Our Friends Beneath the Sands

  An incident in the Sud-Oranais in July 1910 exemplified what could happen when even the best légionnaires were badly treated. By this date 3rd (Mounted)/1st RE was led by Captain Met, and that month no fewer than eighteen of his légionnaires caused a scandal when they deserted en masse into Morocco. Captain Met was one of those rare officers who earn the nickname ‘Daddy’ from their men, and he was not personally leading that half of his company when the incident occurred. The subsequent enquiry was chaired by the 1st RE’s Colonel Girardot (Lyautey’s old classmate, who had served under him in Upper Tonkin during the panic of January 1896). He concluded that the half-company was tired out by continuous marching when a stupidly brutal squad sergeant accused the sick Private Weinrock of malingering and denied him several turns on muleback; the légionnaire fell behind, and when his comrades later discovered that he had been killed by Arabs they deserted.11

  The absentees were described as good soldiers, and the essential quality of this company was demonstrated on the 12th of the same month when its other half, led by Met in person, distinguished itself in an action on the east bank of the Moulouya near a spot named Moul el Bacha. It was operating in concert with Major Huguet d’Etaules’ VI/1st RE, but they were separated when both units were attacked by Beni Bou Yahi tribesmen from the west bank. The fight went on for six hours; the half-company lost more than 50 per cent casualties – 9 killed and 42 wounded, of whom 5 died before they reached Taourirt. It was now routine to give casualties a morphine injection at halts, but they still suffered horribly from the sun and the flies, and under the heavy load of two cacolets a mule often stumbled. One soldier who distinguished himself, Private 1st Class Haberthur, paid a terrible price for his courage: a bullet hit him in the right side of the head and passed through, destroying both his eyes, and another broke his thigh while he was being carried to the rear. Most unusually for a ranker who did not yet hold the Military Medal, Haberthur was admitted to the Legion of Honour, an award that attracted a good deal of publicity through the sale of poignant photographic postcards.12

  LATE IN 1910, GENERAL LYAUTEY’S COMMAND of Oran Division and his seven years on the frontier came to an end, by which time his troops dominated all the territory east of the lower Moulouya. His new appointment was to command 10th Army Corps at Rennes; he understood that war with Germany was inevitable, and he did not expect to progress any higher in the Army. He was well aware of the disdain in which the Metropolitan establishment held colonial soldiers lacking experience of handling large all-arms formations – like Wellington returning from India in 1805, Lyautey was a ‘sepoy general’. Nevertheless, he conscientiously put himself through a staff colonel’s course to sharpen up his theoretical skills, and he benefited from the fact that the new Chief of the General Staff in 1911 was General Joseph Joffre, whom he had known in Madagascar. The man who had collected up the hacked remains of Colonel Bonnier outside Timbuktu seventeen years earlier was hardly likely to see long colonial service as a disqualification for further employment.13

  IN THE WEST, THE SULTAN had forfeited all loyalty, not only by his cruel rapacity but also by his ever deeper forced involvement with the French. In March 1910 he had been obliged to conclude an agreement for a massive new loan, and the French would now extend their lien on national customs revenues from 60 to 100 per cent.14 From November 1910 a military mission under Major Emile Mangin, with a few French and Algerian officers and NCOs and a couple of British mercenaries, made limited progress in knocking the Maghzan cavalry and artillery into some sort of shape, but the unpaid and undisciplined infantry remained an intractable problem. Mangin discharged about 20 per cent of them and ensured that the remaining 4,000 actually received their meagre pay; this enraged the Moroccan officers who had previously intercepted it, but still did not go far towards persuading soldiers not to sell their rifles and desert, or keep them and turn bandit.15

