MUZZLE-LOADING FLINTLOCK MUSKETS of local manufacture had been commonplace in Morocco for centuries; gunpowder was both imported and made locally and, like lead for bullets, could be bought in the markets of the larger oases. The limited accurate range of a smoothbore musket – typically, less than 100 yards – was improved somewhat by the local taste for gunbarrels up to 5 feet long, but from the early 1880s the demand for more modern weapons became intense. As in sub-Saharan Africa, there does not seem to have been much take-up of the many muzzle-loading percussion-lock rifles that were released on to the world surplus market from the 1860s. During the 1890s white armies began receiving repeaters and selling off their single-shot breech-loaders; it was these that the tribesmen demanded, and they were supplied in such numbers that by 1900 the majority of warriors even in the remote south-east had acquired them. The main suppliers were European gun-runners who shipped rifles to the Atlantic and Mediterranean ports – particularly to Spanish Melilla – from where they percolated down the trade routes into the bled es siba. Their great value made it perilous to entrust large numbers to vulnerable camel caravans, so they usually arrived in the oases in small batches, and some impatient warriors travelled north of the mountains to seek them out personally. Some breech-loaders were also smuggled west from Algeria despite a strict French prohibition, but a more common source of French-made weapons were the Maghzan’s regular troops and auxiliaries. The sultan’s neglected and unpaid soldiery were notorious for selling their weapons, often simply to buy food, and also took rifles home with them when they left the ranks.
On the frontier the French Chassepot and externally identical Gras were both apparently called the sasbu, and the British Martini-Henry the bu hafra, to distinguish them from the lowly musket generically called a bushfar. In the 1890s, however, the most common single type was the Remington (mushaka). The supply of 1871 model Spanish Remingtons became plentiful after the Spanish Army began replacing theirs with Mauser repeaters in the 1890s; one French report of 1894 estimated that the Beni Gil alone had no fewer than 4,000 Remingtons, compared with just 200 Gras and 20 Lebel repeaters. This represented about one in five of the total numbers of the tribe, suggesting that virtually every fighting man had a breech-loader. Apart from its sheer availability and comfortable firing characteristics, the Remington ‘rolling-block’ was a near-perfect weapon for tribal warriors; it is extremely robust and simple, with few moving parts to get broken.21
Even repeating rifles were soon reaching the tribes in modest numbers – the 1873 Winchester (sitta’shiya) was available on the open market for those who could afford it, though supplies of Lebels depended upon theft or corruption. Although it was more often the tribesmen who had the most modern weapons rather than the inhabitants of the oases through whose hands they passed in trade, the ksars in the major centres were far from defenceless. A French report of 1899 on the dominant ksar of Zenaga in the Figuig oasis listed 800 Remingtons, 35 Martini-Henrys and 18 Chassepots, but also 47 Lebels and 75 other repeaters. (In some tribes the share a warrior received in the after-battle division of spoils was calculated on the basis of his weapon: the man who carried a Lebel could claim slightly more than the man with a Chassepot, and twice as much as the pauper with a musket – though even a boy armed only with a knife still got a half-share if he had fought.)22
The greatest problem for the tribes was, of course, getting ammunition for these relatively sophisticated weapons. It was no longer a question of tipping artisan-made powder and an approximately fitting ball or slug down the muzzle of a smoothbore, but of brass cartridges with integral percussion caps, and although a modest supply would be bought with each rifle these soon ran out. Used cartridge cases had to be saved carefully for reloading with local black powder and cast-lead bullets. The flimsy brass-foil cartridges of the single-shot rifles must often have become distorted during repeated extraction, and the whole process demanded work to fine tolerances. Replacing the percussion-cap set into the base of the cartridge was the trickiest part, and the materials used for this – the ground-down heads of red matches mixed with petrol – probably caused many misfires. The powder was also of variable quality, and the reliability of a cartridge that had already been reloaded a couple of times must certainly have been dubious.23
AMONG THE MANY OASES dotted along the borderland, Figuig on the Oued Zousfana was by far the most important, providing the centre of trade for the Amur, Beni Gil, Ouled Jarir and Dawi Mani. Here, just over the border from the Algerian Sud-Oranais, about 125,000 date-palms grew in a valley cupped by crags and hills. The 16,000-odd inhabitants lived in seven separate ksars; that of Zenaga, on the valley bottom, was as big as the others combined, and the other six watched it resentfully from higher ground (see Map 13). Figuig had no sense of political unity, and the leaders of the different ksars seldom met even to quarrel. Year-round water was provided by a complex of underground springs and tunnels feeding canals, but access to these was the cause of chronic hostility between and even within the villages.
