Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  LYAUTEY LOST HIS COMBAT VIRGINITY early in February 1896, when Colonel Vallière sent him into the mountains between Bac Quang and Ha Giang as second-in-command to Major Briquelot of the Naval Infantry, leading 350 men. Briquelot was weak with dysentery and Lyautey had to be ready to take over if he finally collapsed. The engagement that followed was banal, the everyday stuff of wilderness soldiering; but a man never forgets the soldiers who shared his first real experience under fire, and for Lyautey they were légionnaires.66

  On 9 February three company groups, each only about 120 strong, advanced to try to drive Chinese bandits out of one of their lairs. Each was led by a Legion captain; Lyautey took Combettes, Pierson and a single 80mm mountain gun straight up from the valley, while Captain Certau was supposed to be working his way in along the crests from a flank. Guided by the ‘friendlies’ who were indispensable to any operation, at about 10am Lyautey set off; ahead lay the mouth of a narrow, dark gorge, with the smoke of bandit campfires rising pale against the forest above. Pierson took the left flank, climbing through jungle to a bare hillock that commanded the mouth of the gorge, while Combettes’ légionnaires clambered up the rocks on the right. In the early afternoon Lyautey led Lieutenant Dambiermont and his reserve platoon forward out of the paddies, and as they reached the treeline they came under fire. Lyautey placed the reserve, then joined Pierson, who was pinned down by fire on the left; the gun was dragged up to the hillock and dropped shells ahead of them, while on each side of the gorge the légionnaires worked their way upwards through the bush, machetes in hand. At nightfall they bivouacked where they were, serenaded by Chinese trumpets, howls and random firing from the slopes ahead.

  Before dawn on 10 February two platoons climbed on up the heights on each side of the gorge, and from the right Combettes’ men reached a position to fire down into the bandit hideout. This was abandoned, and Lyautey reached it by mid-morning; at that point Major Briquelot’s condition worsened, and he had to be evacuated on a stretcher. At about 2pm heavy firing was heard ahead; Lyautey could not tell if this was Certeau coming in from the north, or his own Captain Pierson’s platoon. As the crackling grew more intense Lyautey became concerned – Pierson had only 30 rifles with him – so he took the 60-man reserve and followed Pierson’s track up the side of the gorge:And what a track! Hardly are we in the gorge than we find . . . an inextricable chaos of rocks in ridges, in needles, torn, pitted, which one climbs for 350 feet, with bleeding hands [and] an abyss below, [only] to descend into vertical gorges and ascend again further on; but the increasing fusillade lends wings to our feet; we have an agonizing fear lest [Pierson’s] cartridges give out!

  . . . [At] every moment we expect our reconnaissance party to fall on us from above, retreating and smashed up. We are hailed from a ridge; it is Pierson. ‘So it is not you in action? Who is it then?’ ‘I have no idea, and I’m on my way, but we can’t move fast.’ . . . The firing redoubles . . . and still there are more rocky ridges; we shall never get there. At last, at 5.30pm in the dark, here we are, the 100 of us, having dragged ourselves up to the top of a needle . . . drowned in a sea of trees and less than 700 feet from the fight, but separated from it by a gulf which it is impossible to cross in the dark.

  You cannot imagine what it was like: the incessant firing echoing among the rocks, the shouting of the Chinese, their war-cries and death-cries, the continuous sound of their famous trumpets – you have to have heard them to understand the shiver of fear they cause – and the anguish of uncertainty. Perched on my needle, I order the buglecall of the Legion to be sounded. It is answered; it is Combettes! We speak to each other now, though we cannot see each other. He tells us that he is on the flank of the hill, that he has been fighting alone for three hours, and that we ourselves are exactly on the right flank of the Chinese . . . A salvo from the left – this time it is for us . . . we can see nothing, but bullets flatten themselves against the rock, tearing the trees . . . Combettes in front of us has [had] two of his men killed and four wounded . . .

