Meanwhile, from the eastern flank of the halting-place, the survivors of the right-hand half of 3rd Platoon – who had lost both their sergeants – fell back under such leadership as the corporals could provide towards the higher ground to the south-west, beyond the track; they carried Selchauhansen and at least some others of their wounded, but QM-Sergeant Tisserand describes the movement as ‘pell-mell’, and the mule-line was abandoned. Panting and shaking, these soldiers threw themselves down into firing positions on one of the bald hillocks and in a gulley beside it. What part the Spahis played is obscure, but most of the troopers present seem to have run for the high ground before the légionnaires.
As part of the little headquarters group, Tisserand had been with Vauchez, and he was now seconding the wounded Sergeant-Major Tissier in directing the fire of 4th Platoon and the left-hand half of the 3rd. They were isolated on indefensible ground, with their right and rear wide open, and Shaamba advancing through the hillocks on their left front to cut them off on that flank too. They were all dead men unless they could get to the higher ground, and somebody gave the order. The wooden language of Tisserand’s report does not address the fear and confusion of a hasty retreat in the open, under heavy fire from half-seen enemies in three directions – a retreat that must have threatened to turn into panic flight at any second. The account of an anonymous veteran published ten years later makes it clear that the movement was more like a sauve qui peut than a controlled ‘withdrawal by echelons’.
Most of the NCOs were already down, and now Sergeant Charlier was also hit while trying to organize his squad. With bullets kicking up the dust all around and men falling, wide-eyed soldiers must have been twisting back and forth, straining to pick out some coherent order above the racket of rifle fire, men cursing, mules braying, camels bellowing and churning up the clouds of dust through which elusive figures were flitting and firing. When they finally understood where they were supposed to run, the légionnaires must have felt wounded men plucking at their legs, begging not to be abandoned; some were roughly hoisted on to their mates’ shoulders, but those who could not immediately be distinguished from the already dead were left behind. So, in the end, were the plunging, unmanageable water and ammunition mules, despite the courageous efforts of Private May. (The abandoned casualties were not mutilated by the Shaamba, who contented themselves with riddling them with bullets – remarkable proof that they had ammunition to spare. One NCO’s body would be found with five bullet wounds, two more through his pith helmet, and no fewer than five strikes on his rifle alone.)
THE ACTION NOW DEVELOPED around three separate hillocks above the west side of the track, aligned north to south over a distance of perhaps 500 yards; they will be called here the north, central and south mounds. To appreciate the danger faced by Vauchez’s men it is important to understand that these were not dramatic, clean-cut heights like the gara defended by Captain de Castries’ légionnaires at Chott Tigri twenty years before. In photographs, the centre mound rises like a gently sloped whaleback to perhaps 50 or 60 feet above the track, and since it seems to have uneven shoulders the perimeter to be defended cannot have been obviously apparent. Similarly, although the French use the word ravines to describe the low ground between the mounds, ‘gulley’ is really too dramatic – these were not sharp-edged trenches in the earth, but simply clearly defined dips.33
By the time QM-Sergeant Tisserand reached the high ground, about a dozen Spahis were holding the south mound, and the first refugees of 3rd Platoon the central mound and a dip north of it, under the leadership of the wounded QM-Corporal de Montès. The 4th Platoon and the rest of the 3rd arrived in two groups, the first a small party led by a corporal and carrying wounded, who joined the Spahis on the south mound. The bulk of the légionnaires, with the officers, the sergeant-major and other wounded, took cover in the dip between the central and south mounds. Vauchez had been boosted back on to his horse and was brought in propped up in the saddle by the wounded Corporal Liautard and Private Paris, while Private Brona carried the crippled Sergeant-Major Tissier on his back.