  In the second week of March 1911, warriors of the Beni Mtir and other tribes, rebelling against the sultan and his hated Grand Vizier el Glaoui, began to gather in the hills to surround Fes. Major Mangin had led much of the Maghzan mehalla north to quell unrest among the Cherarga, and this force was now bogged down under incessant rain. Moulay Hafid had his guard of 450 black slaves, but the city and the Dar Debibagh kasbah 2 miles south were held by only 200 Maghzan infantry and some 2,000 completely unreliable tribal levies; any defence would depend heavily on the artillery led by French and Algerian officers. A sortie to clear the approaches failed on 26 March, after which food prices began to rise in the city. On 2 April, about 3,000 men attacked Dar Debibagh and, although they were driven off by the artillery, by 11 April many of the levies defending that camp had defected to the Beni Mtir taking 1,200 Gras rifles with them.

  Leaving the mehalla under the command of Major Brémond, Emile Mangin returned to Fes, where the European population were in fear for their lives, and the French consul Henri Gaillard was cabling Paris to appeal for a relief column to be sent from General Moinier’s command on the Chaouia.16 Fes might not be Morocco’s heart, but it has long been its brain, and the French could no longer resist its magnetic pull. An occupation of the capital would violate the limits placed on French activity by the Act of Algeciras and would provoke Germany, Spain and the French Left; but in Paris the crisis coincided with the fall early in March of one of several administrations led by Aristide Briand, and its brief succession by that of Ernest Monis. At this moment of hesitation, the influence of Eugène Étienne’s colonial parliamentary group was decisive; on 23 April, General Moinier was ordered to mount a relief column for Fes, and the War Ministry decided to reinforce the French corps in Morocco to 22,000. Brémond’s muddy column of Maghzan troops arrived back in Fes on 26 April; they were of uncertain temper and short of ammunition, but they at least provided a deterrent for the city mob, whose hostility to Moulay Hafid frightened him into considering fleeing the city in disguise. (Yet another of his brothers, Moulay Zain el Abadin, was proclaimed as sultan at nearby Meknes on 19 April, and at Sefrou on 2 May). The reinforcement also allowed Emile Mangin to move his artillery up to the sixteenth-century Saadian forts of Bordj Nord and Sud on the hills immediately overlooking Fes.

  It took Moinier two weeks to assemble a relief column and the necessarily large supply train from the troops dispersed around the Chaouia, hampered as he was by heavy spring rains and frequent attacks on columns and camps by Beni Hassen and Zimmur tribesmen. The first brigade under Colonel Brulard got under way from Kenitra on the coast on 11 May, but the whole 120-odd miles could not be covered in one push. Brulard had to establish a staging post at Lalla Ito, where he was joined by a second force under General Dalbiez with a camel convoy; this combined total of 5,700 men was then followed at a distance by the main supply train, escorted by Colonel Henri Gouraud’s 1,800-strong brigade. The Legion, with only one battalion and a mounted company in western Morocco at this time, was represented by two companies from I/2nd RE in a mixed battalion with Zouaves, and by Captain Rollet’s new command, 3rd (Mounted)/2nd RE. The mule company saw action at Lalla Ito on 13 – 15 May, after which large-scale tribal harassing attacks ceased.17

  The Beni Mtir made attacks on the outer entrenchments at Fes on 11 May and again on the 18th, but were repulsed without difficulty. The ‘first siege of Fes’ ended on 21 May when Moinier’s leading troops camped between the city and Dar Debibagh, and the tribes dispersed. Germany, Spain and the French Left were already loud in their criticism of the French government’s violation of the provisions of the Act of Algeciras.18

