The Dawi Mani were still hovering and sniping, but at around 5.15am the different groups returned to the hummocky ground between the company square and the cliffs and joined up again; the whole war party then withdrew into the distance towards the heights of the Djebel Béchar, carrying their wounded and leading the few baggage camels they had managed to cut out. The sun was now above the eastern dunes, and its flat rays soaked the west side of the valley with golden light; Sérant ordered his légionnaires to set their sights at between 1,600 and 2,000 yards, and fired some measured volleys. Watching the result through binoculars, he spotted kicked-up dust and adjusted the fire until he saw flurries among the riders, confirming the Lebel’s effectiveness even at a mile
Captain Sérant recorded commendations for Warrant Officer Peille, Private Diebolt and Private Wilhelm, all of whom had killed Moroccans face-to-face inside the square – the latter as the rider was charging the company commander, and at the cost of a bullet which mutilated Wilhelm’s hand. Sergeants Favrier and Diacre and Corporal Dommanget were commended for cool courage in exposed positions while controlling their squads’ fire. Of the 4th Platoon, caught in the open, their captain commended Corporal Erich and Privates Cassier, Spierckel and Berney for their calm and disciplined self-defence. From El Morra, where the dead were buried, Major Bichemin used his lamp-and-telescope equipment to signal up the line for extra medics and mule- and camel-litters to meet the force at Fendi on 2 August. The Legion casualties were at first 7 killed – all from 4th Platoon – and 9 wounded, but one of the latter soon died; the cause of death was listed as gunshot wounds in every case.
Less than a month later the fifth convoy for Igli passed the scene of the action, and Lieutenant Guillaume left a description of the debris of battle. This was scattered over several hundred yards, but particularly around the base of the hillock defended by the Mounted Company. The overworked vultures and jackals of the Zousfana had already done their best with the sun-dried corpses; the bones of men and mules littered the ground, jumbled up with broken crates, bits of harness and assorted trash. Some finely decorated Arab weapons were proof that the Dawi Mani had not returned to the scene since the fight, and Guillaume and his comrades had their pick of souvenirs. (The most magnificent, and puzzling, was a large chased silver powder flask with an inscription from the reign of Louis XIV.)18
THE WAR PARTY THAT ATTACKED Sérant’s company was by far the largest yet encountered by French troops on the Oued Zousfana border, and although they had been repulsed at only moderate cost, the telegraph key tapped out an urgent report from Oran Division to 19th Army Corps and the War Ministry. (The GOC 19th Army Corps was then General Grisot, first encountered in these pages fighting with the Legion’s 5th Battalion in the streets of Paris.) Companies of Skirmishers were shuttled up and down the convoy route like beads on an abacus, with a Legion infantry company on immediate alert at Djenien bou Rezg.
The heavy losses suffered by the Dawi Mani did not deter the tribesmen from raiding that summer, on one occasion in large numbers: on 10 August at least 400 Dawi Mani ran off herds grazing south of Igli. The list of lesser clashes scrolls on down the page: in the week of 25 August – 1 September 1900 there were five separate incidents at or near Duveyrier – actual or attempted rustling of camels, ration-bullocks and sheep, attacks on the rail camps, 2 sentries killed and their rifles stolen. During September there were five more raids, on Djenien bou Rezg, Duveyrier, Hadjerat M’guil and El Morra, by between 15 and 40 tribesmen. These were sometimes identified as from the Beni Gil or Ouled Jarir; when their origin was unknown, ‘Figuig’ tended to get the blame – one imagines the pen-nib scoring deep into the paper. (On 4 September there was also a more serious clash in the dunes far to the east near Timimoun with a war party of Ait Khabbash, which cost the French 13 killed and 36 wounded. There were no Legion units in the Touat, which was the responsibility of the 1st Bat d’Af and 2nd Algerian Skirmishers.)
THE FOLLOWING YEAR there were no major incidents along the Zousfana valley, but throughout 1901 the regular convoys to the Far South continued to litter the sands with camel-bones, and hit-and-run raiders continued to cross the border every few nights.
