Our Friends Beneath the Sands
Page 45
The harka flowed north on their heels, and divided; most continued to advance up the river towards the village and fort on the rocky western slope, but 300 – 400 others swung right into the edge of the Erg and on to the great sand-dune facing and overlooking the walls (Susbielle did not have enough men to sustain an outpost in such a vulnerable position). Tribesmen also occupied several buildings below the fort, and tried to climb the walls of the ksar, but by about 8.30am they had been driven back to the cover of the palm trees by fire from the villagers, the fort, and the signallers’ perch on the summit. In retrospect, this would prove to be the harka’s high tidemark; however, the Ouled Jarir and Shaamba on the great dune – a significant number of them armed with Lebels – opened a steady fire into the fort which persisted until nightfall. It was easy enough for the soldiers to find cover, but many of their horses and mules were killed, and the task of fetching water became perilous for men emerging from the tunnel down in the pass. The garrison’s best marksmen were placed on the battlements to deny the snipers the leisure to observe and aim carefully – against the shining sand their dark figures stood out clearly.
The 19th cost Susbielle only one dead and three wounded, but the afternoon brought disturbing news: the Dawi Mani holding Barrebi were said to have reached peace terms with their attackers. This made him nervous about the warriors holding the ksar of Taghit, and he moved a platoon of Guibert’s Skirmishers into the village as insurance. When the bugler blew ‘Reveille’ on the morning of 20 August a storm of firing greeted him from the top of the great dune. Soon afterwards a troop of riders were seen galloping in from the west; Lieutenant de Lachaux, with 40 of his moghaznis from Beni Abbès, reached the fort at a cost of two men hit by snipers on the dune. However, by about 8.30am the sand hill seemed to be unoccupied; a foot patrol of moghaznis confirmed that it had been abandoned, and a squad from the Bat d’Af were sent across to take position there. At noon a mounted patrol probing towards Barrebi found that the harka was striking its camps. Without any discernible climax, and at a cost of just 9 French killed and 21 wounded, the four-day battle of Taghit was over.23
WHILE THE NUMBERS INVOLVED on both sides had been very roughly comparable with those at the siege of Tuyen Quang, in every other respect the two actions could not have been less similar (most obviously, in that Taghit was not actually besieged). The fort’s site on its high ledge was probably its least important advantage – potentially, it was still overlooked from two sides, and it was vulnerable to close approach by night.24 At Tuyen Quang the defenders had faced a disciplined army; Ba Sidi el Hanafi was not even the unquestioned leader of a large tribal following, only the temporary ‘chairman’ of a disparate group of such chiefs, whose squabbling never ceased. (The Ait Khabbash were intent upon sacking the village of Barrebi; the Dawi Mani contingent preferred to negotiate with their fellow tribesmen inside.) Such murabtin as Ba Sidi, standing outside the tangle of everyday feuds and pacts, were essential to any pan-tribal enterprise, but – in Professor Dunn’s words – they‘were good standard-bearers but bad generals . . . society normally had no need for specialists of that sort’.25 Nevertheless, Ba Sidi apparently enjoyed a warrior reputation beyond his charisma as a preacher, and it may seem surprising that there is no sign of his exercising any military control over the harka once he had brought it to the battlefield.
Such a European concept was simply foreign to tribal culture. It is clear that there was no coordinated plan of attack, and that even those groups not preoccupied with looting wandered in and out of combat when and where they chose – most strikingly, they did not even prevent French reinforcements from getting in. They were apparently surprised by Susbielle’s aggressive tactics on 17 August, but after that first sortie they seem to have taken no steps to counter its repetition. It would not have taken tactical genius to infiltrate the palm-groves nearer the fort by night and to prepare a reception for future sorties, and in general the tribesmen’s apparent failure to exploit the cover of darkness is puzzling. Above all, however, Taghit exposes the absurdity of the fictional ‘Beau Geste fort’ scenario. Unlike Madani el Glaoui, Ba Sidi did not have a Krupp field gun. Without artillery to breach the walls, even thousands of tribesmen could not hope to storm a properly built fort held by a couple of hundred determined riflemen with water and plentiful ammunition, and they soon gave up any such attempts once casualties began to mount. (The Taghit garrison expended no fewer than 45,000 rounds of rifle ammunition and 103 shrapnel shells.)
