Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  AN EXAMPLE OF THE FRONTIER CLASHES that were now taking place – too small for history books to notice, but ugly enough for the soldiers caught up in them – was an incident in March 1903 near Ksar el Azoudj (see Map 12). Held by small detachments from the 2nd Algerian Skirmishers and 2nd Spahis, this was one of the way-points on the convoy route down the Oued Zousfana. On 29 March, Lieutenant Ruffier of the 1st RE was also camped there with a work party of légionnaires who had just finished building a caravanserai at the wells. At Fendi, about 12 miles further north, Lieutenant Deze of 23rd Company, VI/2nd RE was in charge of a larger construction gang; the légionnaires’ reputation for being able to tackle virtually any physical task condemned them to such work anyway, but on this occasion both parties also included men from the regimental sections de discipline, undergoing hard labour as punishment.

  At around noon on the 29th, Captain Normand of the Engineers was checking the track north with Sergeant Sontag and 9 légionnaires when he learned that a convoy of 40-plus camels, coming down from Fendi to enable Ruffier to pack up his detachment, had been snatched by a strong party of tribesmen and taken south-west into the hills. Leaving Sontag to slog on to Fendi, the captain rode back to Ksar el Azoudj and took the troop of Spahis there in pursuit, ordering Lieutenant Ruffier to follow with all available infantrymen. Ruffier soon got on the march, with the post commander Quartermaster-Sergeant Lovy and 10 of his turcos, and 20 of his own men including some of the disciplinaires. At Fendi, Lieutenant Deze was also alerted; he marched west up a pass into the hills, with the one Spahi trooper who was in camp, his own Sergeant Hoerter and 26 men (mostly disciplinaires) of 2nd RE, and Sergeant Sontag and four of the 1st RE men who had come panting up the track at the last moment. Deze put his batman, Walz, on his spare horse, so he had two other mounted men for scouting and 32 marching légionnaires.

  The situation was thus as follows: two separate parties each of about 30 infantrymen, and a third with fewer than that number of cavalrymen, with no mutual communication, were now climbing into a waterless labyrinth of unexplored ridges and canyons with very limited visibility, by different routes, on the off-chance of catching up with an enemy force of unconfirmed strength – and all under nominal command of an Engineer officer, who had pushed ahead with the troopers after ordering the two infantry subalterns simply to follow him. Lieutenant Deze’s report is the more detailed:After about an hour and a half’s march to the south-west we heard brisk firing on our east, behind a chaotic massif [of rocky hills] . . . I marched in the direction of the firing, and [from a crest] saw Capt Normand and his Spahis . . . in action against about 60 Moroccans. I gave the following orders: [I would take] Sgt Hoerter with 20 men of 2nd RE, plus Sgt Sontag and his four 1st RE men, directly across the massif; my mounted orderly and six other légionnaires were to follow the crest south and try to reach a pass about 1,000 yards away, in order to cut off any retreat in what seemed to me the likeliest direction – a group of Moroccans were taking that route with some of the stolen camels. Walz joined up with Capt Normand and his Spahis; they tried to check the enemy movement, but Walz was seriously wounded in the foot and could not remount, the horse bolted and was captured [and the Moroccans broke past them].

  I moved ahead with the main group, which prompted the retreat of the enemy, but they stayed within effective range and used the ground with marvellous skill. We did not fire, because 17 disciplinaires of my detachment had received only five packets of cartridges [i.e. 40 rounds, instead of the usual 120], and it was necessary to economize in an action that looked as if it might become testing.

  Deze continued to pursue the tribesmen and the stolen camels over very difficult ground – abrupt hills cut by confusing gulleys – and at about 3.45pm he came within 800 yards of a group of perhaps 20 of them. He ordered his men to fire 10 rounds each; the raiders disappeared down a canyon, and when Deze reached the spot he found blood trails. He pushed on for about another 3 miles; by now he was within intermittent sight of Ruffier’s party, advancing in parallel on his flank. Despite the reticent language of the subalterns’ reports it is clear that during an exhausting 4 hours of scrambling through this chaotic terrain both groups became scattered. Deze wrote that at about 5pm he had with him only 12 of his own men plus 3 of Ruffier’s Algerians who had joined him; Sergeant Hoerter had fallen behind with ‘the men who were not such good marchers’.

