Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  THE LIGHT COLUMN STRUCK OUT SOUTHWARDS on the 14th, and at about 7am the next morning the advance guard hit a strong hill position at Tsinainondry; thoroughly prepared by Colonel Graves to block the Riringala valley, this was held by 1,300 men with two field and two machine guns. The Legion deployed into extended line, waded a marsh and clambered up the steep central slope under intermittent artillery fire, but few of the shells exploded; meanwhile the Algerian Skirmishers turned a flank by remarkable feats of mountaineering up and down gorges and ridges. At 1,200 yards – a range that seemed impossible to the Hovas – the légionnaires lay down and began firing steady Lebel volleys. Above him, Lieutenant Langlois saw one man stand up, look around him, and bolt; two or three more did the same; then, ‘as one man, like those jack-in-the-boxes pushed out on their springs, they suddenly surged out from behind their parapets and disappeared rapidly down the . . . ravines that furrowed the terrain’. Graves confirmed this: ‘having lost a good many, they bolted from their works like rabbits . . .’. He sent General Rainianjalahy just 4 miles back, to occupy positions he had prepared at Kiangara, but when he arrived there with the rearguard at about 6pm he found nobody; he eventually caught up with Rainianjalahy some three hours later and found him asleep in bed in his pavilion, having posted not a single sentry. Total French casualties at Tsinainondry were three wounded.33

  This spectacle was repeated on 19 September at the formidable Ambohimenas escarpment, which rose another 2,600 feet to the upper plateau. The légionnaires, Algerians and Composite Regiment clawed their way up three lung-bursting tracks towards fourteen Hova positions on the shoulders and ridges south of Kinadji. For once the Hovas attempted a counter-attack, but despite having the steep slope in their favour they were driven back; thereupon more than 6,000 defenders abandoned the whole line and retreated some 28 miles to the Ankarahara range on the southern edge of the plateau, burning their own villages as they went. Colonel Graves told the correspondent Knight that some had bribed their officers to run so that they could too. No French combat casualties are recorded, but a number of men collapsed from exhaustion. These exertions without the climax of combat were actually lowering morale; there were half a dozen suicides in the Legion battalion, and the men were silent and listless around their campfires.34

  During the last week of September the column crossed the Ankaraharas and dropped down on to a fertile plain where villages sat among rice-paddies and fruit groves. The French were now only about 30 miles from Antananarivo; groups of Hovas continued to fall back ahead of the column but some now flowed back behind it once it had passed, so Metzinger’s and Voyron’s commands closed up to march in defensive formation. They took fire from a number of villages and had to deploy laboriously to attack them, but the Hovas never waited for them to arrive. The French could not be bothered to take prisoners; one Hova told E. F. Knight that when he was captured the soldiers just took his gun away and told him to go home, and the worst that prisoners had to fear was being made to carry the légionnaires’ packs.35

  FROM A HILLTOP CAMP on 26 – 27 September the soldiers could see, about 15 miles to the south-east, the towers, spires and domes of Antananarivo rising on its 650-foot hill above sheep-meadows and paddy fields. (The troops’ relief was partly due to the prospect of those sheep; rations had been reduced steadily, from sixteen hardtack biscuits daily to just four per man.) The capital was a huddled mass of tawny-red buildings on a hill streaked with green lanes and gardens, occupying a narrow, roughly Y-shaped ridge aligned north to south. The northern slopes were invitingly shallow, but those from the west and east rose steeply to the palace complex, and an almost sheer cliff guarded the south. The city was surrounded on the whole of its southern half by the Ikopa river (see Map 8). General Duchesne decided to avoid a direct approach from the north-west; the ground was too boggy for his guns and his infantry would have had to file along paddy dykes below occupied hilltops. Instead he would keep his force well closed up as they made an unhurried clockwise sweep around the north and north-east of the city, to take some of the strong outlying hill positions and clear themselves a path in from the east. To march across the face of an enemy army was a cardinal sin, but Duchesne was not facing Soult at Austerlitz or Wellington at Salamanca (incredibly, some Hova courtiers imagined that since Duchesne did not attack frontally, his direction of march must indicate a cowardly retreat towards Tamatave).36