A few hours’ ride from the nearest French soldiers and their ever-tempting supply convoys, Figuig in the 1890s was a ‘border town’ with all that that implies. The French Foreign Ministry had long pursued a ‘Maghzan policy’, working patiently to manipulate the sultan’s government from the top; the Quai d’Orsay was aware of his attempts to build bridges to the south-east, and did not wish to damage such little prestige as he enjoyed there. Whatever the local provocation, the Foreign Ministry had forbidden any aggressive moves by the Army on this frontier, which had remained inviolate since a clash near Figuig during a ‘hot pursuit’ of the rebel Bou Amama – a Figuig man – in February 1882. Ever since, and increasingly in the 1890s (as extended French activity provided them with more targets), war parties of the Amur, Beni Gil, Ouled Jarir and Dawi Mani had regularly crossed from the Djebel Beni Smir to carry out small-scale raids. To them the French were just another tribe to be robbed of beasts and a few rifles if the chance presented itself – an unusually rich tribe, yet one apparently unable to react decisively.
Figuig was for twenty years the catalyst of disputes between the Maghzan, frustrated generals in Oran Division, and Paris. The inhabitants of the seven ksars wanted the notional protection of the sultan from French pressure, but refused to pay for it with either obedience or taxes. The royal governors planted there since the early 1880s were simply a succession of powerless spokesmen hiding in the ksar of El Oudaghir, unrecognized by the other six villages and unable to collect tribute. The French commanders at Ain Sefra were convinced that Figuig, and particularly Zenaga, was the main source of raids into Algeria. In fact few of the sedentary population were marauders themselves, but Figuig was certainly the sanctuary where cross-border raiders planned, armed themselves, and sold their booty, and the French soldiers itched to scour out this vipers’ nest.
In 1894 the project for a trans-Saharan railway was again under intense discussion, and enthusiasts for expansion south included Foreign Minister Delcassé, Governor-General Jules Cambon of Algeria, and the leader of the colonial lobby in Paris, the Oran deputy Eugène Étienne. The route favoured would have to pass through El Goléa and In Salah immediately east of the Touat oases (see Map 3), and despite the reservations of the Quai d’Orsay pressure was building to unleash the Army to pacify the borderland. If the ‘Maghzan policy’ could not ensure a secure right flank for the planned railway, then the soldiers must. They were already guarding the builders of their own essentially military track south from Mécheria, which had reached Ain Sefra in 1890; there it had paused, but now the steel ribbon and its fortified stations were inching south again.24
After 1896 the increasing proximity of the French also significantly nourished the trade of the merchants of Figuig: from that year foreign goods could be shipped into Algeria free of tariff if they were destined for the Sahara and Morocco, which undercut the duties charged in Spanish Melilla. The railway from Ain Sefra would reach Djenien bou Rezg, some 40 miles from Figuig, in February
1900, and the line of blockhouse stations was obviously destined to come even closer. The advancing railhead would bring French soldiers, but also cheap imports and – more importantly – a cheaper eastern route for exporting dates and dressed hides than the camel-caravans westwards that had to pay protection money to every tribe between the Zousfana and Marrakesh or Fes. That railway track guarded by légionnaires was the direct means by which a box of dates would soon become a regular feature of Britain’s Edwardian Christmas tables.
THE PEOPLES OF THE SOUTH-EAST BORDERLAND had always lived by constantly hedging their bets, and as the rail tracks came closer the different groups were confronted with choices that they were reluctant to make. The events that finally forced them to choose unfolded not on the Zousfana, but in the winter of 1899/1900 in the Touat oasis complex further to the south-east. This was on the Algerian side of any logical frontier line, but historically subject to the Sultan of Morocco. Although Moulay Hassan had not dared to visit it during his progress of 1893 – 4 for fear of the Ait Khabbash, that bellicose tribe were about to have their first encounter with a new enemy.25
9.
