Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  ON RETURNING TO HIS COMRADES in the Yen The, Manington learned that the rebel mandarin De Nam had died – allegedly at the hands of Chinese gun-runners, furious that he had won back during a night of gambling all that he had paid them the day before – and that his lieutenant De Tam was now the power in the hills. A Legion patrol had spotted his new fort a few miles north of the ruins of Hue Thué, overlooked by a promising potential artillery position. De Tam was believed to have up to 2,000 men in and around this base, perhaps 1,200 of them armed with breech-loaders, and also had mutual assistance pacts with Chinese bandits to his west and north.43 General Voyron planned three converging columns totalling some 6,300 troops. For weeks every available man worked to transport and stockpile stores; coolies were hired, garrisons were reduced to a lonely squad or two, and in the dry heat of spring companies of the Legion, Naval Infantry and Tonkinese Skirmishers trudged all over north-east Tonkin to concentrate at their jumping-off points. In the hills, meanwhile, smoke-signals by day and lights by night suggested that every move was being watched and reported by rebel scouts.

  The first column lumbered into the forest on 9 March 1892, burdened by artillery. Remarkably, surprise was achieved and the vital hilltop for the battery was occupied three days later; Manington’s Legion company then guarded the sappers and coolies who in 48 hours turned a 6-mile zigzag trail into a track capable of taking artillery. After a day of frustrating fog, the 15th dawned clear, and under cover of steady bombardment the sappers forced a path towards the fort with axe, saw and explosive. (The thunder of artillery had driven all the deer out of the forest, and that night tigers took three men and three ration bullocks.) On 17 March the fort was taken; for once the rebels left many dead behind, but De Tam and hundreds of his men scattered in all directions – including southwards, passing right between the French columns.44

  In May 1892, Private Manington turned in his old Gras for a new Lebel repeater, with its revolutionary smokeless ammunition.45 After 18 months in-country Manington judged his company to be an effective force – unafraid of the jungle, keen-eyed scouts, good snap shots, largely fever-proofed, and capable of initiative when deployed in dispersed squads under their corporals. Captain Plessier finished his three-year Tonkin tour (the maximum consecutive service permitted), but his replacement in command of 1st Company proved, if anything, to be even more popular. A big, friendly blond from Strasbourg, Captain Watrin could call every man by name after a couple of weeks – unheard-of in the Legion.

  Manington left the company in July 1892, unexpectedly posted to a clerk’s job in brigade headquarters at Bac Ninh, which in 1893 would lead to a luxurious billet in Hanoi; as a consequence he would be the only one of these three memoirists to serve out a full term in Tonkin. ‘Daddy’ Voyron ran a happy staff, and Manington found the work interesting; the reports he filed, of actions fought and intelligence gathered while a railway was painfully pushed north from Phu Lang Thuong towards Lang Son, gave him for the first time an idea of the wider picture. However, in August he was shocked to find himself reading of Captain Watrin’s death, in an ambush among the crags north of Cho Trang – seven of Manington’s old comrades had been hit while getting his body back.46 In December 1892, Manington served briefly under a new interim brigade commander brought down from the frontier; like Voyron, Colonel Galliéni was a Naval Infantryman from West Africa.

  JOSEPH SIMON GALLIÉNI was then 53 years old, but had already been a full colonel for eleven years; since most Metropolitan officers did not even reach major until they were in their early forties, this was a striking example of the rapid promotion that could be earned in the colonies. On the outbreak of war in July 1870, his St Cyr class had immediately been commissioned sub-lieutenants (the consequent demonstration of enthusiasm had to be drilled back into a seemly calm by the officer of the day, a Captain Georges Boulanger). Already reduced to half-strength by 31 August, Major Lambert’s 3rd Naval Infantry Regiment made a stand against Bavarian attacks on hastily fortified farmhouses at Bazeilles. The stubborn defence of the Bougerie house the next day by about 60 men under Captain Aubert would be immortalized by Alphonse de Neuville in his painting ‘Les dernières cartouches’; and one of the 60 was Sub-lieutenant Galliéni, knocked unconscious by a bullet that creased his skull.47