The most serious engagements again took place further east in the Touat, where the Ait Khabbash assembled a harka of up to 1,500 men at Charouine, 30 miles south-west of Timimoun. This tribe had withdrawn north-westwards after the French occupation, but were still not reconciled to losing their extortion income from the Touat oases and their slave imports from In Salah. After travelling by night to avoid detection, they left their camels under guard in the date-groves a mile away and hit Timimoun before first light on 18 February 1901. Creeping close to the rather ramshackle perimeter, they slit the throat of a sentry and got some 30 men inside and under cover before the alarm was given. After an initial scare, Major Reibel’s garrison of just under 200 joyeux and turcos cleared out the infiltrators and drove the rest away from the walls, at a cost of an officer and 9 men killed and 21 wounded; the Ait Khabbash left 153 dead on the field. A reprisal column attacked Charouine rather hesitantly on 2/3 March; at first light on the 3rd, Captain Pein’s goumiers and Skirmishers became trapped in a bowl of the sand dunes under heavy fire, and finally withdrew after suffering 68 casualties. (During these two weeks the tribesmen had captured about 80 Lebel repeaters.)
Fighting the Ait Khabbash was never cheap; and it is worth noting that since May 1900 they had simultaneously been heavily involved further west against fellow Berbers of the Ait Murghad tribe, over control of oases on the Oued Rheris north-west of the Tafilalt. War on several fronts was as natural to the Ait Khabbash as ‘the rising of the sun’, and so was polishing their warrior reputation with little concern for the details. They inhabited a world of lays and legends, not cold reportage; a fact was what people were told and wanted to believe, and Timimoun was soon famous throughout southern Morocco as a mighty victory over the French. This tendency to accept the most encouraging version of events was not the weakness it is today, but a sign of high morale, and it would remain an obstacle throughout the thirty years of the French pacification campaigns. In a world without mass communications, each tribe’s sense of its strength or weakness was more or less introverted, so each of the many groups had to be convinced individually of French superiority. The rumoured defeat of another clan on the far side of a mountain might be ascribed to stupidity or cowardice, while any trivial success – the looting of a convoy or the killing of even half a dozen French soldiers – might be wildly exaggerated by word of mouth. The display of a few captured rifles or the heads of dead Frenchmen in villages beyond the current edge of notional French control would encourage defiance on a scale out of all proportion to the actual success.19
MEANWHILE, THE BOY SULTAN Abd el Aziz had emerged, blinking, into his thankless political inheritance, and lengthy negotiations over a settlement of the Algerian/Moroccan frontier question had been taking place between his Maghzan and the Quai d’Orsay – much to the fury of the jihadi tendency among his subjects. On 10 July 1901, a protocol was signed in Paris agreeing a form of joint authority over the frontier. Ain Sefra was to maintain regular liaison with both French and Maghzan officials appointed as border commissioners, the latter based in Figuig with a modest garrison. The limit of actual French posts was to be the western edge of the Djebel Béchar; Morocco was to build posts along the west bank of the Oued Guir (these never materialized); but the wide region between the Zousfana and the Guir – the actual arena of the raiding problem – was not decisively addressed. The Algerian governor-general defined this simply as ‘territories where Moroccan tribes, whether sedentary or nomadic, traditionally reside, camp and move, in relations or in habitual contact with Algerian tribes’.20 Here the Ouled Jarir and Dawi Mani were to be offered the choice of allegiance to either French Algeria or the Maghzan, and if they chose the latter they were to be moved away from the border to new territory with Maghzan ‘assistance’.
It is legitimate to doubt that any o
f the negotiators believed for a moment that these terms could lead to a peaceful solution. The protocol legitimized the French presence in the Touat and the Zousfana/Saoura valleys, while the Maghzan had preserved recognition of its notional authority in the south-east, but it still lacked any means to exercise it. Whatever the protocol pretended, in fact this open acknowledgement that the tribal range of the Ouled Jarir and Dawi Mani was debatable would soon give the French Army the freedom to shape the reality on the ground.21
ON 19 JANUARY 1902 TWO OFFICERS of the 1st Foreign Regiment, Captains Gratien and de Cressin, went out hunting in the hills of the Djebel Beni Smir above Duveyrier. They did not return, and a search party found their stripped bodies, shot in the back. On 9 February the Paris weekly Le Petit Journal expressed the prevailing mood among the colonial lobby:France’s patience is being abused by the Moroccans. Once again, an odious crime has been committed on the frontier. Two young captains of the Foreign Legion, officers with bright futures, have been killed by the natives . . . If the sovereign of Morocco is unable to assure safety within his domains, it is clearly high time to consider whether it would not be opportune to come to his aid.22
10.
