THE WEST WAS THE THEATRE of political developments, in the imperial cities and on the plains between them, and there General Antoine Drude was replaced in January 1908 by General Albert d’Amade, whose Landing Corps was simultaneously reinforced to 10,000 men to enable him to clear the Chaouia plain. Among the foreign journalists who flocked to cover the campaign was Lieutenant Colonel Reginald Rankin (retired) of the London Times; his account of organization and logistics is everything one could wish from an informed professional who took an interest in details, but it also has more accessible qualities.
In January – March 1908, d’Amade had about 8,000 combat troops.2 These were divided between garrisons for Casablanca and (eventually) half a dozen forward bases, and a field force of two permanent ‘flying columns’ designated Shore and Plains; the latter were sometimes combined, and other units were often taken from garrisons to form additional manoeuvre forces. The Shore Column (in which VI/1st RE served, in a Composite Marching Regiment) was under d’Amade’s immediate control at Casablanca; the Plains (including the 2nd RE Marching Regiment) was led by Colonel Boutegourd, soon based at Ber Rechid (see Map 15). D’Amade was short of cavalry, and had needed to ship in some Algerian goumiers irregulars. His communications were up to date; in addition to telegraph lines connecting Casablanca with forward bases, in late January a wireless link was established between headquarters and Ber Rechid.3 (An observation balloon was taken out by the Shore column in January, but proved a useless and too-visible encumbrance.) The supply, ration and medical arrangements for the Landing Corps seem to have been efficient, as indeed was all staff work at most levels, and d’Amade was a decisive, fast-moving commander who issued brief, clear orders. The frequent rain and heavy mud were exhausting for the infantry, and a severe limitation on the movement of artillery and transport, since the Chaouia was virtually roadless and d’Amade was starved of pack-mules and light araba mule-carts.
On the Chaouia, the infantry would carry out classic full-scale regimental manoeuvres with supporting horse and guns, very different from the small-unit warfare on the south-east frontier. General d’Amade’s first operation was an attempt to bring Moulay Hafid’s men to battle around Settat, and he set out southwards across the prairie with 2,500 men on 12 January. Two miles behind the cavalry scouts, three-and-a-half infantry battalions marched in a single great square a mile across, with the guns and baggage in the middle. They moved slowly and Rankin of the Times was able to indulge his interest in the local flora and fauna at leisure; he was struck by the variety of wildflowers that carpeted the plain, which was treeless except ‘where a rare grove of untended fig-trees languished within their broken cactus hedge, or where the dying aloe [agave] lifted its pine-like head above the tall grey sword-leaves guarding deserted farms . . . for twelve miles inland from Casablanca man has fled.’4
The troops bivouacked overnight in the rain, and on the evening of 13 January were joined at Ber Rechid by Lieutenant-Colonel Brulard with a battalion-and-a-half of his 2nd RE and ‘a few cavalry’, swelling the force to nearly 4,000 men. On the 15th they encountered large numbers of Arab riders in the valleys and hills around Settat, who denied the artillery any targets by swirling and jinking like flocks of starlings.
