IN LATE MAY 1899 – amid the clamour that might well have destroyed Lyautey had he opted for the parliamentary career path that he had considered three years previously – he and General Galliéni returned to France for several months. Galliéni had kept his promise to pacify Madagascar without asking for additional military resources, but now he needed more funds for civil development, and he had a justified faith in his protégé’s powers of persuasion. While the infantryman Galliéni was locked in the trench-warfare of meetings with ministers and bureaucrats, Lyautey acted as his light cavalry, providing the more passionate advocacy at which he excelled. He networked far and wide, spreading glowing opinions of Galliéni and the work he was accomplishing at meetings both private and public.
At a time of such furiously polarized opinions for and against the military, Lyautey’s colonial enthusiasms cost him a number of his old liberal friends, who followed a blindly ‘pro-Dreyfusard’ and therefore anti-military line. Lyautey had kept in touch with the development of the scandal through his prolific correspondence, and despite his instinctive loyalties he was deeply worried that the General Staff had betrayed the good name of the Army. Nevertheless, although saddened by the rifts that his stance caused within his personal circle, he had simply seen too many things that his literary friends never had. He defended colonial achievements as – in André Maurois’ words – ‘the substitution of relative peace for a state of permanent brigandage’. (In December 1899 Lyautey would address the businessmen of the Colonial Union, and his speech formed the basis for yet another influential article in Revue des Deux Mondes, which made him a public personality in colonialist circles.)62
Soon after Galliéni and Lyautey arrived in France yet another government fell, and on 22 June 1899 a ‘government of Republican defence’ in the Gambetta tradition was formed under Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. That same month Dreyfus was shipped home for retrial; after more than four years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island he was ill and inarticulate – when he appeared in court at Rennes on 7 August the Times correspondent described him as ‘an old, old man of thirty-nine’. On 9 September the court announced that Dreyfus was guilty but with extenuating circumstances, and that consequently his sentence was reduced to ten years’ imprisonment. After much private negotiation between the parties, ten days later President Loubet remitted the rest of the sentence, and Dreyfus was freed. The acceptance of this pardon, which implied an admission of his original guilt, disappointed the Dreyfusards, while the remission of the sentence angered the anti-Dreyfusards. Nobody was satisfied with the outcome, but virtually the whole of France was – at last – heartily sick of the whole ugly charade, which had shamed their country in the eyes of the world. (France’s sense of disgrace would soon be wiped out, however, by the delicious opportunity to lead the Europe-wide condemnation of Britain’s second war against the South African Boers in 1899 – 1902.)63
In the eyes of a significant part of the French public the scandal had left the Army deeply compromised, and within three years their representatives would be inflicting painful punishment. The first generation of Republican leaders, whatever their instinctive suspicion of the generals, had managed the relationship pragmatically (indeed, their parliamentary blocs had been happy to call themselves ‘Opportunists’). The Dreyfus scandal would help to create a powerful Socialist/Radical coalition – the ‘Bloc of the Lefts’ – that would sweep to power in the elections of 1902, and under the impulse of its strong Radical component this would introduce a relentlessly anti-military programme. For a decade to come the Naval (by then, Colonial) Troops and the Africa Army would seem to offer an even more appealing refuge to officers who craved a life of soldiering rather than political intrigues, and since these two organizations were clearly innocent of involvement in ‘the Affair’ they would be allowed to deliver that opportunity to many of the men who turned their faces south.
