Our Friends Beneath the Sands

  [Fesch]: Light up the surroundings with occasional flares, and request artillery support only when absolutely necessary.

  [Vary]: Pointless to use flares – we can see well enough. I will ask for artillery whenever it is necessary.

  At 2.30am the major seemed to be rather more focused on his lieutenant’s plight:[Fesch]: How much ammo have you used?

  [Vary]: Eleven boxes – three left.

  [Fesch]: In addition to the three boxes, how much do your men have on them?

  [Vary]: Average of four packets [i.e. 32 rounds each]

  [Fesch]: What about your charges?

  [Vary]: We have thrown four . . . very good effect; we still have 16, plus the box of ‘flutes’ [dynamite sticks ?].

  At 3am, Major Fesch was in a generous mood: ‘Do you want a couple of shells?’. Vary replied that he was no longer under pressure from the east and could see nothing on that flank, but that there were large numbers of tribesmen to the west – ‘I can even hear them insulting us. You might send them a shell?’ Fesch promised to do so, and told the lieutenant above all to husband his remaining ammunition. At 5am, sunrise allowed Vary to report that he could see no significant movement nearby, just a few individuals; he told Fesch that he could see Moroccans returning to their camps in the valley, and asked for fifteen boxes of ammunition to be sent up. During the long night his men had held off five distinct assaults, three of them significant; 25 of the 75 defenders had been wounded, but only one Skirmisher died, and they found 173 enemy dead around the blockhouse walls. Although the tribesmen remained camped on the plain, there were no significant attacks on the main redoubt.39

  COLONEL ALIX ARRIVED AT BOUDENIB from Colomb Béchar on 5 September with some 4,000 men, tired and thirsty after a forced march; one of them was Sergeant Lefèvre of 24th (Mounted) Company. Moulay Ahmad Lahsin was granted the pitched battle to which he had challenged Major Fesch, on 7 September on the plain north-west of Boudenib, when Alix advanced as if to cut the Moroccans off from the mouth of the pass. Rumour had been accurate for once: there really were nearer 20,000 than 15,000 warriors, making a ragged line of separate tribal groups up to 3 miles across.

  On the absolutely featureless rust-coloured plain Alix drew his brigade up in a single diamond formation about 2,000 yards wide, and goaded the Moroccans with his 16 guns. When the enveloping mass of tribesmen flowed forwards at about 8.30am he ordered his infantry to hold their fire until the range had dropped to 400 yards, and then unleashed their crashing succession of volleys. By 9.30am the tribesmen were fleeing in disorder to the north and west, leaving the Djorf carpeted with several hundred bodies. Sergeant Lefèvre’s mule-company had been in the right front face, so joined the Spahis in pursuing the Berbers for more than 6 miles up the Tazuguerte pass. The VI/2nd RE was also on the field that day; so the Legion had played a full part in the defeat of the last pan-tribal harka ever to form in the border country.40

  13.

  Falling towards Fes

  1909 – 12

  While Moulay Hafid was sultan . . . the palace was the scene of constant barbarity and torture. The Sultan himself, neurasthenic, and addicted, it is said, to drugs, had his good and his bad days . . . He was possessed of a certain cunning intelligence, and had some idea of government, but disappointment met him. Things had gone too far . . . he gave way to temptations, and became cruel and avaricious.

  Walter Harris1

  NEWS OF THE BATTLE OF BOUDENIB, which left the way clear for a steady penetration of the Upper Guir country and the easternmost Atlas, increased the pressure on the new Sultan Moulay Hafid to deliver on his anti-French rhetoric. However, since entering Fes and attempting to form a Maghzan he had found himself completely unable to dispense with the hated Europeans, who were already deeply embedded in the economy and administration. The treasury was empty, and constructing a functioning regime without French finance and instructors was an impossibility. In the north-east, Lyautey patiently continued his ‘drilling’ operations in a great triangle of country beyond the Oued Moulouya where the sultan’s writ did not run; in the west, the French retained their ostensibly protective role on the Chaouia while keeping a wary eye on constant tribal warfare to the south of it.