  [It is] a night never to be forgotten. Picture 100 men clustered together on the side of a sugar-loaf with holes in it like a Gruyère cheese. No possibility of moving except at the risk of a broken neck; not a square yard of flat surface. All that one can do is to wedge oneself with ones knees into an irregularity in the rock, so as to rest a little without falling; strict orders not to light a fire or even to smoke – [we must not] disclose our position to the rifles facing us. On our flank facing the bandits our men [have their] rifles at the shoulder. We are in linen, just what we wore when we dashed off . . . without any rugs or a crust of bread . . . not even a drop of water . . . At the top, we four officers squeeze ourselves into a cavity; it shelters us from the wind, but it is open at the top, and now, at 11pm, comes the rain . . .

  Considering his moves for the next day, Lyautey continued:If Combettes’ line of retreat with his dead and wounded is like ours, then he cannot move: to [withdraw] in order to rally one’s forces in these rocks is death, nothing less; we should be killed like rabbits . . . The alternative is to remain and begin the battle again from our balcony . . . [and it is] impossible to see anything, or combine our movements.

  At dawn on the 11th a ‘friendly’ slipped down the crag, and up again after an hour and a half with a note from Combettes. He had spent the night 150 yards from the bandits; he now had 4 dead and 6 wounded, but his path to the rear was not difficult. Leaving a strong guard on his ‘needle’, Lyautey climbed across to join Combettes’ légionnaires and advanced with them. The Chinese – unusually – left 14 dead behind; there were blood trails, discarded rice and gear, and drifts of empty cartridge cases (mostly Winchester). It was on 10 February that Lyautey’s Cross was officially gazetted, so technically he was admitted to the Legion of Honour while under fire; in his letter to his brother he makes a self-deprecating joke about this, but his pleasure is evident.67

  BEFORE LYAUTEY LEFT the 3rd Territory he had a chance to apply the Galliéni method himself, and he found a different but no less intense satisfaction in the experience. On 23 February 1896 he left Ha Giang ‘with my favourite escort, consisting of Captain Pierson with sixty légionnaires under Lieutenants Guittet and Virey . . .’. East of Bac Me he found the ruined, overgrown site of what had been the district’s main market village forty years ago, before the Taipings came. To subsistence farmers on any continent a local market was and is the key to survival; it is where they exchange what little they have for what little they need, and without safe access to such a gathering-place productive life is unsustainable.

  It is always the same – visiting three or four hillocks before we find the right one that is good from every point of view . . . interviewing the notables who must be reassured, exhortations to the inhabitants to return, examination of the old paddyfields, appeals to re-open the market . . .

  [At Lang Ca Phu] I spend my morning going over the ground and by noon I have planned out the post. I install Lieutenant Gadoffre [of the Skirmishers] here . . . We trace out the post, find a spring whose course can be turned, a place for brick-making, limestone to be [burned for making] mortar, woodland for cutting timber – a rapid calculation, an estimate, a sketch, a plan and elevation – and when I start off again at 2pm everybody is already at work . . .

  When he returned on 12 March he was delighted with progress:A real joy . . . a wonderful young lieutenant, Gadoffre, the site of whose post I only fixed 17 days ago, has already constructed it on the ridge overlooking a deep passage . . . well-placed at the intersection of tracks which for twenty years were abandoned to brigandage. The village had been reborn [in] the shelter of the post. These lovers of the soil, who only leave their homes when driven out, have returned from the mountains and the jungle. A dozen houses are already up, the headman of the canton of Yen Phu has been reinstalled. They have started to work like mad on the paddyfields on both banks of the river. They have brought water right into the post itself. The vegetable garden has been planted. All [is] smiles and
movement; it is life after twenty years of death . . . 68

  As during his first trek along the eastern frontier, here in the north Lyautey marvelled at the dramatic highland scenery and thrived on the physical challenge of travelling through it on foot and horseback, sleeping beside campfires under the stars. On the first sunny day after three months’ rain and cold:My légionnaires are cheerful . . . they march without halting, their burdens are light and the coolies keep close together . . .