  In 1880 – already four years in West Africa – Captain Galliéni led columns deep into the country between the Senegal and Niger rivers. When one was ambushed and broken up in forest fighting, Galliéni pressed ahead with the last 30 Skirmishers, very short of ammunition and quinine, and walked into a village alone to bluff the headman into making common cause against the warriors who were pursuing him. Eventually he reached Nango, capital of the Sultan Ahmadou; intermittently delirious with yellow fever, he was held captive in a hut for ten months, but finally persuaded Ahmadou to sign a treaty – an exploit that earned Galliéni promotion and decoration on his return to France. In 1886 – 8 Lieutenant-Colonel Galliéni held an important regional command in operations against Samory Touré. After a spell in Paris as chief-of-staff of the Naval Army Corps, he arrived in Upper Tonkin to command the 1st, then from October 1892 the 2nd Territory, with headquarters at Lang Son.

  It was another two years before the rail tracks from Phu Lang Thuong reached the frontier; but in December 1894 Major Lyautey, acting chief-of-staff to General Duchemin, was sent north for the formal opening and meetings with Chinese notables. He had already heard about Colonel Galliéni before he met him – ‘the great man here . . . clear-headed, businesslike, broad-minded’ – and was flattered when Galliéni immediately congratulated him on his three-year-old article in Revue des Deux Mondes. Lyautey wrote with vivid excitement about his journey up-country by boat and horseback, then along the frontier to Dong Dang and into China during Christmas week of 1894. Like Dr Hocquard before him, he was fascinated by scenery, costume and customs. Getting away from Hanoi gave a lift to his spirits: ‘I feel so well . . . after this good day, wholesome, full of experiences, a day on horseback in the open air, of satisfied curiosity . . . good, healthy, strenuous life.’48

  Hubert Lyautey’s epiphany seems to have occurred during the evening he spent at Dong Dang with Galliéni and the post commander, Captain de Grandmaison. Listening to them swapping stories over drinks on the little verandah of Grandmaison’s shack, watching the sinking sun paint the cliffs of China red, he suddenly recognized and responded to a picture of what life could offer a colonial officer who was capable of real dedication. His letter to his sister on Christmas Day enthused about living ‘like Roman legionaries’, driving roads, constructing outposts, ‘opening markets, governing a little world, bringing peace, confidence, life, commerce’ (one recalls the little boy ‘playing countries’ in his sandpit at Nancy). This revelation came the more easily for the fact that Grandmaison was a man of his own class and intellect; on shelves in the captain’s hut he saw not just technical manuals and months-old publications from Paris, but a little library ranging from Talleyrand to John Stuart Mill – about as wide a moral spectrum as one could imagine. Lyautey must have made a good impression in his turn, and he was ‘enchanted’ when Galliéni hinted at the possibility of future collaboration.49

  Lyautey had pinned some hopes on his lucky shipboard meeting with the governor-general, so he was disappointed when, in January 1895, Lanessan’s political opponents engineered his abrupt recall. To be fair, Lyautey was frustrated not only at losing a powerful contact who might serve his ambitions, but also by the immediate lassitude that seized the civil administration. Until the new governor arrived, every request was stamped ‘pending’, and this during the brief annual season when something might be achieved before the monsoon drowned out all activity in May. However, during Colonel Galliéni’s consequent visit to Hanoi for final meetings with the governor, Lyautey spent time with him, and in January his orders took him back to the frontier for several months to work with ‘this inspiring man’.50

  Galliéni’s photographs suggest a longer-faced version of the
portraits of Rudyard Kipling in his confident maturity, in the 1890s’ cranial uniform of cropped hair and walrus moustache. It is a face full of character, and behind his thick spectacles the lantern-jawed Galliéni shares with Kipling an attractive expression of sharp-eyed curiosity and engagement with his world. He was, on the face of it, quite unlike the effusive aesthete Lyautey (who lost no time in turning his off-duty quarters in Hanoi into a stage-set of chinoiserie). Galliéni came from a firmly Republican background, chose to live simply, and had a dry, sparing wit. The snobbish Lyautey was slightly shocked to hear Galliéni remark of Captain de Grandmaison: ‘It’s odd: he’s of noble birth, he was educated by the Jesuits, and yet he’s intelligent.’51 But the worldly veteran of West Africa and the frustrated theorist of the salons shared one defining quality: they both had huge practical energy and painfully low thresholds of boredom.