Prisoners taken in the week after Taghit said that some 400 warriors had been killed outright and a larger number wounded. On the morning of 21 August, a patrol saw large groups about 10 miles to the north-west, straggling through the passes of the southern Djebel Béchar on their way back to Béchar and the Tafilalt. However, they also reported the tracks of perhaps 300 camel-riders – probably Shaamba bedouin – leading off in the other direction, eastwards into the dunes of the Erg. The question of whether this force would swing north or south, and with what intentions, would be answered two weeks later.26
NEWS OF THE ATTACK ON TAGHIT had caused a convoy heading south for Beni Abbès to be held at Djenan ed Dar. On 24 August word came of the defeat and dispersal of the harka; the Legion’s Lieutenant-Colonel Cussac was by then at Taghit, and that day he received orders from Colonel d’Eu (interim commander of Ain Sefra Subdivision, vice the sick General Prot) to send 2nd Half-Company, 22nd (Mounted)/2nd RE back up to its camp at El Morra. Meanwhile Major Bichemin, commanding the delayed convoy at Djenan ed Dar, was ordered to start it again on 25 August; the inadequacy of the wells would oblige it to travel in three successive groups. Group 1 left El Morra on 31 August, escorted by Captain Bonnelet’s whole 18th (Mounted) Company/1er RE and two troops from 1st Spahis. Group 2 – the smallest – would leave before dawn on 2 September, escorted by the légionnaires of Captain Vauchez’s half-company of 22nd (Mounted) and a single troop of Spahis. Bichemin himself, with two turco companies of 2nd RTA and another Spahi troop, would escort Group 3 out of El Morra at 6pm the same evening. From Taghit, Cussac had sent word to Bichemin of the unaccounted-for camel-riders from the harka who had made off into the Sand-Sea after the attack on the fort. Bonnelet’s Group 1 marched out as planned, and reached Taghit without incident.27
Captain Vauchez’s half-company turned in at El Morra at 8pm on the evening of 1 September. Their sleep was disturbed from about midnight by the bellowing of groups of privately owned camels being loaded – their owners had joined the convoy for security but accepted no march-discipline, and tended to straggle out of camp hours before the escort. Vauchez roused his men with blasts of his whistle at 2am, and they got on the march in pitch darkness at 3.45am on 2 September. They numbered 2 officers, 111 NCOs and légionnaires with 64 mules, Sergeant Damiens with 20 men from V/1st Spahis, and 2 moghazni ‘guides’ (only one of whom had ever made this journey before, several months previously). Vauchez’s deputy was the Dane, Lieutenant Selchauhansen, who had transferred from Bonnelet’s 18th (Mounted) to fill a vacancy since the action at Figuig at the end of May.
The mule-riders rode south in two parallel lines of pairs, Selchauhansen’s 3rd Platoon on the left and 4th under Vauchez on the right, each pair of riders with their two mule-mates marching on their outside flank; the whole column thus took up only about 100 yards on the trail. Vauchez and Selchauhansen rode their horses, Sergeant-Major Tissier and Quartermaster-Sergeant Tisserand had mules to themselves, and there were two led pack-mules with water and ammunition. Pickets each of a few Spahis rode ahead and on the flanks, about 500 – 800 yards out depending on the ground, and brought up the rear. In the darkness, when ears were more useful than eyes, the men marched in strict silence and were forbidden to smoke. In the early light at 6am they made a half-hour halt for coffee, but even so, before long they began passing strings of the privately owned camels dawdling along over about 3 miles of the track, and eventually overtook them all to take their place at the head of the convoy.28
By 9.3
0am, with the sun well up, the men had taken off their greatcoats and were marching in their white fatigues and sun helmets. They had left the well at El Moungar a mile or two behind them when Captain Vauchez decided to call another half-hour halt so that his légionnaires could eat their haversack rations while the leading camels caught up again – since the drivers let them browse on the march, the convoy was stretching and contracting. The half-company stopped in a very slight dip in the middle of a shallow corridor of low ground, perhaps half a mile wide; the good-tempered mules were roughly field-tethered in groups, rifles were stacked in tripods, and the platoons sat down to eat, south of the mule-lines. Behind the légionnaires, spread over perhaps a thousand yards of the track from the north, groups of camels were slowly catching up, eventually followed by the five Spahis who provided the rearguard (see Map 14). Along their right flank, to the west, was a rising series of stony greyish-yellow hillocks in a band several hundred yards wide and up to 60 feet high; beyond these in the middle distance ran the line of the Djebel Béchar escarpment, in slopes of dull black scree rising steeply to cliffs. Back behind their right shoulders the escort had passed a little straggle of stunted, thorny trees in a crease in the edge of the hummocks. On their left the stony ground seemed flat and featureless, studded every few yards with tufts of coarse weeds, until it rose gently into a fringe of small white sand dunes; off beyond these lay the mezmerizing progression of giant golden dunes on the edge of the Sand-Sea.