  Although Duchesne did not know it, by as early as 21 September Rainianjalahy’s army had been reduced to about 2,200 hungry men, and while the officers were still brandishing their swords and boasting to Colonel Graves, the government was now pressing even chained convicts into the ranks. When Graves got back to the city on 25 September he was told that Rainilaiarivony was in bed and not to be disturbed, and by the afternoon of the 27th he was still being refused an audience with the prime minister. Graves finally took the advice of the Times correspondent Knight and left for Tamatave. Under the circumstances, his perseverance had been remarkable, and he can hardly be blamed for securing a generous severance payment.37

  When the slow clockwise march started in stunning heat on 28 September the Legion was assigned to protect the ration convoy, with two companies forming the rearguard; inevitably, these légionnaires were choked with dust and tormented by flies. They often had to halt while the column stretched and contracted, and some villagers even came out and offered the soldiers water and fruit; but as the baking afternoon wore on, Hova army stragglers began to hover around the slow tail of the column. The crowds grew in numbers and boldness until about 2,000 had assembled, shaking their weapons and shouting, and at last they nerved themselves to attack. Shackled to the slow-moving mule-trains ahead of them, the Legion companies could not manoeuvre beyond taking alternate turns to stop and drive the Hovas back with occasional volleys. Visibility was bad, and they were impeded by straggling pack-animals and the need to carry their casualties; the légionnaires were running low on ammunition when about 50 Senegalese drivers from the Train ran back from the convoy to resupply them. That day, from the city above, E. F. Knight had watched various bodies of Hovas making demonstrations of defiance. Shouting war-cries and brandishing their weapons, they would rush up an empty hill with apparent ferocity, but when the French got anywhere close even to artillery range they would run down again, to repeat the pantomime further off.38 On the 29th the French continued their slow progress between scattered hills, and after a couple of skirmishes they camped early, south-west of Ilafy and about 5 miles from the city.

  Early on 30 September, Duchesne attacked the outlying hill positions from two directions. Voyron’s Hausas would guard the mule-train, while his 13th Naval attacked southwards via Ambatofotsy. Metzinger would hook in from the east with the Algeria regiment and the shreds of the 200th Line, with their left flank secured by the Malagasy Skirmishers. By 9.30am Metzinger had taken Ankatso hill; guns were drawn on to the summit, and before noon they opened fire on Observatory and Andrainarivo hills. Hova guns from the palace precincts replied, but fell silent after 45 minutes. The Malagasy battalion then took the Observatory and, after a slight misstep, the Algerians of III/RMdA occupied Andrainarivo, supported from the north by marsouins who had already taken their own objective. By 1.30pm the whole line of hills had been secured. An artillery duel then broke out between French guns on the hills and the batteries at the palace. Duchesne ordered a slow cadence, with melinite shells mixed in with the black-powder rounds. Meanwhile six small assault columns were assembled, each of two infantry companies with sappers, to force the north and east gates. The bombardment began at 2.55pm, and after 35 minutes – just as the storming parties were advancing – a white flag was raised. Within an hour royal envoys had agreed a complete surrender, and Metzinger’s brigade entered Antananarivo that afternoon. In the city they found 74 guns including 30 modern pieces, enormous stocks of ammunition and some 8,000 rifles.

  In actual combat, since it set out on 14 September the Light Column had lost 10 killed, 56 wounded and 12 m
issing. From all causes the weary, half-size Legion battalion had suffered during that period 104 casualties (nearly one man in three), of which just 14 were the result of enemy action.39

  GENERAL METZINGER LED THE LÉGIONNAIRES out of Antananarivo for the return march north on 22 October. They marched slowly; it was 15 November before the last arrived at Suberbieville, where they saw a great dump of abandoned Lefèbvre carts. Private Silbermann recalled the trail beyond Suberbieville as noisome and depressing, lined for miles with wrecked carts and the rotting corpses of mules: ‘now I could see why our rations so often failed to arrive’. They picked up the line-of-communication detachments as they marched; this would be the last column to use the road between Antananarivo and Majunga, all subsequent movements being by the eastern route from Tamatave. Like the rusting scrap-iron at Suberbieville, this was a tacit reproach to the Army planning staff.