  IN THE EAST, MEANWHILE, on 19 April 1911 the Oran Division commander General Toutée was ordered to divert the attention of any tribes tempted to head through the unpenetrated ‘Taza gap’ for Fes by sending out two columns across the high plains of the Moulouya front. The columns were to link up at Debdou about 15 miles east of the Moulouya, and from there General Girardot was to swing west towards the river. Major Gerst’s VI/1st RE left Sidi bel Abbès by train for Oujda, where they disembarked a
nd made an 90-mile march south-westwards to reach Merada, where a new post was being built on the east bank of the Moulouya a few miles north-east of Guercif (see Map 11). Soon afterwards the 6th Battalion departed ‘on column’, together with III/ and part of V/1st RE, the usual screen of cavalry and a battery of guns. After clashes with Beni Ouarain war parties on 9 and 12 May, the advance continued into unknown country, southwards across the dry plain of Tafrata; this was open steppe, belonging to no tribe but ranged by many as their flocks and tents followed the seasons. On the 14th the column linked up at Debdou, about 25 miles south-east of Guercif, with the other that had marched west from Berguent, and they occupied the valley without resistance.19

  The last stage of the march south from Guercif was a climb up to a cleft in a line of brown hills; once through it, the dusty column swung right around a shoulder and down into a steep valley between two ridges. After the baking plains, Debdou was a little pocket of paradise; when Charles de Foucauld passed this way in 1885 he described it as ‘delicious’. It was hidden between one ridge rising 1,000 feet on the north-west, and almost sheer cliffs climbing nearly twice as high on the south-east, crowned with woods. From the mouth of the valley the légionnaires marched in through grainfields towards the large village of pink-washed houses spread among green gardens along the banks of the Oued Debdou. From the high plateau to the south, silver waterfalls bounced down to feed the stream, through olive groves and steep orchards of figs, peaches and grenadines. Shortly before this operation, another traveller described the scene in terms of some glen in the Alps or even the Auvergne, and it must have lifted the hearts of the weary légionnaires as they trudged down into its cool shade.

  At its southern end, the Debdou valley was walled off from that of the Oued Beni Riis by a steep transverse ridge forming a blunt fishtail shape of yellow rock walls striped with green creepers, rising to at least 1,500 feet. The villages scattered over the plateau above Debdou were inhabited by people who called themselves the Ahl Debdou but were, in fact, of very mixed origins, including descendants of Jewish refugees from medieval Spain. Among Muslims, this remote country had a reputation for lawlessness and heresy.20

  At dawn on 15 May three scouting parties, each in half-company strength, left the shadowed camp in the valley and clambered up into the first sunlight, each with an artillery officer to make notes of the ‘going’ for guns in different directions; they were to return and report by noon. Two parties returned before the appointed time, but by midday the two platoons from 22nd Company, VI/1st RE had not. The company commander, Captain Labordette – with Lieutenant Fradet, artillery Lieutenant Drouin, 72 rankers and a guide – had left the Debdou gorge by one of the corners of its southern ‘fishtail’; this steep climb led to a promising-looking track across the plain showing traces of camel caravans coming up from the south, which Labordette was to explore. The patrol had been watched through binoculars from the camp until about 7.30am, when it disappeared over the lip; soon afterwards thick fog closed in, and at noon this prevented anyone seeing if Labordette was already climbing down again on his way back. This delay had begun to cause some unease when, at 12.30pm, Lieutenant Drouin of the artillery came in with a dozen of the missing legionnaires.

  Captain Labordette had sent them back at about 8.30am when he reached the limit of the reconnaissance that he had been ordered to make. Drouin reported to General Girardot that Labordette had decided to reconnoitre a small village – Alouana – situated at the bottom of a bowl of hills below a pass. Details are hard to confirm, but a sketch-map has an inked addition placing Alouana (with rather unconvincing confidence) in the middle of an otherwise blank space a few miles north of the Debdou valley. Lieutenant Drouin reported that the company commander had claimed to see suspicious movements around Alouana before the fog closed in; leaving a rearguard up in the pass, he had climbed down the eastern slope into the bowl, and although the fog had blinded the rearguard the sound of firing had been heard.

  A photograph taken soon after the event shows that Alouana was a far less enticing glen than Debdou; the nearer wall of the treeless bowl is steep (about 40 degrees), rocky, and patchily overgrown with scrub. The hamlet was on one of several features rising from the uneven valley floor to the west, which was some hundreds of feet below the surrounding steppe. Official accounts of the actions of dead officers invariably err on the side of tactful restraint, but Labordette has been described frankly in a Legion source as ‘conscientious to the point of rashness’, and soldiers have much shorter words to convey this idea. What had happened was later worked out from the reports of survivors, who included the twice-wounded Lieutenant Fradet.