For some reason, Captain Vauchez had chosen to rest his men almost exactly on the spot where, just over three years previously, his regiment’s mounted company under Captain Sérant had been attacked while coming up from Zafrani.
THE SKETCH MAP made in September 1903 by Sub-lieutenant Holtz of 2nd Spahis shows the site of Sérant’s action in July 1900 as about 300 yards north of Vauchez’s halt, and QM-Sergeant Tisserand’s report explicitly supports this; so, minutes before halting, Vauchez’s men must have passed Sérant’s little battlefield within easy sight on a hillock to their right. With a practical limit of no more than two years’ continuous service in the mounted companies, there would have been no veterans of Sérant’s unit in the ranks that day. Still, it seems unlikely that in such an arid climate the bulky mule-skulls could have disappeared entirely, nor have been dragged far by the little fox-sized desert jackals. It is tempting to wonder whether any of the légionnaires sitting down to open their tins of sardines commented on them.
Vauchez had been with the Legion in Algeria at the beginning of August 1900 when Sérant’s action was the talk of every dinner table; that month he may have been distracted by preparing for his imminent posting to Tonkin, but he had been back in the Sud-Oranais since early in 1902, absorbing the common gossip of the frontier soldiers. Marie Louis Joseph Vauchez was far from being a dullard; he was an ambitious 37-year-old former ranker from the Line infantry, with the busy energy sometimes seen in short men (he was only 5 foot 4 inches tall). His service reports describe him as capable, studious, and a man who listened to advice, but also as one who needed reining in as much as stimulation. He is described as a stickler for regulations, sober and rather short-tempered, which seems plausible for a man in a hurry to make his way up the ranks.29 In Tonkin he had been recommended for early promotion to major, and although this had been judged premature he was clearly regarded as an officer with a future. However, during his time in the Sud-Oranais he had not learned any respect for the tribes.
In late March 1903 he and half his 22nd (Mounted) had accompanied Captain de Susbielle on a 24-hour reconnaissance west across the Djebel Béchar. Their orders from Ain Sefra had been to avoid incidents if possible, but French officers always interpreted such instructions robustly, and Susbielle’s character will already be clear. When they were seen emerging from a pass facing the kasbah of Béchar, three parties of Ouled Jarir and villagers totalling about 150 armed men had emerged with a green banner and advanced on them; one party had swung around the flank to cut them off from the pass and had opened an ineffective fire. Three Lebel volleys at long range had been enough to send them all back to the palm-grove, and the column had then ridden disdainfully past the walls of the kasbah. Vauchez’s Corporal Zoli later told the journalist Isabelle Eberhardt that a few days before El Moungar, the captain had joked that ‘he could lead them all the way to the Tafilalt in his shirtsleeves’. When he halted his légionnaires south of El Moungar on 2 September, Vauchez did not send out any sentries.30
THE VAST LITERATURE on the battle of Waterloo includes apparently baffling accounts of infantry units being surprised by cavalry before they had time to form a defensive square. At first sight the terrain between the armies seems to be an almost featureless stretch of fields, but walk a couple of hundred yards south from Wellington’s line towards Napoleon’s and the significance of even gentle folds in the ground suddenly becomes striking. At last you can understand how a whole regiment of Cuirassiers seemed to ‘rise up out of the ground’, to ride straight over a battalion of Hanoverian redcoats still deployed in line. Compared with Belgian cropland, the visual trickery of the Moroccan desert is multiplied to an extraordinary degree, and it, too, must be walked if it is to be understood.