Throughout the next seven hours, movement and communication between the separated knots of men was difficult and dangerous; they were exposed on smooth slopes, in white clothing, and all were under fire – from the dunes and track to the east, from hillocks to the north and north-west, and increasingly from the broken ground to the west, where the Shaamba seemed determined to surround them and get up close. Lieutenant Selchauhansen was unconscious; Captain Vauchez and Sergeant-Major Tissier were both badly wounded, but both attempted to exercise command. This was hampered by their inability to see what was happening outside the dip where they were laid, by the difficulty of communication with the other groups, and (probably) by uncertainty as to who was actually in charge from moment to moment – Vauchez, too, was increasingly slipping in and out of consciousness. Tisserand’s report does not give the timing of most events, and the account by an anonymous veteran contradicts Tisserand over the location of some incidents; however, the essential phases seem to have been as follows.
AT ABOUT 10.30AM, Vauchez sent two of the Spahis spurring off with a pencilled note to summon help from Captain de Susbielle at Taghit, 25 miles to the south. The two wounded 3rd Platoon corporals tried to reassemble their men on the central mound, but this was not fully achieved before both took second wounds, Cachès being killed by a bullet in the head. QM-Sergeant Tisserand took part of 4th Platoon up from the dip south of the central mound and occupied it, driving the nearest enemy back by fire. Some of 3rd Platoon then crossed to the north mound; the rest of 4th Platoon came up on to the central mound, where Tisserand found his field of fire to the north masked by 3rd Platoon. Some of the tribesmen were busy gathering up the camel train – a couple of strings were led off southwards – but this did not distract the rest, who kept up a hot fire from the north-west, east and south-east. Their attempts to gather up the company’s mules and to reach the abandoned French casualties were partly frustrated by fire from the central mound.
At some point the 3rd Platoon men abandoned the north mound and regrouped on the central one, clearing Tisserand’s view. The quartermaster-sergeant was now in effective command of the men who could still move around. He was one of those former French Line conscripts who had joined the Legion in the hopes of bettering himself; his rank argues a good education, and his handwriting is a meticulous copperplate, with large, flamboyant capital letters. A drawing shows a burly man in his early forties, a little thick in the jowls, with sharply receding greying hair and an old-fashioned dark moustache and ‘imperial’ goatee in the style of Napoleon III. It is a good-natured face, with noticeably humorous eyes under rather devilish eyebrows, but Tisserand had already taken a bullet across the head, so that day it would have been streaming with blood – nothing bleeds like a scalp wound. (Indeed, the white fatigues of all the wounded crowded in the low ground must have looked like butchers’ aprons.)
As the morning wore on, Tisserand judged the most urgent threat to be from Shaamba advancing among the hillocks to his north-west. He left Corporal Zoli with a few légionnaires and Spahis to keep up the fire to the east, and led most of the other fit men to the north-west of the central mound, from where their steady firing checked the enemy. Tisserand may have advanced further, since the summary in the Livre d’Or calls this a ‘turning movement’. However, at about 1pm a Spahi, Trooper Peroni (presumably a busted colon NCO), rode across on Captain Vauchez’s horse carrying a message from Sergeant-Major Tissier. Tribesmen were closing in from the west, and Tissier ordered the quartermaster to fall back from the central mound to concentrate on the defence of the dip and the south mound.
Tisserand knew that the central height was too important to be abandoned, and at this point his otherwise clear report cannot be reconciled easily with his sketch-map. He says that he obeyed the order; but he left a squad under the wounded but still determined Corporal Zoli, with some Spahis, to keep up observation and fire from the central
mound. It appears that Tisserand and most of the survivors subsequently regrouped some 150 yards south of Zoli’s outpost, around the wounded in the dip and holding adjacent slopes of the central and south mounds; but this may not have been achieved before 1.30pm, when the sergeant-major’s warning proved well-founded.
While Zoli’s men on their vantage point were preoccupied by a threat from the east, other Shaamba rushed the position from the hillocks to the west and reached the end of the shallow gulley where the wounded lay (which was aligned roughly north-west to south-east). Hand-to-hand fighting took place at this point; Private Copel bayoneted a warrior grabbing for a casualty’s rifle, but several soldiers were killed before the perimeter was restored by fire from the men up on the hillocks. Among the dead were Trooper Peroni and his Sergeant Damiens, and Sergeant-Major Tissier.