Blood and Sand
1902 – 1903
Disciplinary Private Maret was found some 9 miles from the battlefield, having neither eaten nor drunk for two days, and half naked; but although feverish, he still had his rifle, his ammunition and his courage. I took him back to Fendi behind my saddle, and I recommend him for the Military Medal for his admirable conduct.
Lieutenant Deze, 2nd RE, following action near Ksar el Azoudj, 29 March 19031
THERE IS AN UNMISTAKABLE FLAVOUR of America’s Old West in Isabelle Eberhardt’s eyewitness description of the activity that followed the soldiers down the Oued Zousfana. The rail tracks reached Duveyrier in September 1900:Recently the railway reached Zoubia, and the new European village of Duveyrier sprang up with vitality. Low houses of grey earth multiplied, to the sound of légionnaires singing their songs of exile; canteens and drinking-shacks opened, made of planks and flattened petrol tins; a hardy duenna even led a few vague prostitutes down there from Saida and Sidi bel Abbès. Lines of camels came to kneel in the sandy streets before travelling on to resupply the posts further south. Duveyrier was the spring from which a river of abundance flowed towards the Sahara. An apparent prosperity reigned for several months; people started to enrich themselves, converging from the country round about on this bait of easy trade . . .
Then one day the little track pushed on; the two shining rails passed Duveyrier towards another stop further on . . . From one day to the next another town sprang up, quick as the grass of the Sahara under the first winter rains – and the ephemeral life of Duveyrier disappeared, leeched out of it by that new station of Beni Ounif de Figuig.2
The American parallel most temptingly suggested by the Zousfana border country early in the century is the Rio Grande frontier with Mexico some thirty years previously. Any Army attempt to create a net of surveillance and defence had such a broad mesh between its small knots that elusive raiding parties passed through it without difficulty, to rob and often to kill. The historic reply to this was to mount counter-raids in strength, tracking the tribesmen to their villages and exacting such wholesale revenge that their own leaders would bring the provocations to an end to ensure collective survival. But since the Army was forbidden to make such expeditions across the border, and since the Moroccan government was impotent, the frontier remained open for the raiders but closed to French soldiers. The French inability to strike back effectively seemed to be encouraging larger war parties to assemble, and the Zafrani incident suggested that the tribesmen might sooner or later achieve something on a rather different scale from running off livestock and killing a couple of sentries.
Nevertheless, in 1902 the Quai d’Orsay was still focused on seeking a political solution by attempting to prop up Sultan Abd el Aziz. The end of the Boer War in May that year allowed Foreign Minister Delcassé to look further into the future, and he wanted no incidents to spark sensational reports that might disturb his planned rapprochement with Britain, which would, in addition to wider implications, give France a freer hand in Morocco as a by-product. A bungled Maghzan attempt to reform the tax system had forced Abd el Aziz to seek urgent new French loans; to ensure their servicing, French customs officials were empowered to run Morocco’s ports and to skim the first 60 per cent off all duty paid.3
Additional accords to the Franco-Moroccan border protocol, signed in April and May 1902, were hotly condemned by the religious establishment in Fes, and raids and ambushes continued. By summer, most of the token company of 150 Maghzan levies installed in Figuig in March in accordance with the protocol had deserted after selling their rifles.4 In June, some of the religious leaders in the Tafilalt openly declared that since Abd el Aziz had failed in his duty of protection they would no longer pray in his name – a seriously subversive act that called the sultan’s legitimacy into question.