  The same might be said of the scenes that confronted Silbermann when he reached Ankaboka, where both the base camp of the 200th Line and the main evacuation hospital were situated. A chaplain was going from one hospital tent to another, giving the last rites to long rows of men in all stages of distress. A Legion medical orderly told him that for the past two months they had been burying 25 or 30 men a day at that hospital alone, and that those at Majunga were even worse. Silbermann saw these for himself some days later. When he had passed on his way up-country in May there had been only a handful of crosses in the cemetery; now he calculated that there were nearly 1,500 of them, and cartloads of coffins came from the hospitals morning and evening.40

  Each battalion had its own two surgeons – for this campaign, twice the norm – and the central medical services (under the command, coincidentally, of the same Dr Edouard Hocquard whose memoir of Tonkin is quoted in Chapter 4) had been planned with Indochinese experience in mind. Originally 70 doctors with support staff had been provided in two field ambulance units, four 250-bed field hospitals, a 500-bed evacuation hospital and a 500-bed sanitorium, and the 350-bed hospital ship Shamrock was anchored at Majunga. There, three water sterilizers could process 30,000 litres a day, and lavish supplies of quinine had been shipped (eventually, about half a pound’s weight for every man in the corps). It had been estimated, from Tonkin experience, that this total of 2,350 medium- to long-term beds would be filled only to 40 or 50 per cent capacity at any one time – in other words, that the expeditionary corps would never have to treat more than 8 per cent of its strength wounded or sick. This would prove to be cruelly optimistic, and the hospitals were simply overwhelmed: during the four-month campaign, one 800-strong battalion of the 200th Line would be reduced to 58 fit men, and one 200-man Engineer company to just seven.41

  There was no lack of care by the hospital doctors and nursing sisters, at least eight of whom themselves died on the island while others had to be invalided out and replaced; but the supplies of quinine had been incompetently loaded first on to the transports, so were not retrieved from the bottom of the holds and delivered to the hospitals until too late to prevent thousands of malaria cases.42 It was, in any case, ineffective against the blackwater fever that battened on exhausted men heavily infected with a particular sort of malaria parasite, and this killed them in their thousands – especially (but far from exclusively) those of the unacclimatized units from France, who died at twice and three times the rate of the légionnaires and marsouins. Of all those who died, the cause of death was given as malarial (that is, including blackwater fever) in 72 per cent of cases.43

  Total figures are slightly contradictory in different sources. Those in General Duchesne’s original report had to be revised subsequently, to give total deaths among French soldiers in Madagascar (including Naval Troops and the mixed Colonial Regiment) as somewhere between 4,450 and just over 4,600. To these must be added those who died aboard ship on the way home and those who succumbed after repatriation, which General Reibell later calculated at another 554 and 348, giving a total of just over 5,500; however, a standard modern French source gives a grand total of 5,756 deaths. Since the total manpower of the original expeditionary corps and its subsequent reinforcements was 18,340, this was a fatality rate of 31 per cent, and of these, less than half of 1 per cent – just 25 men – died as the result of enemy action.44 The total dead and missing from the three battalions of the Algeria Marching Regiment was 604, or roughly 22 per cent – marginally more than the figure for the 13th Naval Infantry. Much the same percentage applied to the Legion battalion alone, which had 226 dead, only 5 of them the result of combat. What dragged the overall percentages upwards so dramatically were the deaths in the Metropolitan units: 1,039 for the three battalions of the 200th Line, and 510 for the 40th Light Infantry Battalion – fatalities of 43 per cent and a shocking 63 per cent respectively.45 The parliamentary representatives of French voters would make very sure that Metropolitan troops would never again be exposed to such risks.

