Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  Lyautey needed some project to which he could devote his energy and which would further his driving ambition, and the life of home garrisons could not provide it. Reading, correspondence and occasional like-minded social contacts kept him in touch with the worlds of art and ideas, but he seldom found opportunities to explore them in the face-to-face discussions on which he thrived. Frustrated, he took long leaves to travel in Europe; Italy charmed him, and for a while he was intrigued by the Catholic Church – not doctrinally, but politically; at that time the divisions within the French thinking classes made papal relations with the Republic a subject of real controversy. Lyautey’s family connections secured him personal audiences both with the exiled Bourbon pretender, the Comte de Chambord, and with Pope Leo XIII, and he attended a thrilling pontifical mass in the Sistine Chapel – attractively risky adventures for an officer in the Army of the anti-clerical Republic. But though briefly excited by even such light brushes with history, Lyautey soon recognized them as cul-de-sacs, and continued to cast about restlessly for an outlet for his enthusiasm.

  He seemed to have found it for a while when he took up a squadron command at St Germain late in 1887. With responsibility for 160 troopers – a responsibility that he took more seriously than many brother officers, who knew their troop horses better than the men who rode them – Captain Lyautey became determined to improve the day-to-day conditions that they had to endure. The French Army was a traditionally neglectful employer, and the whitewashed and tarred stone boxes in which it stacked its conscripts were essentially prisons. Some were very old and all were cramped and badly heated, with completely inadequate washing facilities, latrines and sick quarters – mundane details, but important to the men’s morale. Conscripts got little free time, especially in the cavalry, where care of the horses required many fatigue duties quite apart from the daily six or eight hours of drills and exercises. The previous year was the first in which rankers had even been granted free Sundays, and there was nothing for them to do except wander the streets of little provincial towns and visit bars and brothels.

  In 1886 General Boulanger had ordered the provision of recreation rooms in barracks, but these would be slow to materialize. Lyautey installed a foyer for his men – a clubroom, with a billiard table, a library, reading and writing facilities and non-alcoholic refreshments. ‘My aim is to give them distraction, as well as instruction and fatigues, within the barracks . . . to escape from the present situation, in which after 5pm every man who is not sufficiently stupefied to go to bed is condemned to the street corner or the [wet] canteen.’ These efforts, modest enough, impressed some observers sufficiently to be reported in the press, but were regarded by others as suspiciously radical. Such improvements were associated in the Army mind with Boulanger, who in that winter of 1887 – 8 was at the height of his dangerous notoriety, so Lyautey’s timing was innocently tactless.3

  When bored and discouraged, Lyautey occasionally found the sort of company he craved through the hospitality of a former educator and politician named Guerle, a man of wide connections in several worlds. The whole nervous system of the upper classes functioned through personal contacts and mutual acquaintances, and Lyautey was always alert to opportunities for extending his network. In Guerle’s salons he mixed with liberal and literary figures (including, on at least one occasion, Marcel Proust), and he found a friend in an influential man of letters, Comte Eugène Melchior de Vogüé. The elegant and charming Lyautey was good social value; these men were not used to soldiers who could discuss the latest novels with knowledgeable enthusiasm, and their interest encouraged him to express his frustrations at the dogmatism of the military hierarchy. Vogüé suggested that Lyautey write an article on socio-military reform for his journal Revue des Deux Mondes. The consequent 50-page essay, ‘On the Social Functions of the Officer under Universal Military Service’, impressed Vogüé so much that he published it complete in the March 1891 issue. Briefly, Lyautey argued the importance of officers getting truly involved with their men, using the unique opportunity of mass conscription to combine the Army’s central role with that of a school of citizenship, both educating the poor for an improved standard of life and healing the mutual suspicions between the classes.

  The article was printed anonymously, but when it caused a stir Lyautey’s authorship was soon revealed. To the most reactionary, he was a dangerous socialist; to the merely conventional, a muddle-headed dreamer; but to like-minded progressives (in a number of different political camps) he was a refreshing new voice. Lyautey found himself in demand as a speaker, and became a member of one of those groupuscules so dear to the self-regard of French intellectuals. His vanity was caressed, but his small measure of celebrity earned him the automatic distrust of some senior officers. At a time of murderous outrages by anarchists, culminating in the actual assassination of a President of the Republic, the more ossified members of the establishment were inclined to overreact to any further hint that the world was going to the dogs – such as cavalry officers publicly expressing social theories.4

  Nevertheless, the ‘socialist captain’ clearly had his supporters – he sprang, after all, from a reliably conservative family. In 1893 he was promoted major, and a few months later he was posted as chief-of-staff to the 7th Cavalry Division at Meaux. His initial excitement over the favourable responses to his ideas was short-lived; as his 40th birthday approached, his spirits drooped at the prospect of long years of mind-numbing routine leading only to a colonelcy, perhaps eventually to a brigadier-general’s stars before a pointless retirement. His discontents extended beyond the merely military; he wrote to his lifelong friend and confidant Major Antoine de Margerie of his unhappiness in a worldburdened with prejudice, clichés and formulas, where during the whole of our adolescence and youth we were kept at arm’s length from life, under the pretext of safeguarding and correction . . . where the human and intellectual horizon was deliberately drawn in so tightly around us . . . During these past ten years, what personal efforts were demanded of us, and what scandals roused, in order to free ourselves from these swaddling-clothes!5