Sixty Thousand Dead Camels
1900 – 1902
I do not believe that there has ever been a massacre comparable to that of camels between 1900 and 1903. The jackals and vultures responsible for cleaning the desert were simply overwhelmed by the immensity of their task.
Professor E. F. Gautier1
SOUTH OF THE GREAT WESTERN SAND-SEA, the Touat comprised three different groups of oases strung in a horseshoe shape open to the east (see Map 3). From Taghit and Beni Abbès the smaller Oued Saoura oases stuttered down south-eastwards through the desert for about 150 miles, to link with the north-west corner of the Touat at the end of the horseshoe’s upper arm; this was known as the Gourara, with its largest centre at Timimoun. The north-south oasis line, centred on Adrar, continued for about another 150 miles to Reggane, and from there the lower arm of the horseshoe – the Tidikelt – extended a few sparse settlements 140 miles eastwards towards In Salah. That was where the world of the Algerian Arabs faded into that of the Tuareg of the open Sahara. (Until the French seizure of Timbuktu in 1894, the Touat had been the last major trans-Saharan slaving station, and even in 1899 a trickle of poor wretches were still being driven up here to feed the Moroccan market.)2 The Ait Khabbash Berbers operated a protection racket over caravan traffic into the Touat from the west, and tyrannized several of the ksars in the Gourara and Adrar groups. At this extreme eastern spearhead of their expansion they competed for dominance with the Dawi Mani Arabs, who also profited by trading with and exploiting several oases.
In 1892, Governor-General Cambon of Algeria had sent a group of Muslim envoys to negotiate access to the Touat, but this had been rebuffed. An initial military probe was carried out by Captain Théodore Pein with Algerian Spahis and irregulars in November – December 1899, and after a preliminary skirmish In Salah surrendered without a fight. In late January 1900, Major Maurice Baumgarten was checked at the kasbahs of In Rhar, but these were successfully stormed by Colonel Clément d’Eu of the 2nd Algerian Skirmishers on 19 March. (Usually invulnerable to other attackers, such strongholds – like the European castles of the fifteenth century – were doomed by the appearance of effective artillery.) This left the Gourara oases around Timimoun still to be occupied.3
The infantry available to Oran Division in the winter of 1899/1900, for all purposes, were the four-battalion 2nd Zouaves and the 1st Bat d’Af based in and around Oran itself; the 2nd Algerian Skirmishers, recently enlarged to six battalions, around Mostaganem; and the two six-battalion Legion regiments – 1st RE headquartered at Sidi bel Abbès and 2nd RE at Saida. However, the Legion had three battalions in Tonkin and one in Madagascar, and in response to international tensions two more would have to be shipped to each of those colonies in the first half of 1900, while large headquarters depots had to be maintained. Any general who was planning open-ended operations in the Sud-Oranais could not count on having all four remaining Legion battalions available to him, and while the turcos of 2nd RTA were acclimatized to the south they still had to be mixed with half their number of white infantry. He could send the Bat d’Af anywhere he wanted, but the Zouaves would be useless for a desert campaign, and anyway the colons were always sensitive to a need to keep white troops in the north to offset the presence of the native units that they never really trusted.
THE OCCUPATION OF THE TOUAT was a turning point that caused deep outrage throughout Morocco. The fundamental duty of any sultan was to defend the House of Islam against the unbelievers; these oases were the first indisputable communities of the sultan’s subjects to have been occupied and garrisoned by the French, and Moroccans raged at the Maghzan to declare holy war and restore the integrity of Muslim territory. They raged loudest both in the religious colleges of the northern imperial cities, and down south in the Tafilalt, where wealthy men had widespread interests to protect; but they raged in vain. In Marrakesh, the regent Ba Ahmad would be dead in a few months, and his ministers were preoccupied with exploiting his failing grip.