  At this point Deze’s group came under intense fire from tribesmen on a ridge about 600 yards off. They must have had modern rifles, because one of the first shots hit Private Ghysslinck full in the chest: ‘He was carried into cover and put up on one of the Spahi horses, with a man holding him from each side’. The mention of Spahis suggests that by now Deze’s and Normand’s parties had joined up, but relative numbers and positions are unclear in the reports; one must suspect a good deal of confusion, with each junior officer and NCO doing his best with the men he had around him, and one does not get the impression that Captain Normand had a tight grip on events. Ruffier was on a separate crest, also under heavy fire and, on two occasions, in danger of being rushed and overrun.

  The sun was getting low in the sky, ammunition and water were running short, and the soldiers were taking casualties. Two groups of tired men, within sight but not in contact with one another, were dispersed in broken and unfamiliar country, and in danger of being outflanked by well-armed enemies fighting on their own ground. Against no more than equal numbers, the sapper captain had led the légionnaires into a tactical dead end, and the worst was still to come. Normand now accepted the inevitable, and ordered Deze to retreat by two leap-frogging echelons; predictably, as soon as the soldiers gave up the high ground the tribesmen closed in on their heels – Lieutenant Deze:Capt Normand ordered a fighting retreat through a canyon which opened at the foot of the escarpment where we were; [Ruffier and] the Skirmishers from Ksar el Azoudj were on the south side of this ravine to guard our flank. The retreat began when the wounded had been got under cover, but at that moment new groups of Moroccans appeared on both flanks and opened a violent fire at less than 400 yards.

  I fell back with the last echelon. The retreat was extremely painful; we were dominated from higher ground on all sides by an enemy who knew this terrain much better than we did. When falling back we found that Légionnaire Ghysslinck had been hit again, in the head, and was dead. We tried to carry the body and put another wounded man up on the horse, but this proved impossible, and we abandoned the corpse when the Moroccans got within 100 yards of us.

  We reached a corridor where Capt Normand was [waiting], and rallied all the men there to cover [by fire] the retreat of Lt Ruffier in the direction of Ksar el Azoudj. [This re-emphasizes that each platoon was obliged to retreat independently, on either side of the canyon mentioned above; Normand and the Spahis were with Deze and the 2nd RE men.] Disciplinaires Stamm and Flipsonn of 2nd RE were killed; we could not take their bodies along as the wounded were using all the horses we had.8 We were pursued for more than a mile, but our fire succeeded in holding them back. At nightfall Capt Normand reunited the two echelons, totalling 30 men, and we continued towards Fendi. We arrived at about 9pm, with three wounded; the wounded Walz had already been brought in . . .

  Deze commended his batman Walz, who had continued to fire after his right foot was smashed by a bullet, and had killed two of his assailants; Disciplinaire Lambinet had also shown great bravery, fighting hand-to-hand with a tribesman who tried to take the rifle of a fallen Skirmisher. Disciplinaire Maret, who had behaved well throughout the day, became separated in the darkness and was missing; so at first was Disciplinaire Bonneuil, whose left arm was broken by a bullet, but he managed to make his way back to Ksar el Azoudj alone during the night.

  Further south, Lieutenant Ruffier had also been leapfrogging his men back in the face of wolfish pursuit, and his matter-of-fact report paints a frightening picture for the imaginative:The Moroccans, breaking out of cover, pursued us vigorously, and soon showed that they had more ammunition th
an we did. We retreated, holding foot by foot; at several points it came to hand-to-hand. The fight continued until nightfall; QM-Sgt Lovy of 2nd RTA and two of his Skirmishers were killed. Légionnaire Peter of my detachment was hit in the belly, and I got a bullet in the right thigh . . . My horse, held by a Skirmisher, bolted in very difficult country and could not be recaptured.

  I wish to commend 11859 Pte Peter, who continued to march throughout the action although wounded in the belly; and 9617 Disciplinaire Dubois, who behaved very well during the retreat, stopping from ridge to ridge to hold back the pursuit.