  In Fes, the sultan was forced in December 1908 to accept the Act of Algeciras entrenching French and Spanish rights, and to acknowledge Morocco’s existing foreign debts. His proclamation of an end to jihad cost him dear in public credibility, and what little goodwill he retained was soon squandered by the medieval ruthlessness of his attempts to gather taxes for his mortgaged government. In this pillaging he was assisted enthusiastically by his king-maker Madani el Glaoui, whom the sultan had appointed grand vizier. Madani, in turn, appointed dozens of his own relatives to positions of local power, and his fiefdom, governed from a palace of royal magnificence in Marrakesh, soon extended over roughly one-third of Morocco. The sultan and El Glaoui were formally linked by a mutual exchange of daughters in marriage, and watched one another like cats.2

  Simultaneously, the sultan gave formal governorship over the hill country of the Djibala in the north-west to another regional strongman. The notorious sharifian robber baron Moulay Ahmad er Raisuli had built on the position he had inherited from a formidable father, proving his extraordinary strength of will in disaster as well as triumph. He had survived four unimaginable years chained in one of the regent Ba Ahmad’s dungeons, and after being amnestied by Abd el Aziz he had returned to the Djibala a crueller man, utterly determined to regain and surpass the influence and riches he had lost. By kidnap, extortion, pillage and murder, he succeeded; by 1908 Raisuli’s audacity, guile and violence had made him the inevitable choice for pasha to hold down the restless north-western hills – ostensibly in the name of Moulay Hafid, though his personal appetite for gold, power and women acknowledged few limits.3

  Raisuli treated Moulay Hafid ‘the Scurvy’ with more wary respect than he had shown the ineffectual Abd el Aziz, since the new sultan was an altogether more dangerous figure – a Koranic scholar, but also an unstable tyrant with a venomous temper. Moulay Hafid had, of course, been greedy for the throne, but his wish to save his country from the Europeans had also been sincere, and his frustration at finding himself powerless to do so – indeed, powerless to truly control any great matters of state – aggravated his worst traits. Resentful, avaricious and obsessively suspicious of treachery, he showed a sadistic cruelty in exercising those powers that he did have. He enjoyed supervising personally the work of his torturers and executioners, and in his lust to extort riches even high-born ladies of his kingdom were not safe from his dungeons.4

  ONE OF THE SULTAN’S ITCHING SORES was healed in the autumn of 1909. In the north-east, the claim of Bou Himara, alias El Rogi, to be a rightful heir was generally disbelieved after the spring of 1903, when he left Taza to establish a stronghold at Zeluan, a few miles south of the Spanish presidio of Melilla. There he ruled like any other warlord, and though he posed as the head of a rudimentary pseudo-government, this was never established with any thoroughness. After he more or less ceased offensive operations against Maghzan forces around Oujda in 1905 his flow of loot dwindled, and he needed new sources of income to pay his small standing army and to rent the loyalty of tribal chiefs. One solution was his sale, in the summer of 1907, of lead- and iron-mining concessions south-west of Melilla to French and German-financed Spanish companies, complete with the right to build a railway serving them. This invitation to foreign intruders was unpopular with the tribes, as was his simultaneous resort to traditional tax-gathering methods.

  In June 1908, El Rogi’s black general, Jilali Mull’Udhu, led one of these pillaging parties westwards into the Rif, thus provoking an unprecedented alliance of the whole Ait Waryaghar tribe (French, Beni Ouriaghel) and some neighbouring clans. In September, these Berber highlanders surrounded the Pretender’s cavalry on the Nekor river and shot them down as they floundered in the mud. In an attempt to rebuild his damaged prestige, El Rogi led about 1,000 men
towards Fes in July 1909; on 10 August they were beaten in the Oued Ouergha valley by a makeshift royal mehalla with French artillery instructors, and between the 15th and 18th of that month Moulay Hafid presided over the public torture and mutilation of the prisoners. On 22 August El Rogi himself was betrayed and captured, and taken back to Fes in a cage to be exhibited in a courtyard of the palace by the gloating sultan. For three weeks Moulay Hafid attempted to make the Pretender reveal the whereabouts of his rumoured wealth. Finally, on 13 September, the sultan had El Rogi thrown to the palace lions, but when they proved too lethargic to do more than mangle him he was finished off by a slave. In his time Bou Himara had condemned many other men to hideous deaths, but it was said that he endured his own long ordeal with great courage. His most lasting legacy to Morocco was the seeds of an entirely new war.5

  THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SPANISH harbour presidios on the Mediterranean coast – at Ceuta on the Straits of Gibraltar, and Melilla about 135 miles to the east – still retained something of the character of their medieval foundation (see Map 18). Each measuring only a few miles across, they had functioned for centuries as little more than sleepy gateways for trade, set down on the edge of almost unexplored tribal country, though their areas of settlement had been slightly enlarged after campaigns in 1859 – 60 and 1893 – 4 respectively. They were dependent on ships for intercommunication, and on Spain for almost every necessity – on occasion, even water had to be shipped over to Melilla from Malaga; they had no more capacity for independent survival than space-stations.

  After defeat at American hands in 1898 left Spain with only a few abject remnants of her once world-spanning empire, an ‘africanista’ faction urged the active exploitation of these footholds. At first, governments were inhibited by fear of foreign reactions, but Delcassé’s busy diplomacy, culminating in the agreement of October 1904 and the Act of Algeciras two years later, cleared the way for Spain to expand her territories throughout a broad northern coastal zone of Morocco. This vision – to call it a programme would wrongly imply some coherent plan – was divisive. Spain was poor, backward, inefficient, corrupt, and largely under the autocratic social control of a stagnant Church and aristocracy; but she nevertheless had a vocal class of educated liberals, served by a courageously active press. Exposed to their arguments, popular opinion, at first indifferent to the Moroccan enthusiasts, would become increasingly hostile, though this hostility had few effective outlets for political action.

  The arguments against a new colonial adventure were that an attempt to expand Spanish territory in Morocco would be a ruinously expensive graveyard for Spanish youth; that such a colony, cramped in the coastal mountains, could never become a net contributor to Spanish wealth; and that it would be a damaging distraction from the real work of reforming Spain herself for the twentieth century. Ranged against these voices were the Church, some commercial interests, conservative politicians and an element among their constituency, and the army. The Church’s attitude to the ‘Moors’ had hardly evolved over centuries, and reports of rich mineral resources in the Rif hills were enough to explain commercial enthusiasm. Conservative politicians welcomed the prospect of patriotic theatricals to distract the poor from the national failure to provide them with any opportunities for a better life. Many less cynical Spaniards were also hungry for some cause to revive national pride, and some even hoped for new lives as pioneers.

  The africanistas of the army, above all, saw their salvation in Morocco. Their dreary existence in home garrisons lacked the validation that the Rhineland frontier gave their French counterparts, and without Morocco they had no prospect of the active service that alone could bring prestige and worthwhile advancement. In a rigid and largely agricultural society governed by hereditary privilege and favouritism, the well-born who had any energy were denied careers in commerce or industry, and only the uniforms of God or the king were acceptable. But by now, few family estates could provide the necessary private income no matter how hard they squeezed their peasants, and there was a limit to the number of promotions to the rank of general that even the Spanish Army could justify. The collapse of the Cuban and Philippine garrisons in 1898 had revealed not only unreadiness and incompetence, but also shocking corruption (stores and armouries opened to meet the emergency were found to be empty, their contents sold off long ago for private gain). In the ranks, Spain’s illiterate peasant conscripts were neglected, abused, and exploited as personal labourers by absentee officers, too many of whom lacked any taste for serious work at their profession. The kingdom was too poor to fund a modern army, and the officer class too poor to live honestly on its pay or its private means; yet both were too proud to give up the outward trappings of a military prestige that now rested on little more than distant memory.