Four of the infantry companies were sent forward, in a long single rank, without intervals – the Legionaries on the left, the Tirailleurs on the right, their supports about a quarter of a mile behind . . . The line advanced as one man, then halted, knelt, fired by platoons, usually in volleys, and then again advanced. It was admirably done.5
There was brisk return fire: ‘the air was humming with bullets, but they hit nobody, and the shells fired by the only [Moroccan] field-piece . . . buried themselves in the plough[land] without troubling to burst’ – yet again, the enemy seemed incapable of setting fuzes. No Arabs ventured closer than 300 yards, and when the French entered the squalid little kasbah of Settat they found only terrorized Jewish families who greeted them as saviours. D’Amade had been forbidden to occupy the town permanently; denied the battle he had hoped for, he had to trudge back to Ber Rechid with very little to show for it. He had killed a few dozen tribesmen, but essentially he had been punching empty air. It was a discouraging precedent for future frustrations (and the returning Arabs killed all the Jewish men in Settat).6 During the return march Rankin found little of military interest to report, and instead filled his notebook with what really delighted him. We are inevitably reminded of Waugh’s legendary William Boot of the Daily Beast: Nowhere else have I seen so many sorts of flowers in a narrow compass. There I found the beautiful pink Cheronia exifera, a rare greenhouse plant at home, and a white sparaxis with a subtle scent . . . There I first came on a drift of lupins, just opening into blue, hard by a fold in the plain crimsoned by a colony of plantains. Our familiar little friend the Virginia Stock is at home in the rocky clefts; the glorious blue of Veronica anagallis is a rival to the sky; here is clump of scarlet pimpernel; there, by the reed-grown pool where the snipe are flushed, is a belt of yellow broom; the tall lavatera fills the hollows; and camomile, hidden by aspiring snapdragons, wafts you a greeting as you ride by.7
There is a great deal more of this sort of thing; Rankin was the type of writer who called cattle ‘kine’ (although he also had the keenly critical eye for horseflesh that one would expect of an officer and a countryman). He had an opportunity to enjoy botanizing through open woodland on 21 January, when d’Amade marched north up the coast to Bou Znika, then swung south through the edge of the Sehoul cork-forest. The general was hoping that converging columns – from Bou Znika, Ber Rechid and Mediouna – would be more productive, but he was again disappointed. The Moroccan horsemen danced around and between these separated forces with some ease, and chose to hit Colonel Boutegourd’s weaker column from Mediouna before the rendezvous. His defensive square and shrapnel shells drove them off, but before the columns could converge on them the tribesmen had simply burned their own huts and floated away. (Their grain was stored in hidden pit-silos 10 feet deep, deadly for an inattentive French horseman.)8
It is easy to like Rankin. One day he is rhapsodizing about ‘one of the loveliest flowers I have ever seen . . . a marsh-marigold in leaf, a single chrysanthemum in flower; golden, indescribable’. The next, he notes that among observers crowding forward for a view of a distant action there was ‘a correspondent carrying a loaded Mauser pistol pointed fiercely towards a foe about a thousand yards away, [who] filled his confrères with a deep sense of the frailty of the bonds that hold us to the earth’. One colleague a yard from Rankin had his skull creased by a rifle bullet, and a nearby artillery officer got another through wrist and lung; these everyday mishaps are recorded briefly, but in language far less engaged than his nature notes.9
WHAT RANKIN CALLED the most critical action of the campaign – that is, the one that most nearly ended in a defeat – was fought on 2 February, at Sidi el Mekki. Aiming to deny the tribes resources by sweeping up some 5,000 cattle reported there, Colonel Boutegourd marched from Ber Rechid before first light with VI/1st RE and two companies of turcos from Passard’s mixed regiment, a cavalry squadron and a battery. Soon after 7am Boutegourd had left a few troopers to ride herd on the captured cattle while he probed further south, when some 5,000 Arab riders appeared and came between the infantry and the cattle. These were potentially dangerous opponents for a badly outnumbered force; most had single-shot rifles such as Martini-Henrys, but some carried Winchester repeaters (though their insistence on firing from the saddle meant that most shots went high). They were quick to spot weak points and attack them, but their lack of coordination usually prevented any systematic follow-through.
The six infantry companies retired in a square; the cloud of horsemen got within 100 yards, though thinned by a single machine gun in front of the east face. When its crew all fell, Captain Bosquet of the Legion served it alone until he had used all the ammunition within reach, whereupon he hefted it on to his back and brought it inside the square. Rankin
reported that the formation had to ‘double up’, making its sides shorter but two ranks deep, for more concentrated fire to prevent charging riders breaking through – this has a Napoleonic flavour. Another Legion officer told the Englishman of his pride in his men’s steadiness; he had seen one légionnaire pause between two shots to pat reassuringly the head of a baby goat that was sticking out of the front of his greatcoat (many légionnaires gathered their supper on the march, but a kid was rather more ambitious than the usual chickens). The column regained Ber Rechid after 19 hours of marching and fighting, with 11 killed and 41 wounded, the latter including Colonel Passard.10
D’AMADE’S CONVERGING COLUMN tactics failed again on 16 – 18 February. Colonel Taupin repeated the hook southwards from Bou Znika, while Brulard’s 2nd RE marched east from Ber Rechid and d’Amade led a much larger force north-east from Settat, for a planned rendezvous at Abd el Kerim. Picking the smallest and most isolated of the three columns, on the 17th the tribes attacked Taupin in a narrow valley in the hills at Ain Rebbah; at one point his square had to fight them off with bayonets, and fell back with 39 casualties. Marching across the prairie, Brulard’s Legion column were harassed by cavalry from dawn until dusk, at a cost of 30 casualties, while d’Amade’s own column never fired a shot until a skirmish on the 18th.