What you see in this subtly rolling terrain of dust and stones is a series of superimposed horizontal folds, like receding ripples. Over a few miles the colours of the ground can vary in a series of gradations – from yellow-grey to charcoal, to rust-brown, then pink, and back to tawny – and the surface textures may change from fine grit, through gravel, to fist-size stones on the patches of true hammada. But within those stretches where the colours are constant, the monotonous swells and dips rolling gently away from you give the eye no more to catch hold of than the surface of a quiet sea. The distances and the relative heights between particular patches of ground are quite remarkably deceptive. When you look at terrain like this under the noonday sun it seems that even a desert mouse skittering across it would be seen immediately – and then the dark shape of a man seems to rise up out of the ground a couple of hundred yards ahead of you like the dead awakening, shockingly close.
If you could look down on the scene from above at dawn or in late afternoon, when the light comes low and flat, then a whole jigsaw puzzle of light and shadow would be revealed; in the French term, the terrain is surprisingly mouvementé. The shadows are the ‘dead ground’ – a soldier’s hiding places and corridors for movement. The bright slopes and flats between the shadows are his obstacles, and the places where he may get himself killed. At El Moungar the sun was well up the sky; but the point is not the light – the point is that the dead ground itself does not disappear along with the morning shadows. The several hundred Shaamba waiting for Captain Vauchez’s half-company that day had understood its uses since they had been little boys searching for strayed goats under the threat of a whipping.31
THERE WAS A SLIGHT GULLEY to the east of the spot where Vauchez had halted, between him and the small white dunes. It would have been literally invisible from ground level, and the cavalry pickets cannot have checked that flank; it may be significant that they were not from the veteran 2nd Spahis but from the 1st, newly arrived on the Oranais frontier from the long-peaceful Algiers province. It was in this curving gulley and spread among the white dunes to the north of it that the nomads who had headed into the Sand-Sea after Taghit now lay concealed. The tribesmen had hidden their camels among the dunes and crept forward to wait patiently under cover for the convoy to arrive, and they must surely have grinned like wolves when they saw the escort actually halt in the middle of their chosen ambush site. Now the white-clad soldiers were sitting bunched and stationary little more than a hundred yards in front of their rifle sights, while the unsuspecting camel-train came lumbering up from the right.32
It was at about 9.40am, when the leading string of camels had almost reached the soldiers and others were passing the thorn-trees a little way north-west, that shots suddenly rang out from the low dunes to the east. Immediately afterwards, as t
he légionnaires were stumbling to their feet and running for their stacked rifles, the tribesmen in the gulley opened a heavy fire, which struck the men of Lieutenant Selchauhansen’s 3rd Platoon on the near flank of the escort. As he got them into a firing line facing east, some of the Shaamba burst out of the gulley and ran across the open ground towards his left flank, intent on cutting the escort off from the leading camels; other tribesmen rushed out of the dunes further north and made directly for the camel train (see Map 14).
Under fire from enemy both facing him and hooking fast around his left flank, Selchauhansen ordered his two squads into a shallow ‘V’ facing both east and north. He stood behind the angle to direct their firing, but almost at once a bullet hit him in the side of the chest and he fell; when men tried to carry him to the rear he shouted at them to leave him. Captain Vauchez took 4th Platoon north behind the 3rd to form a line on their left facing back up the track, protecting the mules; he then came under heavy fire from that direction too, from up to 100 Shaamba who had charged out of the dunes and across the track, and were now in good cover around the little group of trees to the north-west. Vauchez reacted by ordering 4th Platoon to attack them, and – whether ordered or not – the left-hand squad of 3rd Platoon also went forward on the 4th’s right flank, led from each end of their line by Corporal Cachès and QM-Corporal de Montès.
The decision to react to the threat by immediate counter-attack was in the Legion tradition, but it was a serious miscalculation. As the légionnaires charged, their ranks were shockingly thinned by a hail of bullets; they were soon halted and pinned down, returning fire as best they could from the notional cover of knee-high tufts of grass. Captain Vauchez himself was among those cut down almost at once, shot in the stomach, and Sergeant-Major Tissier spun and dropped with a smashed thigh. At various moments during the fighting in the open, most of the NCOs became casualties, but in the confusion the sequence is unclear. Sergeant Dannert was described groping at a belly wound through his blue sash as if trying to pluck out the bullet with his bloody fingers; Corporals Terrasson and Gierké were killed, Sergeants Perré-Dessus and Van der Borght and QM-Corporal de Montès wounded. While some tribesmen continued the fireflight on the flats and from the hillocks to the soldiers’ north-west, others grabbed the leading strings of camels and urged them sideways across the track, masking more warriors who crouched and fired between them and used their cover to get across into the hillocks to the west.