IN DECEMBER 1899, the inexorable enlargement of the Legion continued, with ministerial authorization for each of the two Foreign Regiments to form a sixth battalion; the actual rifle strength had now increased fourfold since 1875. In March 1900 it was decided to send two more Legion battalions to Madagascar, forming a marching regiment commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Cussac, to work on the development of the Diégo Suarez naval base and roads through the tropical forest of Cap d’Ambre. The IV/1st RE and II/2nd RE landed in April and June respectively; both units would return to Algeria in 1901, leaving some men to top up the original battalion.64
On 7 June 1900 the long-argued transfer of the entire Naval Troops to the War Ministry as the new ‘Colonial Troops’ was finally voted into law; Article 8 specified that the Legion could be called upon to cooperate with them in any theatre at any time. Of the eighteen planned Colonial Infantry Regiments (RIC), six plus additional detachments were to be based in the colonies, and the 15th RIC was shipped to Madagascar that year.65
THE TEAM OF GALLIÉNI AND LYAUTEY – both now promoted – were busy back in Madagascar. The governor-general appointed Colonel Lyautey his chief-of-staff and gave him command of the whole southern one-third of the island, with headquarters at Fianarantsoa in the Betsileo country. Lyautey would now enjoy the opportunity to be a réalisateur on a grand scale; with 80 officers and 4,000 troops, he ruled a territory one-third the size of France with a population of about one million.66 His characteristic joy in this work would be expressed in a typical letter to his sister:It is splendid to lie down at night after ransacking a mail delivery that brings word, all in one day, that an advance of a day’s march has been made on the Menaran; that a reconnaissance has reached the assigned objective; that two villages have been repopulated; that another 6 kilometres of road have been completed . . . that an attempt to grow potatoes has been successful; that a new merchant has opened for business; that a market had been re-opened – how well one sleeps on all that!
And now, to finish, you are going to give me a present. I have just found a scrap of verse in Shelley that I want to make my motto: ‘The soul’s joy lies in doing.’ Would you have that engraved inside a signet ring, and have it sent out to me?67
Lyautey spent most of his time out on column and installing his outposts, coordinating security operations and civil development in the old Tonkin style. He familiarized himself with the tribal leadership in different districts and, where they seemed to justify it, he gave them a measure of autonomy, creating a radiating pattern of carefully calculated bilateral relationships under his personal control. As always he was eager to encourage commerce, but this did not deter him from taking swift and direct action where necessary. Civil development could not progress among the Bara people until his columns cleared the forests between Fianarantsoa and Tuléar (base of the Legion battalion’s 1st Company) of the bandits who raided villages and ambushed French convoys. Further south, in the parched and almost impenetrable cactus forests west of Fort Dauphin (where the Legion 4th Company was based), the fierce Mahalafy had to be dissuaded from cattle-rustling from their more fortunate neighbours, and légionnaires hunted them down all the way to their bristling villages. Here, in the summer of 1901, Lyautey planted a substantial Legion fort at Behara, and not simply as a visible sign of French strength and commitment: in the shelter of such outposts he wanted peaceful marketplaces to grow, where contacts between rulers and ruled could be patiently encouraged. Pacification could only work through ‘the transformation of our posts from the poles of repulsion that they are today into centres of attraction’.68
Lyautey always kept in mind that the Bara bandits and Mahalafy rustlers were not alien interlopers like the Chinese who had preyed on the hill tribes of Upper Tonkin; this was their homeland, and they had to be tamed rather than destroyed. He repeatedly stressed to his subordinates that they should nurture their contacts with local populations, keeping the olive-branch as visible as the sword, and never taking any hasty step that would make reconcilation impossible – above all, however frustrated they became, they must never carry out collective reprisa
ls.69 Nevertheless, he never entertained sentimental fantasies about the colonial relationship; shortly before he returned to France in June 1902 he wrote to Galliéni:Regardless of the results obtained through the economic and moral conquest of the native population, regardless of the degree of their submission and that of their leaders, we must never mislead ourselves into believing that our domination will ever become acceptable to them.70
In May 1902 his work was done; the southern military command was dissolved, and Lyautey returned to Tamatave for six weeks of debriefing and paperwork before sailing for France. There, after some home leave, in October he took up his new appointment as regimental commander of the 14th Hussars at Alencon. The Metropolitan Army had him in its grip once more.
MAJOR PAUL BRUNDSAUX had returned for his second Madagascar tour early in 1902, this time as commander of the Legion Marching Battalion based now at Majunga. Later that year he welcomed a 26-year-old junior officer who had served in his previous battalion two years before in the very different environment of the far Sud-Oranais, during a desert column to plant a garrison in a little furnace called Igli.71
Lieutenant Paul Frédéric Rollet was a lively, slightly built young man with bright blue eyes and a sharply trimmed dark beard, who had transferred to the Legion in December 1899 after three boring years with the 91st Line in the Ardennes. He had graduated halfway down his class at St Cyr in 1896, but he had shone at all physical activities (including an epic night march after falling asleep on a returning leave-train). In Algeria he had worked, played and hunted hard, and had been popular as a brother-officer who was willing to try anything once; he was nicknamed ‘Softy’, in the way that a giant is nicknamed ‘Titch’. Indeed, his posting to Madagascar may have been partly due to complaints from the staid bourgeoisie of Sidi bel Abbès about the off-duty antics of a group of young 1st RE subalterns. His mother’s parting advice before his embarkation was that he should not always express his opinions to his superiors quite so frankly – a trait he had inherited from his father. (General Rollet’s personal report when a major and professor at the École Spéciale Militaire in 1889 had included the comment that he ‘does not always show himself satisfied with what emanates from his chiefs’.) The general had personally supervised his childrens’ education, and had encouraged Paul to think, question and argue.