On 29 February, Rankin was present – and critical – when d’Amade suffered another tactical setback, at Rfakha in the hills around the confluence of the Oued Mkoun and Oued Mellah. D’Amade was advancing eastwards with the combined Shore and Plains force of 5,500 men when he came to a valley where a ford crossed the Mkoun; the river ran north – south across his front, with rolling green downland beyond. While he waited impatiently for a convoy to catch up, he did not halt his whole force on the nearer bank. He pushed his five cavalry squadrons, a Zouave and a Legion battalion eastwards across the ford, while holding the other five battalions and his three batteries of 75s on the hills on the west bank. The Moroccans, using ground with great skill, then attacked the part of his divided force that had crossed the river, and the situation unravelled in a series of mishaps.
Among the knolls and dips on the French right flank Arab horsemen flowed forwards, each with a foot soldier leaping along hanging on to his stirrup, and pressed home a number of hit-and-run attacks on Colonel Luigné’s Africa Light Horse. The French cavalry charged, the mêlée wheeled away, and the Moroccan riflemen who had dropped free got up from the long grass and fired into the troopers’ backs. There was some confusion when two squadrons got in each other’s way, and Luigné suffered 37 casualties and 30 horses killed. (The fallen troopers were found to have been grossly mutilated where they lay, some having the bound wrists that showed they had been tortured while still alive.) When two companies of Algerian Skirmishers waded the stream and came up to provide the cavalry with a base of fire, the turcos paid for it with half a dozen casualties from French artillery misdirected by a confused senior officer.
The Moroccans then switched their focus, moving northwards behind a ridge to emerge on the French left flank. There they rose up out of cover to fire from 50 yards into the flank of the Zouave battalion advancing in column, dropping 13 conscripts with a single volley. Rankin watched from 200 yards away, with bullets buzzing round him, as the Legion battalion came up to support the shaken Zouaves. He describes the battlefield as a shambles, in the old sense of that term; and that night an idiotic muddle of orders sent the cursing infantry marching and countermarching up and down hills in the dark for hours before they were finally able to rest and eat.11
It had not been the Landing Corps’ finest hour, and frustration in Tangier and Paris had already led Clemenceau and War Minister Picquart to offer the command in the Chaouia to Lyautey, who had just finished a satisfactory operation against the Beni Snassen tribe in the far north-east (see below), but Lyautey was too wise to accept it. Colonel Rankin, being a military rather than a political animal, was amused that such modest casualty bills should cause fluttering at cabinet level.12
D’AMADE’S CEASELESS TRAMPING around the plains by day and night, and his confiscation of herds, flocks and stored grain finally began to bear fruit in March 1908. While he seldom had the tactical initiative, he had a strategy, and the Moroccans did not. His newly established garrisons and frequent columns were steadily circumscribing the tribes’ freedom of movement, which their lack of central coordination rendered increasingly aimless. There was no long-term gain from darting in to kill a dozen or two Frenchmen at a heavy cost if the squares never broke, and simply kept coming back week after week. D’Amade suffered tactically from having fewer than 1,000 cavalry, so the thousands of Moroccan horsemen could break off engagements at will, but they were paying a steady price in lives to his shells and volley-fire.
The Arabs soon had no supplies of food other than what they could gather on the spot, and d’Amade usually got to this first. (Rankin – a man of his time – believed that the French might even have erred on the side of humanity; he quoted a fellow journalist being told by Sultan Abd el Aziz himself that ‘the French would never do any good in the Chaouia until they plundered, plundered, plundered’.)13 The main tribes were being forced up off the plain into the rocky southern and eastern plateaux, where their cavalry was of less value and they would be bound to stand and defend the refuges of their people and livestock. Moulay Hafid’s Rehamna warriors from around Marrakesh were still bellicose, but their looting had done as much damage to the local tribes as had the French, and they were rapidly wearing out any welcome they had ever enjoyed.