  IN AUGUST 1894, MAJOR LYAUTEY was on manoeuvres at Brie when he was informed of his appointment to a staff post in Tonkin. His sympathetic biographer André Maurois suggests that friends in high places felt he would benefit from some fresh air far from the introverted quarrels of the Metropolitan Army. Others believe that he was sent into what careerists regarded as outer darkness in delayed punishment for trumpeting his ideas in 1891 – 2; and at least one commentator has interpreted the posting as a banishment due to official disapproval of Lyautey’s undoubted homosexuality. Descriptions of Lyautey’s temperament by men who served with him leave little room for doubt, and it is even plausible to interpret in this way his lament to Antoine de Margerie quoted above. To what extent he was sexually active is another question, but not an interesting one. Odd though it appears today, nineteenth-century gentlemen of devout family were indoctrinated with values of duty and self-control that enabled some of them to channel repressed energies in constructive directions, at whatever emotional cost. On the other hand, fin de siècle French society was more tolerant than Victorian Britain, and homosexual acts were not illegal. All that matters, surely, is that any prejudice or indiscretion there may have been did not rob France of Hubert Lyautey’s talents.

  He sailed in October, on the Pei-Ho as far as Egypt (which he gulped down like a drink during his few days ashore), and then on the Oxus down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean. Despite his innate reserve towards Britain as the great national rival, part of his pleasure during the voyage sprang from his contacts with British travellers (of which one fellow-officer strongly disapproved – did Lyautey not realize that any English wealthy enough to travel must be government agents?). He was struck by how confidently some British women set out across the world without a male protector – extraordinary to a Frenchman. He also noted that the British men returning to the East after home leave invariably spoke of their colony
as their lifelong future, while ‘the wasters and the needy who, with us, usually occupy similar posts’ counted the years until they qualified to return to France for good.6

  Lyautey’s letters really catch fire after stopovers during the voyage revealed to him something of how Britain organized its colonial possessions and garrisons. His correspondence is full of praise for British ‘strength, unity of plan, continuity of design . . . promptness of execution, practical good sense, tenacity, complete adaptation to the country and the climate. In a word, everything that we do not have’. Britain seemed to ‘breathe initiative’:In front of us rises the admirable English organization – broad, supple, full of continuity, managed from top to bottom by gentlemen (or by those who know how to behave like gentlemen whatever their origins) . . . there is a school, a doctrine, a colonial system based on experience from which they derive methods essentially supple and elastic in their application, leaving the details to be dealt with by personal initiative, with latitude to vary [broad guidelines] to the utmost.7

  Bearing in mind his project at St Germain, it is not surprising to read – even from Aden, of all hellish stations – his comments on the spacious, airy quarters and the sports facilities provided for all ranks (le sport was almost unknown in the French forces). But it was Singapore that was his real road to Damascus; his letter to his sister of 7 November 1894 seems to have been written in a sort of daze of admiration, and it encapsulates – by contradiction – most of the things he loathed about the French Army.

  He describes in detail the quarters of the Lincolnshire Regiment, set in unenclosed, unguarded parkland; the only sentry he saw was at the ammunition magazine. Separate company bungalows were built for space, coolness and ventilation, each with shaded verandahs, its own Chinese-staffed kitchen, a dining room, a spacious and well-equipped bathroom (open to all, at all hours) and separate latrines. There was a large recreation hall with billiard tables, newspapers, writing facilities, and a library whose shelves were regularly refreshed. There was an officers’ mess whose anteroom was ‘a sort of salle d’honneur, with flags, the names of battles, regimental souvenirs’; a bar, and a small theatre for entertainments; a gym, two swimming-pools, and pitches and courts for football, cricket and tennis. Lyautey and a consular interpreter were shown around by a sergeant, whom they had to unearth from his prettily overgrown bungalow in garden surroundings. When Lyautey expressed astonishment at the apparent absence of restrictions the NCO was puzzled: ‘What would be the good of it? Why should we keep the place closed? The men know the hours; it is their business to be on the spot at the proper time. As for their dress, they know what would happen if they were seen incorrectly turned out.’ Lyautey does not address the important fact that British soldiers were all volunteers rather than conscripts, but he writes in an ecstasy of envious pleasure:I revel in the sight of the application of all my ideas. These are not, after all, Utopian – somewhere there do exist cheerful military quarters, open, welcoming, where duty wears a smiling aspect, where men are men – and not ragged convicts, shut in, sweeping those eternal courtyards under querulous overseers. But what would our warrant officers in France say?

  What would our Engineers say, at the sight of this camp where symmetry has been purposely avoided, and the houses are not all aligned and of identical design, but dotted about as at Trianon, merely for the pleasure of the eye? . . . I should not dare to bring even the best-disposed Engineer officer here. He might approve enthusiasticaly, but he would certainly want to copy the whole plan slavishly. It would then form a Colonial Type, the same everywhere, at Hanoi as at Biskra, at Tamatave as in New Caledonia . . .