Lieutenant Rollet was recommended for a staff post under Colonel Lyautey, but the latter was just about to return to France. Paul Rollet would serve his tour with the battalion cheerfully, rising to command 3rd Company at Anosivaro; later he would lead his légionnaires to Sakaramy to build a new post on a hill overlooking Diégo Suarez, whose development was then being directed by Colonel Joseph Joffre of the Engineers.
In 1904, the original Foreign Marching Battalion that had been shipped out in August 1896 was disbanded; its individual companies were progressively withdrawn, and on 21 July 1905 – shortly after both Lieutenant Rollet, and General Galliéni himself – the last légionnaires left the ‘Red Island’. They were too valuable to use any longer on construction work in what was now a sleepy colony; for the past three years the Legion had been drawn progressively into offensive operations on a new frontier, where a recently promoted general had need of enduring and resourceful soldiers to back up his gambles.72
PART TWO:
MAROC
8.
The Instruments of Downfall
1893 – 9
Every one who has ever come in contact with his Majesty will feel real regret that qualities, which in another clime would have made him a liberal and enlightened ruler, have, in hide-bound Morocco, been the very instruments of his downfall.
Reginald Rankin, of Sultan Moulay Abd el Aziz, 19081
MOROCCO, FORMING THE NORTH-WEST CORNER of North Africa, has an area slightly smaller than that of France, slightly larger than that of California. It is bounded on the north by the Mediterranean, on the west by the Atlantic, and on both east and south by Algeria, which is five times its size.
The whole grain of the country runs from south-west to north-east, parallel to the great mountain spine of the Atlas ranges that occupy about the central one-third of Morocco (see Map 10). A lesser range of highlands – the Rif – runs from the north-east tip of the Atlas westwards along the Mediterranean coast, like the top stroke of a figure ‘7’. The diagonal wall of the Atlas is about 400 miles long from end to end, and some 100 miles wide. It begins in the south-west as a fork, north and south of the triangular coastal plain behind Agadir; the southern prong is the Anti-Atlas range. The northern prong swells north-eastwards into the High Atlas, whose tallest peak, in the Djebel Toubkal, stabs up to 13,700 feet. There are only three practical passes across the High Atlas; in places these are long, easy ramps, in others they inch giddily around hairpin ledges over thousand-foot ravines. The northern part of the whole mass is termed the Middle Atlas, with peaks up to 9,000 feet. The shoulders of the mountains are thickly wooded, most characteristically with tough little holly-oaks, and above 4,500 feet they are mantled here and there with magnificent cedar forest. In the wrinkles of this alpine landscape Berber villagers have lived since time immemorial, tilling their high, hidden glens and herding goats on slopes clothed in maquis.
Over the country as a whole the climate, rainfall and vegetation vary enormously with latitude and altitude. As in Algeria, the wooded and watered north can resemble southern Europe; even highland valleys may be lush with fruit-orchards, and down on the Atlantic coastal plains the black soil disappears in summer under great prairies of waving grain. At the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, semi-nomadic tribes grazed their flocks and herds on the high, treeless steppes east of the mountains; again as in Algeria, the climate here resembles that of the North American high plains – searing in summer, freezing in winter. (The cliché is that Morocco is not a hot country, but a cold country with a hot sun.) These grasslands roll down southwards into gravelly plains scattered with low, wiry trees, occasionally highlighted by stripes of the dwarf palm and pale green tamarisk the that mark underground watercourses. Lesser mountains run like teeth along parallel folds in the earth, and between these blades the plains are randomly studded with abrupt buttes and giant piles of house-sized rocks. Finally, even this marginal country fades away southwards into baked stone-desert, dotted with a monotously deliberate-looking pattern of knee-high clumps of tough weeds. Here the horizons are still broken up by curtains and scattered islands of bone-dry peaks; they look young and raw, their skylines a chaotic mixture of tabletops and book-stacks, pinnacles, domes and saw-toothed crests. In this Saharan fringe, any life that requires more than camel-thorn is limited to a few intensely cultivated oases along the hidden lines of underground rivers.