On 7 March the French marched into the eastern hills again against the stubborn Mdakra tribe and Moulay Hafid’s contingents, and following this action at Mkarto – during which ‘Wild Boar’ Passard’s légionnaires made a positively Wellingtonian charge from hiding on a reverse slope – many of the local caids came in to make terms. D’Amade took the opportunity of the Algerian goumiers’ departure at the end of their four months’ contract to stage an impressive parade in the field, and a week later the last major action of the campaign took place.14
AFTER HARD MARCHING, by noon on 15 March 1908 the combined field force of about 5,500 men was at Dar ould Fatima, south-west of Ber Rechid. This country was still populated, but men of fighting age seemed scarce among the villagers watching the column pass, and an intelligence officer soon learned that warriors were gathering at the camp of a chief named Bou Nuallah about 20 miles north-west. D’Amade ordered knapsacks to be dumped and left one man in every sixteen to guard the baggage while the rest pressed on at speed. Snipers began harassing the advance from orchards and rocks almost at once, but fell back before the French; viewed from a ridge, thousands of riders could be seen eddying about on the rolling grassland below, but these withdrew in disorder as soon as the artillery opened fire. The advance became a race, with the guns unlimbering to fire every half-mile before hitching up and hurrying to catch up with the infantry again. Then Rankin saw through his binoculars what he took to be a low line of rocks stretching right across the horizon for several thousand yards. Hard though it was to believe, what he was actually seeing was an immense encampment of about 1,200 tents.
There was no coherence to the Moroccan defence; skeins of riders caracoled back and forth, shooting and wheeling away, while others on foot fired from among the separate tribal groups of tents, where French shells soon began to start fires. As the infantry went straight into the attack, the Legion were in the centre of the long line, with Algerian Skirmishers on either flank; all were tired and frustrated by their forced marches, and in a vengeful mood. Rankin followed close behind, revolver in hand, and he leaves an unflinching picture of confused close-quarter killing among the tents, with bullets flying from every direction. He describes a Spahi toppling dead from the saddle right in front of him; a Legion platoon making an about-face on the spot to return the fire of riflemen among tents they had passed; pools of blood on the grass; bewildered women and children caught in the crossfire; tribesmen throwing down
weapons and trying unsuccessfully to surrender at the very bayonet points of battle-mad Skirmishers and légionnaires; and Spahis in pursuit, leaning from the saddle to sabre fleeing Moroccans. As the sun sank into dark clouds, its last rays painted the contorted faces of the soldiers red and black; from every side screams and shouts mixed with the din of gunfire and of ammunition cooking off in the blazing camel-hide tents, which added their stink to that of gunpowder and melinite.
As darkness fell, Rankin could see for miles around the glowing rings of sparks left by tents burnt down to the ground. He reckoned that not many more than 130 Moroccan fighting men had died, but the rest scattered in a panic rout. Soon after sunset, rain began to fall in torrents; the bugles blew the ‘Assembly’, and under a pelting downpour the sated soldiers regrouped slowly, chilled and quiet, to begin a long, exhausted march back towards their camps around Dar ould Fatima.15
RANKIN’S DESCRIPTION OF TRIBAL CHIEFS coming in to seek peace terms, escorted by a dashing squadron of Africa Light Horse, paints a vivid picture:The dark green of the corn was flecked with patches of old rose, where the bare earth stood out . . . for thousands of yards the gilded marigolds turned the mountain slope to orange; the ochre and brown walls of the derelict kasbah were topped by snow-white towers; the red and blue uniforms of the Chasseurs were set off by their grey horses; they hedged about a group of men in whom a sense of colour seems innate. There was a white horse whose bridle, reins and blinkers were the palest blue; his high-peaked, chair-backed saddle was covered with lemon-yellow leather. A black with flashing eye and enormous mane was decked out in vermilion, his breastplate fastened to the saddle by large silver brooches.... Most of the men wore the dark blue burnous with its white hood thrown back behind. Some few were all in white; on their feet were either red or yellow slippers, and beneath their robes you caught glimpses of orange, blue and violet skirts.16
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 51