  What can one say of . . . the quarters in the park, so lavishly laid out for amusement and study; of the liberty permitted out of duty hours; of the constant call on initiative, the encouragement of a sense of responsibility, the proof of confidence in the men one commands? . . . [I despair] when I think that in France hardly anyone believes in or wants such things – that regulations, coercion, are in our blood to such an extent that even amongst the best there is not one in ten who does not consider that all is lost if the men do not groom their horses in time with music, and peel potatoes to a measured rhythm.8

  LYAUTEY’S DISDAIN FOR FRENCH BUREAUCRACY and inertia was aggravated after he reached Saigon; it is a recurrent theme in his correspondence, but a couple of examples are enough. The main telegraph office refused to accept French gold coins – which had been accepted in every British office across the world, and even at Kandy railway station in Ceylon. There were two telegraph lines from Saigon to Hanoi, one French, one British (extended down from China); the Army used the British one even for official despatches, since it was much faster and more reliable than the French. Again, a French officer in charge of a district up-country told Lyautey that he had employed landless Vietnamese labourers for building work in a region previously abandoned for years to the ‘pirates’. The colonel wanted to give each of his workers a plot of land around the reborn village to consolidate the pacification of the area, but the civil power refused permission unless each peasant submitted an application on the same forms used to register land titles in France. Unsurprisingly, they drifted back into the forest, where many of them took up banditry simply in order to eat.9

  It is widely conceded by French historians that colonial development was handicapped by the low quality of the civilian administration. For decades, different directorates in the ministries of the Navy, Trade, War and Foreign Affairs had fought turf wars over their responsibilities and prerogatives. When the Colonial Ministry was finally created in the year that Lyautey arrived in Indochina, it housed an assortment of jealously squabbling departments with responsibilities that either overlapped or left gaps between, and all of them starved of men with real local knowledge. The instability of governments robbed the ministry of any continuity of direction; the average tenure of a colonial governor before 1920 was just one year, and most other officials also rotated at frequent intervals. It has become a lazy cliché to accuse French colonial military officers of making policy in the saddle. Since they had often been in-country for twice as long as the often ignorant and dilatory administrators, had more contact with the villagers, and were confronted by immediate life-and-death situations without guidance from the civil power, they had little choice but to act according to their experience and instincts. (As Professor Porch has pointed out, their decisions were usually based on a rough-and-ready natural justice that was far more acceptable to the Vietnamese than the cruel inanities of the bureaucrats – vide Lyautey’s tale of land title application forms.)

  Since the specific comparison was often made by contemporary Frenchmen, it is legitimate to note that these administrators presented a sorry contrast to those of the British colonial service, who were selected by demanding competitive examination from among an educational elite, required to learn local languages, and indoctrinated with an ideal of imperial service that passed down through generations of the same families. This ideal hardly existed in France, where the colonies were widely regarded as dumping-grounds for professional failures and family embarrassments, and consequently the quality of the personnel was sometimes shockingly low. Such posts were often sought (by political jobbery) only as the last resort of the otherwise unemployable; of those in Senegal, General Brière de l’Ile wrote that they were ‘if not actually compromised at home, then at least incapable of making a living there’. Anxious above all to avoid criticism from Paris, they shied away from taking decisions and sought refuge in the wording of regulations drafted far away and in an almost frivolous ignorance of local conditions. As late as 1900 – 14 barely 50 per cent of the recruits to the service had even secondary education; it is hardly surprising that military graduates of St Cyr and the Polytechnique despised them.10

  AFTER A FEW DAYS IN SAIGON Lyautey sailed up to Hanoi, and again he was lucky in his company: Governor-General Antoine de Lanessan himself. Since the governor spoke freely about his frustrations and hopes, the
major clearly made himself respectfully agreeable. Paris was obsessed with short-term profit from customs revenue and taxation, ‘eating up the corn while it is still only grass’. Lanessan was insistent that France must try to work with the existing Vietnamese power structure, imperfect and secretive though it might be, rather than seeking to break an armature that had held native society together for a thousand years. The French would always be in a tiny minority, so they must patiently persuade the local elite that it was in their own long-term interest to cooperate. The white men must not seek to change local habits, and must offend no traditional beliefs. To the argument that France should not be helping to entrench the selfish privileges of mandarins (who might just as easily be working against them), but should ‘liberate and educate the poor’, Lanessan replied that hierarchy was natural in all human societies, and cited the relative success of the protectorate in Tunisia compared with the squalor of Algeria. Lyautey recalled from his own tour in 1880 – 82 what had happened to the Algerian poor when their local leadership was utterly destroyed – that method might ‘satisfy the mentality of corporals, but it doesn’t get you very far’. Lyautey wrote of the governor-general’s approach that ‘this system is distasteful to the military mind, which is a powerful argument for its good sense’.11 The belief that a people of utterly different culture would welcome the chance to become imitation Frenchmen if the ancient framework of their own society was dismantled may ostensibly have been humane, but was actually a patronising fantasy.