exist as a military force.64
Invisible in the thick bush, the Fon clung around them all the way – springing ambushes, cutting off watering parties, harassing the camps by night, wearing the men out and keeping their nerves at screaming pitch. Any of these daily skirmishes might cost up to 20 killed and wounded (86 in all between 13 and 15 October alone).65 The diminishing convoy of porters, and the fast-growing numbers of stretchers to be carried, meant that the troops now had to struggle through the bush burdened by 75lb packs, which multiplied the numbers of heatstroke and exhaustion casualties as their strength gave way. Rations were reduced to hard biscuit and repellent tinned meat (‘monkey’), whose contents could almost be poured from the can in this heat. The column had to pause several times, and on one occasion to retrace its steps for several days, to allow more men and supplies to come up from Porto Novo and for accumulated casualties to be carried back down the trail.
On 17 October, after six weeks on the march, fighting strength was down by nearly 60 per cent to 53 officers and 1,533 men in stinking, thorn-ripped rags, with about 2,000 utterly demoralized porters who had to be guarded and driven by the pitiless Senegalese. That day 200 casualties – some with livid yellow faces, their stretchers stained with dark vomit – started to be carried back down the trail, necessarily with an escort of two full companies of Skirmishers, which reduced bayonet strength even further. In one camp Corporal Martyn saw the notorious crapaudine field punishment inflicted for the first and only time, after an Italian légionnaire struck a sergeant (who in Martyn’s view must himself have been to blame). The man was left on the ground for three hours, at the mercy of black ants, with his ankles and wrists tied agonizingly together in the small of his back; after being released, he had to be invalided out.66
On 20 October the French had to manoeuvre in square when threatened by 3,000 – 4,000 warriors. The Fon artillery was more accurate than before, but hardly any of the shells went off, and the gunners’ inability to set fuzes argued against the ‘white renegade’ myth. Behanzin also got an old mitrailleuse into action, its crackling sound quaintly unfamiliar to this generation of Frenchmen, and merely amusing to an old Legion warrant officer; he reassured Martyn’s company – correctly – that the Dahomeyans would fire much too high. Later that day the sound of bugles blowing ‘Le Boudin’ to their east announced the first of some 600 reinforcements who would come in by 24 October, together with a supply convoy.67 On the 24th the advance resumed, now in four roughly 500-man groups each with one Legion and two African companies, commanded by Majors Riou and Audéoud of the Naval Infantry and Captains Antoine Drude and Poivre of the Legion. It is clear that by this stage the Legion was regarded as the indispensable hard core in any action, while the Skirmishers provided the advance guard, baggage- and artillery-guards and any necessary detachments and escorts.68 Corporal Martyn recalled tough resistance on 25 October before an earthwork could be captured, but much less the next day when a fort at Kotopa was taken; the Fon seemed anxious to get their artillery out of harm’s way, and Martyn reckoned French casualties over 24 – 26 October as only 10 killed and 75 wounded. However, despite their great losses, a smallpox outbreak, and a rebellion by their Yoruba slaves, the remnants of Behanzin’s crack regiments still had fight in them. Before dawn on the 27th the camp was attacked in great strength, and Martyn wrote that ‘quite a thousand [men and women] were right in the midst of us. This was a very narrow squeak indeed, and the fight lasted the whole of the day, only ceasing when we had chased the Dahomeyans to within a mile of the walls of Kana’.69
On 4 November – now at last clear of the dreadful bush-forest, and into more open country on the outskirts of Kana – the column ran into a modest force that Martyn reckoned put up the most stubborn opposition of the campaign, particularly by Winchester-armed ‘Amazons’. The French had to form six company squares to hold off counter-attacks, and ‘every one of them was as busy as the biggest glutton for fighting could desire’. The Dahomeyans held their ground even after the Spahis finally captured four of their Krupp guns, but then suddenly fell back towards Abomey, leaving about 300 dead. Martyn was surprised that the column lost only 14 killed and about 50 wounded in this action, which had lasted up to nine hours. The holy city of Kana now lay virtually undefended before them; on 5 November the artillery breached the strong mud-brick walls, and the infantry entered with almost no resistance.