  . . . It is wonderful to think that I have become an infantryman; I never get on my horse now except to cross the streams – though it is true that this means pretty often. Last year I thought it more chic to wade across with water up to my waist like the soldiers, but Galliéni convinced me that this was idiotic: (1) because by getting wet [myself] I could not [make the others any drier]; (2) because when the chief reaches the bivouac he writes, thinks, orders, and has need of the rest, health and sleep on which depend the rest, health and sleep of those he leads; and (3), because the chief is forty years old and his men twenty-five.69

  It is interesting to see through Lyautey’s eyes two different generations of Legion officer. At Viet Tri he met the old-school Captain de Traversay, a paternal 47-year-old Gascon who had graduated from St Cyr in 1869 but retired from the Army in the mid-1870s. After reducing himself to penury by riotous living he had enlisted in the ranks of the Legion, and had now worked his way back up to captain; he had decorations, the respect of his men, a passionate interest in hunting and photography, and seemed a wholly contented man. In a bivouac near the frontier Lyautey spent an evening of pleasant gossip with the younger type: Lieutenant de Meditte from Dijon, a year out of St Cyr – ‘last winter he was at a dance at Marie de L’s, and talks of them all and of the others whom I know there’. Clearly, the Legion’s roughneck image was no longer a deterrent to gentlemen.70 In March, Lyautey had good reason to look back on the past weeks with satisfaction:Could I have believed six weeks ago, after Bac Muc, that the problem would have been solved . . . and that I myself should reopen this Na Bo route which seemed to Chabrol and me, in our office at Hanoi, as something so far away, so problematic and so vague? On the innumerable white spaces on our maps . . . we marked in red a mass of future outposts, without really believing in them! . . . [Now] we know where we are. It has passed from the unknown to the known, from the inorganic to the organic, from the vague to the actual . . . Why not congratulate oneself a little at the thought that one has taken a small part in this work? ... But all of this would have been useless, would have been mere scraps of paper, without the man of action, the réalisateur . . . in the shape of Vallière.71

  WHILE BANDITRY WOULD REMAIN as endemic as fever in the High Region, by 1898 the major work of pacification would be more or less complete. Until the First World War the Legion would continue to provide the hard skeleton of the up-country garrisons in the hills, and settled into a fairly peaceful routine enlivened by the occasional skirmish – particularly along the middle Red and Clear rivers in 1908 – 9, when various upheavals brought the name of De Tam back into the 2nd Bureau’s reports. The permanent Legion presence swung between three and four battalions over these ten years, though it dwindled thereafter. One was normally based at Lao Cai on the upper Red river, with companies dispersed in forts along the Yunnan frontier; a second at Hia Giang, to watch the upper Clear and Gam rivers; a third centred on Tuyen Quang; and the fourth at and around Cao Bang on the border with Guangxi. In 1900 – 1901 the garrison was temporarily increased by two Legion battalions when many Navy troops were withdrawn from the colony to take part in the international operations against the Boxers in northern China.72

  In the Algerian depots, the appeal of a tour in Tonkin remained as strong as ever, despite the known dangers of disease; men competed to get into the replacement drafts, and the threat of being excluded was held over the troublesome. The attraction of double pay and, for ‘lifers’, an increased pension entitlement was less important than the simple yearning to experience an exotic faraway world. Returned veterans would speak of Indochina wistfully: a nostalgia for its beauty, its timeless calm (and its women) seemed to get into their bloodstream along with the malaria parasites, and would never let them free. The Kipling who wrote The Road to Mandalay would have understood them perfectly.

  LYAUTEY’S LETTERS AFTER HIS RETURN TO HANOI in the spring of 1896 suggest one of his swoops into depression. Through a simple misunderstanding he had missed the chance of applying for command of the circle of Ha Giang himself; ‘bereft of productive, compelling and immediate action, I am eating myself away – corroding’. He did reflect, in some wonder, on all that had happened in the bare eighteen months since that cable had reached him on manoeuvres at Brie – where he had felt himself ‘chained for life to a treadmill, and . . . disheartened by successive failures to get free from it’ – but he seemed unable to bank any lasting dividend of confidence from his achievements.73

  The temptations of armchair psychiatry should be resisted, but in his personal correspondence the contrasting poles of Lyautey’s character are very striking. When he is in the field, faced with practical difficulties and physical dangers that demand decision and action, then his letters are all robust energy and focused intelligence. When he is confined to the stifling world of headquarters and the obligatory social round, he is seized by gloom and apprehension. At all times his personal relationships with the men he worked beside strongly influenced his moods, and the lethargy and back-biting of Hanoi brought out his fretful side. Many of his friendly colleagues had already moved on to other postings, and he perceived other fellow staff officers as chilly and jealous, lacking the slightest interest in what was being achieved in the High Region. True, General Duchemin was as kind as ever, presenting him personally with his Cross at a private dinner party for friends and calling him ‘the chief-of-staff he had dreamt of’; but Lyautey feared that public signs of favour from a commander-in-chief who would soon be going home would simply expose him to envious hostility.