In this atmosphere of frustrated fury there was a danger that regional tribal and religious leaders might assemble a harka, and Ain Sefra Subdivision decided that they had to cover the Touat garrison of turcos and joyeux from any threat coming out of the desert to their west. The threat was real; warriors from the Atlas, the Marrakesh plains and as far north as Fes were drifting down to the Ziz valley in search of a charismatic leader able to weld them into an active force. (To avert an attack that he knew would merely provoke a French invasion, in July 1900 the young Sultan Abd el Aziz was to name Madani el Glaoui pasha of the Tafilalt. Glaoua warriors partially garrisoned the oases from late 1900 until the summer of 1901, an intervention that temporarily drew the tribes’ attention and thus defused4 the threat of a harka forming to march eastwards. However, at the beginning of 1900 the French could not predict this.)5
In February 1900, troops pushing ahead of the rail tracks down the south-eastern wall of the Djebel Beni Smir/Djebel Béchar range reached a spot on the map called Zoubia, 15 miles east of Figuig. Work began there on a station-cum-fort, to be named Duveyrier; and it was from there, on 20 March, that a column set out for another speck named Igli, some 150 miles south as the vulture flies (see Map 11).6 Led by Colonel Bertrand, commander of the 1st Foreign Regiment, it numbered 52 officers and 2,000 men with 2,000 baggage camels. The column comprised a turco battalion of 2nd RTA, the V/1st RE commanded by Major Paul Brundsaux (and including the young Lieutenant Paul Rollet), the 1st (Mounted) Company/2nd RE with their mules, half-squadrons of Spahis and Africa Light Horse, a section of mountain guns and small detachments of sappers and service troops; as always, goumiers on horses and méhara camels scouted for the column.7
THE MARCH MET NO RESISTANCE as it slogged south from Duveyrier, with the dark bulk of the Djebel Béchar looming on its right. For the 60 miles between Ksar el Azoudj and El Moungar, the more distant line of the Djebel Mezarif showed on the eastern horizon beyond a tongue of dunes, but after that there was nothing on their left except the other-worldly skyline of the Great Sand-Sea. On 1 April they reached the important oasis of Taghit in the Beni Goumi, the people of which had never yet seen French troops. Here, where the Zousfana ran on the surface for several miles thickly fringed with palms, the passage between cliffs on the west and dunes on the east narrowed to a few hundred yards, dominated by a battered old ksar straggling up the rocky ledges on the right. The villagers (who owed allegiance to the Dawi Mani) manned the walls and refused Colonel Bertrand’s requests to pass. In the end he simply deployed his two mountain guns en batterie and sent a company of turcos to the top of the highest dune facing the village, and after this demonstration the column were able to march through with no shots fired.8
It took the column another four days to reach Igli, through the worst terrain of the whole route. Brundsaux’s légionnaires marched without knapsacks, wearing only their curtained
képis and white fatigues; each man’s greatcoat, change of clothing and spare boots were tied in a bundle after reveille every morning and packed on the baggage camels. Each man carried only a horseshoe roll of tent-cloth, his rifle, belt order with ammunition, a haversack with one day’s rations and a 2-litre waterbottle (men more often collapsed from drinking too much when they got the chance, rather than too little). The officers rode, wearing sun helmets and either whites or khaki drill to personal taste. At every night bivouac the unmistakable figure of Major Brundsaux – tall, thin and ‘hard as a halberd’, with his big forked beard – might appear in the tent-lines when least expected; he understood his légionnaires, and he kept as close an eye on their feet and their health as on their training and discipline.
The number of camels in the convoy was dictated by the amount of water that had to be carried. Most were loaded with two 50-litre kegs (which still leaked, despite careful presoaking), supplemented with cooler native guerba water-skins. The wells were sometimes more than a day’s march apart, and were easily missed from only 100 yards away. Often a well was simply a hole in the sand less than a yard across and deep, and the few inches of water in the bottom was vile-tasting from mineral salts. Wells had to be dug out laboriously before a flow strong enough to water the animals was reached. The low capacity of the wells, and the large numbers of camels needed to carry a column’s every necessity (even down to firewood), meant that expeditions usually marched in separated groups a day apart, so as to allow the wells time to refill after each unit had passed.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 40