The légionnaires advanced cautiously through tree-shaded open spaces between separate blocks of tall red buildings, towards a walled enclosure that occupied about one-quarter of the town. The gates to the House of Sacrifice hung open; fat flies buzzed in the dim, reeking interior, where a floor smoothly cobbled with the tops of human skulls surrounded a huge stone basin caked with dried blood. 70
IT HAD TAKEN THEM NINE WEEKS to cover a distance that on the map measured only four days’ march at North African rates; but the Fon army was broken, and the rest
of the campaign was an anti-climax. Colonel (from 9 October, General) Dodds rested his men at Kana until, receiving an unsatisfactory reply to his ultimatum to Behanzin, on 16 October he put the town to the torch and marched his men the few miles to Abomey. Behanzin in his turn burned and abandoned his capital, though the légionnaires still got a chance to gawp at the great palace gateway, literally built from human skulls and bones. A Senegalese battalion and one Legion company were left in garrison when, on 27 November, the rest began their march back to the coast.
On Christmas Day 1892, Corporal Martyn embarked on the steamer Thibet among about 1,400 Army and Navy personnel and families of Senegalese Skirmishers. Before they docked at Oran on 11 January 1893, 5 more légionnaires had died; just 214 of the original 800 landed, of whom 69 had to be carried straight to hospital, and only about 100 were well enough to return directly to Sidi bel Abbès for the ceremonial reception and feasting. Martyn wrote that the total of about 2,300 combatants had lost 15 officers and 143 men killed outright, 3 officers and 90 men died of sickness, and 27 officers and 344 men wounded – 27 per cent casualties, and 11 per cent fatalities. The significant missing figure is, of course, those laid low but not immediately killed by disease. Had this statistic been published, in Martyn’s opinion the actual total casualties would have been nearly 75 per cent.71 Even if we assume that the single Legion company not shipped home on Thibet was brought up to a strength of about 200 by taking fit men from the other three companies, then total Legion dead, wounded and disabled by sickness – including those taken straight to hospital in Oran – were indeed at least 75 per cent of the original 800 all ranks. (It must be significant that in 1893 a law was passed forbidding the deployment overseas of Naval Troops conscripts unless they specifically volunteered to join such marching battalions.)72
Behanzin and his last couple of hundred warriors continued to evade capture in the arid northern wilderness for another year, but although the Dahomeyans had to give up the human element of the Grand Customs they remained peaceful enough – especially those tribes that had now been released from the Neronian rule of the Fon kings. Nevertheless, a strong draft of Legion reinforcements was sent out early in 1893, and one of these was a former comrade of Major Faurax in Tonkin in 1889 – 90: Captain Paul Brundsaux, whose six-and-a-half-foot frame and enormous forked beard would one day be immortalized in bronze on the high altar of Legion ancestor-worship. Another was Private Léon Silbermann, who left an account of exhausting marches and continuing deaths from sickness until this successor Legion marching battalion returned to Algeria and was disbanded on 3 March 1894. Silbermann claimed that his unit, too, had been reduced to about quarter-strength by disease, and that two of the stretcher cases actually died on the quayside at Oran during the welcoming ceremony.73
SOMEWHERE OFF THE AFRICAN WEST COAST, Silbermann’s returning ship must have passed another trooper which left Oran for Senegal on 19 February 1894, carrying – among others – 10 officers and 305 men of the Legion, including the now-Sergeant Minnaert of the 1st RE. On 15 January that year, in the emptiness of what is now Mali, a Lieutenant-Colonel Bonnier of the Naval Troops had joined the list of Frenchmen for whom the deceptive lure of the name Timbuktu proved fatal. After briefly visiting that disappointing museum he and his company of Skirmishers had been wiped out by Tuareg tribesmen; their bodies were found by a more methodical Army officer, the engineer Major Joseph Joffre. It was decided that the Niger country needed some token reinforcement of white troops, and in February the Legion were ordered to embark two infantry companies.
These were formed under Captains Nicolon (1st RE) and Certeau (2nd RE), and again included a high proportion of Tonkin veterans. On 2 March – while Private Silbermann and those few of his mates who were healthy enough were gorging themselves on their welcome-home feast in Oran – Major Bouvier (2nd RE) led the draft ashore at St Louis de Sénégal.