At the moment of Tissier’s death, command devolved on QM-Sergeant Tisserand. He placed the fittest men on slopes of the central and south mounds, and those slightly wounded who could still fire lined the edges of the dip, with the worst cases lying under cover below them; the badly wounded Privates Ueber and Vandevalle cared for Vauchez, who was now semi-conscious and in great pain. The sun was brutal; the men’s waterbottles were emptying fast, and since the mule with the reserve kegs had been lost, all the wounded were soon in great distress. Tisserand moved around, controlling a disciplined fire, until about 2pm, when he, too, was wounded a second time and was obliged to hand over command to Corporal Detz. Detz – one of only 2 unwounded corporals – was now the senior able-bodied man in a unit that had begun the day with 2 officers, 7 senior NCOs and 7 corporals; nearly two-thirds of Vauchez’s men had become casualties, about 30 of them killed, and Detz had the responsibility for protecting almost 50 wounded with perhaps 30 fit men spread around quite a lengthy perimeter of uneven ground.
He seems to have borne it admirably, under enemy fire that did not slacken until about 4.30pm. At that point the Shaamba must have accepted that they would never get close enough to capture the rest of the company’s tethered mules, so they began shooting them instead. All the camels had now been led away, and at about 5pm the shooting stopped. Detz sent a few men down to try to find water amidst the carnage, but they only brought back a few litres, which was divided among the wounded. At perhaps 5.30pm, riders were seen to the south. The battle had lasted nearly eight hours.34
THE TWO SPAHIS sent to bring help from Taghit probably did not arrive there before 1.30pm at the earliest. Lieutenant-Colonel Cussac did not wait until he could get his mule-infantry under way, but sent his horsemen north in succession from about 2.30pm; these were led by the Taghit moghaznis, followed soon afterwards by Captain de Susbielle with Dr Mazellier and two troops of IV/2nd Spahis under Sub-lieutenant Holtz.35
The moghaznis merely ensured that the Shaamba had left the immediate scene, and it was not until Susbielle arrived that the casualties received anything but the roughest first aid. Dr Mazellier was overwhelmed by his task: 49 wounded men lay in the baking dust of the gulley between the central and southern knolls, and Susbielle had to send riders south again to Zafrani simply to bring up more water. Tisserand’s casualty return signed at Taghit on 5 September shows Captain Vauchez among the dead, but in fact both officers were still alive when the rescue party arrived.36
Vauchez had been shot through the right side of his stomach with a bullet that had exited through his right kidney. A second bullet had struck him behind the top of his right shoulder while he was lying prone, and had made a shallow tunnel down his back to exit 10 inches lower, without doing serious harm; he also had a superficial bullet-graze on the right of his neck. He had suffered badly from thirst and heat all day, and had lost a great deal of blood both internally and externally. Dr Mazellier kept him going through the night with injections of caffeine and ether, and with opium for the abdominal pain, but he vomited and restarted the bleeding several times. At 3am his pulse became fast and thready, and the worsening pain required two morphine injections; Mazellier detected the tense ‘drum belly’ caused by peritonitis, as sepsis rampaged through a stomach cavity infected by the bullet-torn bowel.37
At about midnight, Captain Pages’ half-squadron of Spahis and Lieutenant Dubois’ half of 18th (Mounted) Company/1st RE arrived from Taghit; Susbielle had already sent word back for reinforcements, since campfires could be seen away to the east in the Sand-Sea. In fact the next troops to arrive, at around 10.00am on 3 September, were Major Bichemin’s Algerian Skirmishers trudging down from the north. These two companies had set off from El Morra at 6pm the previous evening, escorting the third section of the convoy, and had met 5 riders on foundering horses – Sergeant Ahmed ben Boukhaten and his Spahis of Vauchez’s rearguard. When the battle broke out ahead of them these men had been engulfed by a chaos of civilian camels and drivers, and after exchanging a few shots with the most northerly Shaamba they had turned back for El Morra. Bichemin brought with him Dr de Lignerolles, who joined the exhausted Mazellier in making the most of their seriously inadequate medical supplies. At mid-morning on 3 September, Lieutenant-Colonel Cussac arrived from Taghit with some 300 Legion and Algerian mule-infantry.38 The battlefield was searched for anything salvageable while the debris was dragged together and burnt; only 5 mules were found alive, and 25 dead. It was calculated that the Shaamba had also made off with 25 rifles and no less than 5,000 rounds of Lebel ammunition, together with more than 90 laden camels – booty worth a place in tribal legend.