Abd el Aziz was far more concerned by the threat from the pretender to his throne in the north-east, where Bou Himara – El Rogi – was building a strong following among the tribes in the hills around the strategic town of Taza. (He was a charismatic speaker, and in a society in thrall to superstition his early success was partly due to his mastery of what Walter Harris of the London Times called ‘rather ordinary conjuring tricks’; one of these involved, at every performance, the death of a slave by burial alive.) Now he was sending letters throughout the south-east, trying to draw others to his flag to depose the sultan and resist the French. In the summer of 1902 Abd el Aziz sent an army to crush his rebellion, and the ambitious Madani el Glaoui and his brother Tahami led a force of Atlas tribesmen to join this expedition.5
WHILE A SCOURGE TO HIS PEOPLE, the sultan’s army was not an impressive military instrument even after it acquired some modern weapons and instructors in their use. Since it lacked any functioning system of logistics, its operational range was dictated by its ability to live off the country, a process in which payment for requisitioned goods played no part. Command of an expedition was regarded as an opportunity not only to pillage the countryside but also to misappropriate the soldiers’ pay, so it is hardly surprising that they – like all other armed men in Morocco – were motivated very largely by the prospect of loot. (Abd el Aziz had given command of the army sent against El Rogi to his teenage brother Moulay el Kebir, in order to give him ‘a chance to make a little money’.)
Walter Harris accompanied another Maghzan force which Abd el Aziz personally led on a simultaneous campaign against Zimmur rebels west of Meknes in summer 1902. Their advance was blocked by a ravine, and a few shots were fired at them from scrub on the far lip. A small deserted village could be seen on a grassy shelf half-way down the opposite slope, and the Dukkala regiment were ordered to clear the canyon. Clambering down to the little river and up the far side, they halted at the village, where the inevitable search for loot turned up a store of wheat:In the presence of the Sultan and the whole army they . . . took off their uniform breeches of bright blue cotton, tied up [the legs] with string, and filled [them] with wheat . . . loaded up their booty on their backs, and started to return to the army. Nothing would make them go on: bugles were blown, signals were made, orders shouted . . .
Another unit was sent forward ‘to see if [the Dukkalas] couldn’t be persuaded to turn once more in the direction of the enemy’:With music and singing the Abda regiment set out. They met the Dukkalas struggling up under their heavy loads . . . and the Abda charged. The Dukkalas threw down their loads and commenced firing, and in a few minutes a little battle was raging . . . A ceasing of the firing bespoke a compromise. The two bodies of troops fraternized, the Dukkalas temporarily abandoned their breeches . . . and returned bare-legged to the Zimmur village with . . . the Abdas. Once there it was the latters’ turn to step out of their nether garments, and the Dukkalas assisted them to load up . . . This done, the two regimen
ts, except for a few killed and wounded, returned together . . . On the summit the enraged Sultan and his Court and the rest of the army [were] impotent to change the course of events . . . all thought of crossing the ravine that night was out of the question, so the camp was pitched . . .
The Dukkala and Abda regiments quarrelled over the division of the spoil, and fought on and off all the night through. Bullets were flying in every direction . . . We never crossed that ravine. The next day news reached the Sultan that the army under his brother had been defeated [by El Rogi] near Taza. In all haste we turned back . . . to Fes.6
The expedition against El Rogi had been a complete failure; defeated at Ain Mediouna on the southern edge of the Rif hills, the royal mehala (army) was virtually cut off around Taza for four months. When the town finally fell on 22 December 1902, the Pretender gained great prestige throughout the north-east, and also a reputation for burning prisoners alive with petrol. Madani el Glaoui, wounded three times, led the remnant of his men across into Algeria, where a French officer arranged his passage home. His younger brother Tahami fought a rearguard action before escaping southwards; he then disappeared from the scene for three years, during which he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the wake of this humiliating defeat Abd el Aziz moved his court from Fes (a city vulnerable to encirclement) to Rabat on the west coast. In the winter of 1902 – 1903 El Rogi’s victory – and his steady supply of modern rifles through Melilla – enabled him to form a coalition of both Arab and Berber tribes, and in the summer of 1903 he would even briefly occupy the border town of Oujda. His pan-tribal alliance was shortlived, however, and his pretensions could not hide his essential nature as just another regional gambler for short-term prizes.7
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 42