Captain Certeau was ordered upriver to Timbuktu via Kayes, Bamako and Segou; he reached Segou only on 29 April after many delays and detours in the riverine marshes, and his company stayed there until repatriated eight months later. The only members of Bouvier’s command to see action were a 20-man detachment under Lieutenant Betbeder and Sergeant Minnaert. Providing a stiffening for Captain Bonnacorti’s Skirmishers, they distinguished themselves in the capture of the remote village of Bossé, lair of a slaver named Ali Kary. As usual, three-quarters of them had become casualties from wounds or sickness by the time they returned to base.74
The irrepressible Minnaert does not seem to have been a man much given to reflection, but we may perhaps wonder if he and his lieutenant ever reminisced – as they squelched through the reed-marshes, slapping their necks – about the taste of guavas in the cool shade of a banyan tree. During that autumn of 1894 a restless French cavalry officer at a crossroads in his career was sailing East to discover such delights, and other more substantial rewards.
6.
Tiger Country
On the night of 22/23 June 1889 Légionnaire Gatelet was taken by a tiger while on sentry duty . . . The tiger must have jumped the wall and ditch, surprised him from behind while he was rolling a cigarette – we found the paper and tobacco with his dropped rifle – and carried him out over the wall again . . . Next day we found his remains 150 yards away.
Corporal Jean Pfirmann
[Out here] there is not a single young lieutenant, chief of an outpost or leader of a reconnaissance who does not develop in six months more initiative, decision, endurance and personality than an officer would acquire in France in the whole of his career.
Major Hubert Lyautey, 22 December 18941
MAJOR LOUIS HUBERT GONSALVE LYAUTEY was a man whose happiness depended upon lively and informed conversation, and in October 1894 – despite the enervating heat in the Red Sea – he may have been the happiest man aboard the steamship Oxus, since his fellow passengers made for gratifyingly mixed company. Lyautey had perfect manners, and he tasted all his temporary companions before choosing those he would devour: some ‘old China hands’; an Italian missionary bishop; the colon black-sheep of a wealthy family of Lyautey’s acquaintance, accompanied by a lady of dubious marital status; a number of Dutch and English colonials including a raffish ‘adventuress’, and – most fascinatingly – the much-travelled niece of the second Rajah Brooke of Sarawak.
Still just short of his fortieth birthday, Lyautey had been promoted from captain some five years younger than was usual. He was a slim man of above average height, with a fine forehead, dark brows over large pale blue eyes, and a strikingly sensual mouth hidden by the big moustache of those days. He was very much a gentleman, taking his tone as much from his mother’s family of minor Norman aristocrats as from the practical soldiers and engineers on his father’s side. His turnout was always immaculate, as befitted a light cavalryman; the only thing that he might have regretted as he checked himself searchingly in the looking-glass before emerging on stage was his painfully thin legs – the legacy of a serious childhood accident that had kept him in calipers until the age of 12.2
This confinement had made young Hubert a voracious reader, and if anything it had increased his competitive energy when he was finally released; his stork’s legs had not prevented him from becoming a fine horseman, which spoke for his determination. His grandfather and great-uncle had both been artillery generals, who between them could boast memories of Wagram, Moscow and Waterloo. As a boy Hubert had loved playing with toy soldiers, and had been fascinated by his grandfather’s scars from Russia. But his father, Just Lyautey, was a respected civil engineer, and at home near Nancy in Lorraine – where his adored mother presided over an elegant, cultured country-house life – the boy also loved ‘playing countries’, building landscapes of towns, roads and railways in his sandpit.
THERE WAS NEVER any question about young Hubert’s path in life; precociously gifted, he passed the entrance exams for both the École Polytechnique and St Cyr in 1872 at the age of 16. In 1876 he passed straight into staff
school, yet despite this success his diaries are full of complaints about the pettiness of the academy regimes and the uninspiring curriculum. After a year of regimental duty interrupted by bad health, in 1880 a two-year posting to Algeria opened his eyes to another perspective, and he greedily sucked everything he could from this exotically different environment. He was promoted from lieutenant to captain at the early age of 26, just before his return to France late in 1882, and after a year with the 4th Light Horse at Épinal he was picked for the staff of the Inspector General of Cavalry at Commercy. It was there that the unvarying, stifling rigidities of the Metropolitan Army began to close around his spirit like the coils of a python. He was always a man prey to volatile swings of mood, and he was shocked by what time had done to some of his elders. Long years of routine and iron regulation had snuffed out any fire or curiosity they might once have had, narrowing them into pompous martinets to whom the slightest deviation from the norm seemed offensively disturbing.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 26