  The next day General Cauchemez, commanding Ain Sefra Subdivision, ordered Captain Normand out again with Deze and 60 légionnaires to search for the abandoned bodies. Eight were found and taken back to Fendi for burial; all but one had been stripped – Stamm had fallen unseen some way from the others with a bullet through the head, and was still holding his rifle and a cartridge. Only one had been mutilated: QM-Sergeant Lovy of the Skirmishers showed no bullet wounds but the signs of violent beating, and his eyes had been gouged out with a dagger. More happily, Lieutenant Deze found 8305 Disciplinary Private Maret, 36 hours after the action and a full 9 miles from the scene. Half-naked and suffering from heatstroke, he had been eating grass seeds and drinking his own urine, but when found he still had his rifle and was full of fight.10

  THE RESTLESS COLONIAL LOBBY in Paris and Algiers took heart in the spring of 1903 from the re-appointment as Governor-General of Algeria of Charles Célestin Jonnart. A cabinet minister in 1893, he had been forced to retire the following year when he sustained serious injuries in an early motorcar accident. He had served briefly as Algerian governor-general in the winter of 1900/1901 before ill-health then forced him to take a long sabbatical. By the spring of 1903 he seems to have recovered his full vigour, and returned to the post that had always been his ambition.11

  In the first half of May, new cross-border raids were being reported every few days, and one was in alarming strength: on the 6th, no fewer than 1,500 Ouled Jarir and Beni Gil, 600 of them mounted, lifted several hundred camels. This suggested to some that the Tafilalt’s constant demands for a holy war against the French were being heeded. Impatient to take decisive control of a drifting situation, Jonnart urged that reconnaissance columns be sent into Moroccan tribal territory, and that an actual attack be made on the walled township of Zenaga, the notorious bandits’ base in the Figuig oasis.

  Paris agreed to the reconnaissance columns, but forbade any occupation of Figuig; however, Jonnart was free to present demands for action to the Maghzan border commissioner there, the Amil Si Muhammad Ragragi. On 23 May 1903, General Fernand O’Connor at Oran Division was ordered to prepare the two recce columns, and also (perhaps significantly) to send artillery south by rail. A meeting between Jonnart and Ragragi was arranged, to take place on the plain outside Zenaga on the morning of the 31st.12

  The valley of Figuig is aligned east to west, bordered on the north by steep, almost continuous cliffs and on the south by a more separated series of heights (see Map 13). The direct approach from the Beni Ounif railhead to Figuig ran almost due north by the Taghla pass. Along its left side, at the foot of the moderate slopes of the Djebel Zenaga, a thick belt of date-palms followed the west bank of the flowing Zousfana river. On the east bank a corridor of sand studded with occasional palms led along the foot of the steep, sawtoothed Djebel Taghla rising on the right. A rider emerging at the northern end was confronted, across about 750 yards of open ground, by the 2-mile long east-west edge of the great palm plantation and crop-gardens packed into a semi-circular bay in the northern cliffs. To the left, in the edge of the palmerie down at the western end of the valley, the walls of Zenaga dominated the oasis.

  CLOSE SECURITY FOR THE MEETING was provided by Captain Bonnelet’s 18th (Mounted) Company/1st RE, who marched up from Djenan ed Dar early that morning. Given the all-clear by a Spahi patrol, Bonnelet moved up the pass and halted short of the northern end; his 4th Platoon was led by Lieutenant Ruffier, who had clearly recovered from his thigh wound at Ksar el Azoudj two months’ previously. The 1st Platoon were sent forward to take up position on the lower knees of the Djebel Taghla on the right of the northern exit, keeping watch over the open ground to the west and north. At 9am, Jonnart rode through with General O’Connor and their escort. At about 9.50am Bonnelet heard a shot, then two more, then a rolling fire; he left Ruffier’s platoon holding the mules and took the 2nd and 3rd forward on foot at the double. They had not gone more than 50 yards before they came under a scattered fire.

  The Amil Ragragi had ridden down from his residence in El Oudaghir and had met Jonnart’s party on the plain. When the meeting broke up half-an-hour later, the governor-general’s party had not turned back for Taghla pass, but had ridden westwards with Zenaga on their right, in order to swing left again for Beni Ounif by the broader Jew’s Pass. As they rode past Zenaga shots were fired at them and riders emerged from behind the ksar. Seeing this, the légionnaires on the lower slope of Djebel Taghla opened fire to cover their escape. Jonnart’s party spurred away to safety, while Moroccans rushed to man the walls and tower of Zenaga, returning an increasingly heavy fire on 1st Platoon. This was commanded that day by a Danish lieutenant named Christian Selchauhansen – one of the Legion’s few foreign-born officers at that time.13