  In another eighteen months he would inevitably be swallowed up again by the Metropolitan Army – the great model for everything that frustrated him in Hanoi. He had been let out of prison and shown what life could be like in the open air, but he could see the gates closing on him again all too soon. Always as easily cast down as lifted up, he despaired of ever becoming a réalisateur himself. He considered resigning his commission, and wrote to his friend Max Weber:. . . the plan, I imagine, would be this: to find a wife who would bring me, with her other qualities, an ample independence of means . . . and henceforward to look out for an electoral seat for 1898. At 43 one can still do something in parliamentary life, and I shall try to steer towards the colonial cause and become a candidate for governor’s rank.74

  It is hard to think of a worse date than 1898 for a man of Lyautey’s values and temperament to be entering the National Assembly. In the event, his ‘dear colonel’ would save him from a fate worse than the boredom of provincial garrison life, and would reunite him with his ‘favourite escort’. Vietnam was not the only place where blackwater fever was feasting on légionnaires like a tiger.

  7.

  ‘A Calling Devoid of Allurement’

  Soldiering in Madagascar for a native was a calling devoid of allurement. There was no commissariat, no pay, no outfit except for a rifle, a few rounds of ball cartridge and a bit of calico.

  Bennet Burleigh, Daily Telegraph correspondent

  ‘How many men do you reckon die at this hospital each day?’ I asked him. ‘Twenty or thirty’, he replied. Taking the average as twenty-five, I made the gloomy calculation that this represented 1,500 deaths in two months, at just this hospital alone.

  Private Léon Silbermann1

  THE GREAT TROPICAL ISLAND of Madagascar lies 250 miles out into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Mozambique in East Africa. It is larger than France, almost three times the size of mainland Great Britain, and has roughly the same area as the US Atlantic seaboard states from Massachus
etts down through South Carolina.

  Measuring about 1,000 miles long by 360 wide at its broadest, it is shaped vaguely like a human left footprint with a long ‘big toe’ (see Map 9). In the nineteenth century the swampy river valleys of the northern and north-western coastal lowlands were covered with jungle. South of this region, roughly the central one-third of the island’s length is divided into three distinct strips of contrasting terrain. The broad western zone is grassy savannah; from these plains slopes rise eastwards towards the island’s offset rocky spine, where treeless plateaux up to 6,000 feet above sea level switch-back down the island, spiked with occasional volcanic peaks rising to 9,500 feet. On their eastern edge these uplands fall away sharply in escarpments thick with mountain jungle, stepping down to a narrow, intensely fertile eastern coastal strip.

  The Malagasy peoples, a diverse mixture of mainly Malayo-Polynesian and African stock, numbered about 2.5 million in 1900.2 Depending on local conditions the tribes lived mainly by growing rice in irrigated paddy fields, maize, vegetables and fruit, and by raising longhorn oxen and fat-tailed sheep. The west, from the northern jungle inlets right down through the grasslands, was the country of the Sakalava tribes. Very dark and strongly built, Sakalavas favoured a hairstyle of matted dreadlocks; their inland communities were herdsmen and farmers, but coastal fishermen also sailed their outrigger canoes across the Mozambique Channel to Africa on slave-raids. Although intermittent fighting continued, particularly with the Sakalava, by the mid-nineteenth century the Hova people of the eastern central plateau had come to dominate a large part of central and northern Madagascar. This tribe had pale olive-brown complexions and straight Malayo-Polynesian features, and considered themselves the most culturally advanced people of the island. Their king Radama I(r. 1810 – 28) had aggressively extended his rule northwards and eastwards from his capital at Antananarivo (Tananarive), and southwards over the ethnically similar Betsileo people. The Hova nation was called Imerina and their state the Merina empire. Women among the Hova enjoyed equal rights and prestige, and queens were often preferred to kings, though sharing power with their consorts.