  AFTER A MISERABLE VOYAGE HOME, during which the crew of the steamer Hindoustan neglected them shamefully, the légionnaires disembarked at Oran just in time for Christmas 1895. Here, the welcome was the warmest Silbermann ever experienced: the whole town was decorated, there was a garlanded Arc de Triomphe in the Place de la République, and a band led them through cheering crowds who showered oranges and cigars on them all the way to the Zouave barracks. That evening the garrison and civilians alike pressed free drinks on any légionnaire they spotted, and if he entered a café-concert the band struck up the Marseillaise. It all started again when the men from 2nd Foreign returned to their Saida depot, where they were met at the station by the colonel, the colours and the band. Many of them were soon sent to Arzew for the rest cure, but blackwater fever still came to collect a few of them even two months after disembarkation (for the sake of their morale, convalescents were forbidden by the medical officers from attending funerals). The ‘Red Island’ was far from finished with the Legion yet, however.46

  WHEN GENERAL DUCHESNE ENTERED ANTANANARIVO on 1 October 1895 he declared a French protectorate over Madagascar, and in January 1896 his place was taken by a civilian resident-general, Hippolyte Laroche. This well-meaning man cast around for a group of nobles to form a plausible government under the nominal authority of Queen Ranavalona III, whose prestige was important for ensuring the peaceful acceptance of the new arrangements. Given the factional intrigues that had always characterized the ruling oligarchy, it was not difficult to find collaborators; in January 1896 the old prime minister Rainilaiarivony was sent into exile in Algeria and his treacherous secretary Rasanjy installed in his place. However, competitive conspiracies among the nobility continued unabated, as each group clawed for advantage and profit while slandering the others to any Frenchman who would listen (forging incriminating letters was a favourite activity). The two main parties were associated with courtiers close to the queen on the one hand, and with Rasanjy and a royal relative named Ramahatra on the other.

  The defeat of Imerina by the French had removed any check on their former subject tribes in the north and east, and left their enemies in the south and west unpacified. The main tribal peoples were – from the northern ‘big toe’, southwards down the east coast (see Map 9) – the Antankarana, who showed strong Indian and Arab traits; the darker, more African Bezanozano and Betsimisaraka; and in the south-eastern forest the Tanala – expert spearmen, who carried heavy wood and ox-hide shields. The most warlike of all were the Mahalafy of the dry southern ‘heel’, which supported nothing but thorn-scrub and cactus; their reputation for cattle-raiding was also shared by the Bara, who lived north of them on the western savannah. North again, all the way up the grasslands to the jungle of the north-western ‘toes’, was Sakalava country. At first the countryside was troubled by only minor banditry, but both in Imerina and the north resentments soon gathered strength and purpose (the Malagasy word for the French was farantsay; in local parlance this was soon rendered as faratay – ‘the final excrement’).47

  The rapid repatriation of half the surviving tr
oops, under irresistible French political pressure, had left General Voyron with only about 6,000 men. Even with just Imerina and its vassal tribes to police (the west and south being still unpenetrated) he had an impossibly large area to cover. His garrisons – at Antananarivo, Majunga, Diégo Suarez, Tamatave, and Fianarantsoa in the Betsileo country of the southern plateaux – were predominantly Algerian, Senegalese and local Malagasy battalions, with a thin spine of Naval Infantry.48 Incidents multiplied in early 1896, and in April a full-scale revolt broke out as rebels calling themselves menalamba attacked Frenchmen, collaborators, and the Protestant churches that they associated with the Hova regime.49

  These outbreaks seem to have been largely spontaneous and uncoordinated, but some Frenchmen were convinced that they were orchestrated by Hova aristocrats (the more paranoid also suspected Britain’s hand at work). Queen Ranavalona always denied encouraging the rebels, perhaps truthfully; but since rebellion against the throne was regarded as sacrilege, rebel leaders claimed to be acting in her name against a traitorous clique of courtiers who had sold out to the French. Violence spread not only among the Hova but also among the Betsimisaraka, the Bara, even the Sakalava, who saw the French protectorate in Ranavalona’s name as perpetuating the hated rule of Imerina. Chaos spread over much of the north and centre of the island, the garrisons were forced into a purely defensive role, and soon the capital was effectively cut off from Tamatave, Diégo Suarez and Majunga. Naval Troops officers were briefing against Resident-General Laroche, and in Paris politicians and journalists took sides, with the pro-military and colonialist lobby pressing for outright annexation.