The two doctors did their best to prepare the wounded for the ordeal of the trek to Taghit. They had few drugs and not nearly enough mule-litters – nobody had dreamt of a butcher’s bill this long. The soldiers had to improvise stretchers, and since there was nothing in this desolation from which to cut 6-foot poles they must have used rifles and greatcoats. The doctors could do little but apply dressings to all wounds, and immobilize broken bones (large-calibre, unjacketed bullets striking long bones cause shattering up and down the shaft, and often compound fractures). External bleeding would have been stopped with direct pressure, and deep wounds would not have been stitched, since it had long been understood that they should heal from the inside outwards; but bullets carried infectious shreds of clothing into the body, and doctors of that day had no antiseptic techniques. No blood transfusions were possible, and neither was it then understood that exertion by ‘walking wounded’ (and, equally, being jolted around on mules) could cause internal bleeding that leads to shock.
Towards noon, Vauchez was placed on one of the cacolets ready for evacuation. He was conscious and lucid, and had been commending his soldiers for recognition when his face became livid and he lapsed into a coma, dying at about 12.30pm; his body would be carried back to Taghit. The relief force had gathered up the corpses of 34 légionnaires and 2 Spahis, and buried them in a mass grave at the foot of the bleak knolls they had defended. Before the convoy got under way at around 1.20pm, they piled rocks all over it to deter the jackals, and erected two wooden crosses. The column walked very slowly to spare the wounded, and only arrived at Taghit at 3am on 4 September. Captain Vauchez was buried there that evening, and a few hours later Christian Selchauhansen also died. When he was buried beside Vauchez the next day, it was with the Knight’s Cross of the Legion of Honour which his old company commander, Captain Bonnelet, had taken from his own tunic.39
FOR THE WOUNDED SURVIVORS the ordeal was far from over, since the medical facilities at Taghit were rudimentary. The fort’s tiny infirmary had never been designed to hold 50 patients, and the men had to be laid out on blankets over piles of dry grass on the hard floor of various storerooms. Conditions were far from aseptic, and the fort’s medical officer, Dr Boulin, at first had inadequate supplies of every necessity. He was already exhausted by the Saharan summer, and was himself suffering from a distressing eye infection (caused by a jet of pus when he had been treating one of the wounded from the attacks of 17 – 20 August). Nevertheless, he did everything he could to help Mazellier and Lignerolles and the 2 medical
orderlies of the garrison companies, and they were soon joined by 5 more orderlies sent down from Ain Sefra with supplies. The wounded would, in fact, take as much comfort from the care of an unmilitary figure who rode into the oasis soon after their arrival: a slight, bearded, nut-brown man wearing the Sacred Heart on a monk’s habit of unbleached wool, with a long rosary at his belt. As soon as the news of El Moungar reached his missionary hermitage at Beni Abbès, Father Charles de Foucauld had borrowed a horse from the post commander there and had ridden 75 miles across the desert to offer his help.
(In France, Foucauld would become one of the fixed points of Saharan legend; it is unclear if he ever made any converts, but the tribes seem to have honoured him as a holy man for his simplicity and devoted care. Once an aristocratic and dissolute subaltern of the Africa Light Horse, he had resigned his commission in 1882 at the age of 24; he was a gifted linguist, and in 1883 – 4 he made a long and perilous lone journey through Morocco disguised as a Jewish rabbi, gathering intelligence and observations with a concealed compass and sextant. During later desert wanderings the sabreur-turned-spy rediscovered his faith; he entered the Trappist order, before being ordained to the priesthood and returning to Algeria in 1901.)40
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 46