  UP HERE AT THE CHINESE END of the highland corridor of dissident activity that connected with the Yen The and the Delta, the Chinese bandits had the priceless advantage of friendly refuge across a virtually open frontier. However, although the border was porous, during the past two years it had at least presented Galliéni with something to work with – an edge he could get hold of. His converging columns did not have to try to trap the gangs from all sides simultaneously in an amorphous wilderness, but simply to drive them in a direction which they were anyway inclined to take when under pressure – back across the border. It would take much longer to persuade them not to return, but Galliéni had no intention of merely reacting to local events; he had a plan for the long term, and the patience to apply it.

  The man who had talked Ahmadou of Segou into a treaty while held as a sick, helpless captive was well able to deal with evasive mandarins trying to protect the fruits of their corruption; he negotiated politely, but was absolute in his demands that they control their side of the border. He divided his territory into battalion ‘circles’ or districts; each comprised a number of satellite sectors, held in roughly company strength and commanded by a captain who was required to familiarize himself completely with his patch. In those adjacent to the frontier he planted a line of little border posts on mutually visible hilltops opposite the Chinese forts, staring down their throats; the bulk of the troops were held in larger posts further back on important tracks. This allowed them to react quickly and fiercely to local incursions, and his company commanders learned that Galliéni would always shield them from any diplomatic protest over robust tactics of hot pursuit.

  As the arithmetic of cross-border raiding became less profitably one-sided, the terrorized locals saw that French outposts had begun to offer some measure of protection, and began to creep back from their caves and forest hideouts to rebuild in the ashes of their villages. It was then that Galliéni demonstrated his difference from other commanders: when a local success was achieved he did not shift his attention and troops to some other point, but continued his investment. He understood that without the real support of the local people no pacification could succeed. He believed that the highland tribes had been controlled by the Chinese bandits solely through terror, and that they would multiply the effect of his own stretched forces if they were given a genuine reason to do so. That reason had to be a trust earned by delivering practical incentives, and Galliéni’s incentives extended to arming the tribesmen for self-defence once they were installed in their rebuilt villages and reclaiming their abandoned fields:This seems very strange, but gives excellent results . . . Armed villages work – more than 10,000 rifles have been distributed in the 2nd Territory – counted, checked and inspected once a quarter by the local French officer. So far only one has gone missing (the man got two years in jail and a hundred strokes). The locals hate the Chinese and brigands; up here we really are liberators – this is the first time in twenty years that the peasants have been able to harvest their crops.52

  Lyautey’s letters of February and March 1895 reveal his enthusiasm as he grasped the pattern of the ‘Galliéni method’. The keys were rapid access by new roads, continuity of local efforts and civil development – not postponed until some imagined future when military pacification might have been achieved, but immediately, by the military officer on the spot, to give the villagers a real stake in achieving it:The brigands are all Chinese . . . they ravage the country, intimidate the inhabitants . . . the latter are in general anxious for our arrival, and above all that we shall remain . . . [They] are hostile only when they cannot count absolutely on our support, because they know that the bandits, when they return, will make them pay dearly for any help they may have given us. But when they see us do something definite – establish posts, make roads, bring the telegraph – then they quickly make common cause with us.

  . . . Military success is nothing unless one combines simultaneously the organization of roads, the telegraph, markets, agriculture – so that alongside pacification there spreads, like an oil stain, a broad patch of civilization.53