  Bonnelet formed his 2nd and 3rd Platoons into a skirmish line extending left from 1st Platoon, and all advanced north to the oasis by fire and movement, eventually taking firing cover among the palms in the edge of some terraced gardens. After about an hour, Bonnelet received the order to fall back by echelons. A withdrawal straight backwards would have left the covering echelon still mixed up in the trees and vulnerable to outflanking; instead, the captain orderered Selchauhansen to take his platoon back to their original covering position on the Djebel Taghla slope before he withdrew the other two, at first moving eastwards along the edge of the palmerie before turning south across the open ground under Selchauhansen’s rifle sights. This was sensible, but it took a while for Selchauhansen to complete the move. When 2nd and 3rd Platoons began to move the enemy’s fire redoubled, and up to 300 Moroccans emerged from Zenaga and followed the leapfrogging platoons along the fringe of the palm-forest in an apparent attempt to get ahead and cut them off from the pass. From the slope, Selchauhansen kept this force under fire while Bonnelet led a texbook withdrawal below him, pursued by growing numbers of Moroccans.

  When the three platoons had linked up at the northern mouth of the pass, Bonnelet faced a classic tactical problem. If he gave up the slope of Djebel Taghla to fall back down the open corridor, his men would have no effective cover for several hundred yards until they reached a slight ridge, and their backs would be in danger from the usual following rush that was second nature to all Moroccans; but if he left Selchauhansen’s platoon up on the slope to cover the retreat of the rest, they would soon be cut off. He formed a firing line to hold the enemy back while two seriously wounded NCOs were carried to the rear, and this line soon had to bend backwards at each end to fight off Moroccans trying to flank the company on both sides. As long as his men held this ground and kept up a disciplined fire all would be well; but their cartridge pouches were not bottomless, and as soon as he thinned them out to start retreating down the pass things would become delicate.

  At about 11.45am a Lieutenant Catroux rode up with orders from Lieutenant-Colonel Cussac, 2nd RE (now returned from Madagascar to a territory command at Djenan ed Dar). Cussac had ordered most of 19th (Mounted) Company/lst RE up the pass to help Bonnelet disengage, and 150 légionnaires were advancing along the western slope above the Zousfana, from where they could give effective cover to 18th (Mounted) falling back down the sandy corridor on their right. The two companies changed places smoothly, and the 19th (plus Lieutenant Ruffier’s frustrated mule-holders) went forward for a brief exchange of fire with the Moroccans, who then fell back to Zenaga. By 2pm both units were safely back at Beni Ounif.14

  AT TH
E COST OF A FEW MEN WOUNDED and a brief personal scare, Jonnart had the excuse he needed for direct surgery on the twenty-year-old cancer of Figuig. By 6 June General O’Connor had shunted his units around to assemble a strong force at Beni Ounif, including two battalions of 2nd RE from Saida and Mascara. The aim was not to assault Zenaga, however, but to persuade it to surrender by an artillery bombardment; this would be delivered by one battery each of 95mm and the new 75mm pieces, and the mission of the infantry and cavalry was simply to ensure that the guns got there and back safely.15

  O’Connor marched on 8 June; he had anticipated that it might take a day to fight through the passes into the valley, but this proved pessimistic. The infantry occupied all the passes without difficulty, and the artillery took up position facing Zenaga. At 7.45am the eight guns opened a slow, deliberate fire, taking care not to drop any overshoots into El Oudaghir. The last guns fell silent at 11am; perhaps 150 buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged, and anything between 80 and 300 people killed. During the subsequent withdrawal there was a little skirmishing with some Ouled Jarir who emerged from the ksar of El Hammam, but losses were light on both sides, and by 2pm all the troops were on their way back to camp.

  The councils of all seven Figuig ksars presented themselves to General O’Connor to negotiate the best peace terms they could get, and these were agreed on 10 June. A swingeing fine would be paid; there was to be free European access to the oasis, and tribal marauders would be expelled. In return, Figuig traders would enjoy French protection in Algeria, property rights at Beni Ounif would be respected, and no troops would be stationed in Figuig. These terms naturally bound only the sedentary population of the oasis, not the visiting tribesmen; these returned to the djebel and the bled, where they soon had increased reason for concern over France’s new bellicosity.16