THE MOST POPULATED one-third of Morocco has always been the plains that run south from the Mediterranean highlands down the western side of the country, between the Atlantic and the Atlas, and here the great imperial cities have grown up. On the coast, Rabat the Green is cooled by Atlantic breezes. About 100 miles east of it, more or less in the angle of the ‘7’ of mountains, lie Fes the Blue – the religious, intellectual and political capital – and nearby, its rival Meknes. Some 160 miles below them is the southern capital of Marrakesh the Red, again about 100 miles inland from the Atlantic. The slanting mountain wall to the east has always divided Morocco in terms not only of climate but also of human history. While communication and trade always crossed it, the grip of governments based in the cities west of the passes was weaker in the Atlas, and tenuous in the steppe and desert to the east and south. That human history might be said to mirror the contrasts of the mesmerizing landscape – yellow-grey desert, vivid green cultivation, ox-blood castles, lion-coloured hills and silver-capped mountains, all domed by the immense African sky. Since the earliest European travellers’ tales from the Middle Ages, the mysterious, almost closed world of Morocco had always been described in terms of intensely colourful extremes. Teeming activity and great riches contrasted with an emptiness whe
re life itself was only marginally possible; clamorous noise and brutal heat, with the serene lullaby of fountains in the shade of paradise gardens and tiled courtyards; pride, generosity and ancient scholarship with piracy, slavery and hideous cruelty.
Academic careers have been built upon attempts to identify the exact origins of the Berber peoples of North Africa, who were invaded and – to a strictly qualified extent – conquered in the seventh and eight centuries AD by Muslim Arabs from the east. (The sometimes lighter colouring of hair and eyes that is still found among Berbers after 1,400 years of Arab presence has encouraged speculation, some of it entertainingly fantastic.) ‘Pure’ Arabs remain a minority, but over centuries of intermittent migration the two ethnic groups have mixed to a greater extent than was recognized by some Frenchmen, who sought to practise a divisive politique de race. In 1900 the total population of Morocco was over 4 million people, of whom at least 45 per cent spoke one of the three main Berber dialects as their first tongue, and another 20 per cent were Arabic-speakers of Berber blood.2
Morocco’s birth as a Muslim monarchy, under sovereigns vested simultaneously with both religious and temporal authority, is officially dated to the founding of the city of Fes by Idriss II in AD 808. The sultan was simultaneously the head of the Muslim community (imam) and the temporal sovereign (amir el muminin), and ruling dynasties sprang from both Arab and Berber stock. From the eighth century Moroccan Muslims had periodically rejected the authority of the Abbasid caliphate in faraway Baghdad, and in 1145 a Berber sultan, Abd el Mumin bin Ali, definitively broke away and proclaimed himself Commander of the Faithful of a separate caliphate of the west. This ensured that, unlike the peoples to their east, Moroccans would always be completely independent of the later Ottoman Turkish Empire. Significantly, Moroccans – unlike nineteenth-century Algerians – had a strong national consciousness, dating from the fierce resistance by the Saadid dynasty (r. 1511 – 1659) to attempts by Spain and Portugal to carry their Christian banners into North Africa after the fifteenth-century Reconquista – attempts which had left behind only the tiny Spanish presidios of Ceuta and Melilla clinging to the Mediterranean coast. European nations had maintained tentative contacts with Moroccan sovereigns since late medieval times, and in the 1890s Tangier, on the Straits of Gibraltar, was a bustling entrepôt from which diplomats and traders visited the imperial cities. Nevertheless, contact outside the cities was so limited by Moroccan suspicion of Christians that geographers could still count on their fingers the number of Europeans who had ever returned from the mountains that could be seen from the promenade-decks of ocean liners passing through the Straits.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 37