  This quoted phrase of Galliéni’s – the tache d’huile – would make a career for itself; the imagery is of oil dripped on cloth, with its margin gradually expanding outwards by automatic capillary action. The first application of the oil took tireless energy, however, and Galliéni’s headquarters at Lang Son were another revelation after the torpor of Hanoi. In this buzzing workshop the colonel was everywhere – checking, counting, complimenting, hustling his small staff to serve his planned timetable for development. ‘It is like America: a town is being born on naked soil . . . Everything seems to spring out of the earth – such intensity of creation! The whistle of a train is heard – already two arrive here each day; between the [taped-out] boundaries of the avenues comes the sound of carpentry, and lime-kilns, mortar-mixing, brick-making . . .’. Lyautey had conscientiously brought with him all the latest Army staff publications on campaign service; Galliéni made a parcel of them to send back to Hanoi – ‘I don’t want you to be tempted to glance at them while you are with me; [they] would only confuse you – it is on the spot, in handling men and things, that you will learn your job.’ (Yet Galliéni had all the main English and German newspapers sent to him, and somehow made time to read them.) He explained his hopes for the future of the border region, and one particular piece of advice would stick in Lyautey’s mind:Look here, I tell you all this, but I am careful not to tell them in Hanoi: [it would] terrify them, and they would stop me short. French functionaries, generals and prefects fear one thing only – broadminded ideas and long views. Therefore I serve dishes that they can digest, I make as little as possible of all that I do, I advance in secret – tacking about, shortening the range of things, describing my most daring and revolutionary acts as matters of everyday policy and detail, as if they were mere rectifications of parish [boundaries] – and so they pass.54

  MAJOR LYAUTEY SEEMED TO HAVE FOUND the path for which he had been searching for twenty years; it was as if a gate had opened in mental walls and he had been let out into open country for the first time in his career. His correspondence races and bubbles with enthusiasm, confidence and the sheer joy of measuring himself against demanding work, and his pleasure in practical tasks far from the Metropolitan hothouse was particularly understandable at this date. The ‘Dreyfus affair’ cannot be ignored: it would sour the relationship between the French Army and the Third Republic for the next decade, putting a dangerous strain on the mutual toleration that had built up between generals and politicians during the previous 25 years. In early 1895, however, the reports reaching the colonies seemed straightforward, and gave little hint of the explosive potential of l’Affaire.55

  On 15 October 1894, during a period of febrile public spy-mania, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a probationary officer of the General Staff, was arrested on a charge of passing military secrets to the German embassy. Dreyfus was a chilly, unclubbable man with few friends; he was also – at a time of growing anti-Semitism – the first Jew to be appointed to a post with the General Staff. Still protesting his innocence after weeks of interrogation and
solitary confinement, he was convicted by court-martial and sentenced to life imprisonment. In February 1895, Dreyfus was discharged from the Army in a ceremony of degradation in a courtyard at Les Invalides; then he was shipped off to the tropical penal colony in French Guiana, where he was one of the few convicts actually to be confined offshore on the infamous Devil’s Island. It was at this stage that Lyautey referred to the matter in a letter to his sister, on 12 February:All the details of the condemnation and degradation of Dreyfus have reached us by this mail. Certainly, at this distance the outlook is a little different; we are more deeply saddened and humiliated than we are angered . . . for the simple reason that we are somewhat suspicious . . . And what adds to our scepticism is that one seems to discern a certain influence of . . . the rabble, always ready to blaze up. They howl ‘à la mort! ’ against Dreyfus, because he is a Jew, without knowing anything . . . just as they howled a hundred years ago ‘Les aristocrats à la lanterne!’, and in 1870, ‘à Berline!’.56

  Over the following two years there was some intermittent press speculation about the legitimacy of the conviction, but few other than Dreyfus’ family were working for a review of the case. He had disgraced his calling, he had been condemned to ‘the dry guillotine’, and France wished to forget him.

  ON THE CHINESE FRONTIER in the winter of 1894/5, Lyautey accompanied Galliéni on a tour up to Cao Bang to ginger up his outposts and confer with his northern ‘circle’ commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Vallière (who had soldiered with him in West Africa). The first of many mentions of the Legion in Lyautey’s letters is the account of leaving ‘a good new road built by the Legion’ from Lang Son to Na Cham, before striking off up a frightening goat-track above the Ky Kung river on ‘vicious little horses, quarrelling all the time’. They made ten-hour marches sometimes in pouring rain, leading their ponies through slippery mud along rock ledges and up and down 3,000-foot passes. They did not take their clothes off for four nights, lying down in rat-infested huts and, when sleep was impossible, smoking, talking and laughing. One tip that Lyautey remembered was that even though telegraph wires had now reached the frontier, they must keep the ‘optical telegraph’: the sight of the lamps flashing back and forth by night was a constant reminder to the Chinese forts that any French garrison was part of a unified system.57