  Any healthy army needs well-founded reasons for pride. The Spanish Army in the early 1900s had none, and the africanistas saw a Moroccan adventure as the opportunity to build some. Many among Spain’s modern-minded educated class knew that the scandals of 1898 had not been addressed, and that the ministries charged with directing such an adventure were idle, dishonest and profoundly ignorant. Unfortunately for the junior ranks (and, eventually, for many French soldiers and légionnaires), too many of the africanistas seem to have been in denial about the systemic degeneracy of the army that they were proposing to lead into action against some of the most vigorous and skilful guerrilla fighters on earth. Given Spain’s own Napoleonic history, her generals should have known better.6

  THEIR VICTORY OVER EL ROGI in 1908 gave the Rifian tribes confidence, and in July 1909 they attacked engineers preparing the infrastructure for the iron mines leased out by the Pretender south of Melilla. General Marina y Vega demanded reinforcements, and the call-up of 20,000 Spanish reservists caused a general strike and violent riots in several Spanish cities, notably Barcelona. In the meantime, General Pintos himself and more than 1,000 of his men had been killed and 2,000 wounded on 27 July at Monte Gurugu, a feature that dominated the plain on the west of the peninsula. Reinforced to 30,000 men, it took Marina’s comandancia until the end of September to capture these heights, and by the time a truce was negotiated at the end of November the Spanish were admitting to 4,000 casualties.7 Over the next few years intermittent Spanish operations on the plains behind Melilla pushed a line of posts towards the edges of the mountains. The mines became productive, underpinning some other Spanish and German commercial activity, and a colonial administration was established. From 1911 local troops (Regulares) were raised to ease the burden on the Spanish Army, which in 1911 – 12 probed westwards as far as the Kert river.

  Simultaneously, Spanish troops landed at Larache on the Atlantic coast and marched inland to plant a base at Alcazarquivir (El Ksar el Kebir) in the south-west of the Djibala, from which troops were later intended to spread northwards to link up around Tetuan with others advancing southwards from Ceuta. The commander at Alcazarquivir was a blustering royal favourite named Lieutenant-Colonel Manuel Fernandez Silvestre, who in 1911 began a frustrating relationship with the Pasha Ahmad er Raisuli. Raisuli’s ambition was to become the khalifa of the whole Spanish zone and thus second only to the sultan, and Silvestre had to deal with him not only as a locally powerful warlord but also as the appointee of the Maghzan that was nominally recognized by both France and Spain. Naturally, Raisuli exploited both his armed strength and his official status to play off the Spanish against the Maghzan to his own advantage.8

  FAR TO THE SOUTH-EAST OF MELILLA, 1909 – 10 saw General Lyautey making quiet progress with forces a fraction the size of those commanded by General Marina. Given a free hand by Paris, he pushed his mobile groups west from Oujda and Berguent across the great triangle of hills and high plains east of the Oued Moulouya (see Map 18), building a post at Taourirt in June 1910 and patrolling as far west as Guercif on that river – nearly half way between the old 1845 Algerian border and Fes. (While the Quai d’Orsay still insisted on the fiction of Maghzan authority, in practice the old frontier was no
w a dead letter.) Further south, patrols from Boudenib pushed into the edges of the High Atlas, where the usual combination of force, diplomacy and trade achieved tentative agreements with some Berber clans.9

  Lyautey’s spearhead unit from Berguent was the 3rd (Mounted) Company/1st RE, led from March 1909 by Captain Paul Rollet. In this independent command, Rollet – by now a four-year veteran of the mule companies, who had served with 3rd (Mounted) far longer than any of his men – was beginning to make a name for himself. He hardly ever mounted his horse between leaving one post and approaching another, so he covered twice the distance on foot of any of his légionnaires. He marched forty paces ahead of his company, as if he could not wait to find out what was over the next ridge, and he preferred sandals to boots, earning himself the nickname ‘Captain Espadrilles’. He was as demanding of his men as he was of himself, quick to punish but as human as his rank allowed, and taking the trouble to get to know them personally. He had a sharp blue eye for every detail of organization, kit and procedure, and did not even leave it to his quartermaster-sergeant to haggle in remote markets when buying fresh provisions for his légionnaires. They liked his eccentricities and respected his strength, and they learned that he would defend them fearlessly against any perceived injustice. In March 1911, after his transfer to the western Moroccan front, Rollet disagreed loudly with the sentence of a court-martial on one of his men; although reprimanded for pursuing the matter as far as General Charles Moinier, then GOC Landing Corps, just two months later he wrote directly to the general to protest a similar judgement. Although himself a strict disciplinarian, he argued against the automatic and blind application of military law to his erring légionnaires. After all these years with them, he recognized their special character, and believed that only officers who knew them well were qualified to sit in judgement on them.10