  THE COMPANY COMMANDER had sent back a half-squad to escort Drouin with his report; left perhaps a squad and a half on the crest of the pass; and then led his remaining 36 men down the steep eastern slope into the bowl. Accompanied by half of this platoon, he left Fradet with the other squad about 500 yards short of the village, and pushed on towards a group of riders and men on foot who were visible around the huts. As he approached them, Labordette came under fire.

  He turned his men about to fall back on Fradet’s squad, but they were soon being fired upon from the heights behind them and on both sides. Two men were wounded; thus burdened, they continued their retreat up the difficult, broken slopes, under covering fire from Fradet’s légionnaires. The net closed around the platoon inexorably, as warriors surged up all over the slopes behind the cover of rocks and bushes. Fradet’s men retreated some way ahead of Labordette’s; progress was difficult up a long, steep, uneven slope not only studded with rocks and thornbushes but also veiled in fog. Soon a choice had to be faced: either to abandon their wounded to a certainly horrible fate and clamber up the slopes more quickly; or to form a circle around the casualties and defend them to the end. Lieutenant Fradet, who had almost reached the crest that would have saved his squad, chose the second option: they turned and went back down the slope into the murk.

  Blinded by ever-thickening fog, they followed shouts heard at intervals in the gunfire that echoed confusingly from all directions, and managed to link up with their comrades low on the slope. They tried to climb out again carrying the wounded and dead; then Captain Labordette was hit full in the chest. As losses mounted it became clear that they had no chance of reaching the lip, since there were now more wounded than fit men to drag them. A slow calvary now began; Fradet regrouped the survivors half way up, and kept firing whenever a tribesman was spotted. If the fog hindered them it also gave some concealment from the enemy, but towards noon – when their ordeal had already lasted perhaps three hours – the fog lifted. The warriors shouted taunts as they fired, and some rolled rocks down at the dwindling platoon grouped around their lieutenant and their casualties.

  MEANWHILE, AT DEBDOU CAMP, the rest of VI/1st RE were soon filing up the precarious path out of the tip of the ‘fishtail’ gorge. They were followed (with huge difficulty) by a section of two guns, but one piece soon had to be left behind so that the gunners could concentrate on manhandling the other up the steep track, while légionnaires carried shells on their backs. On their way across the steppe they ran into the retreating rearguard that Labordette had left that morning up on the pass. At the precise moment when the relief force had finally dragged the mountain gun to the rim of the slope above Alouana, the sound of firing below them ceased. The gunners soon got their piece into action; the warriors fell back from the slopes and gulleys towards their huts, but the effect of the hasty shellfire was certainly more psychological than physical.

  Now the search for the dead and the survivors could begin, but before the légionnaires could clamber down to the scene of the fight the fog closed in again even more thickly, and persisted. When night fell the darkness added to the difficulties of finding and bringing up casualties through the chaos of boulders and thorn-scrub, and there was no alternative but to set up a new defensive perimeter themselves around the area where the dead and wounded had been gathered. They passed a wretch
ed night, in visibility reduced to a few yards so that the least movement around the hillside was difficult. To make things worse, a fine, soaking rain began to fall, and at this altitude – about 5,000 feet – the night was chill; the tense silence was broken by the groans of the wounded, who could be given only the most rudimentary care and shelter.

  When dawn finally broke, the fog still hung about the slopes. Part of V/1st RE arrived from Debdou with mule cacolets, but it was only at about 8am that the search could be resumed, after threatening moves by the Moroccans had been discouraged with a few cannon shots and rifle volleys. All day the dreary task continued; by late in the afternoon of 16 May, 29 corpses had been dragged up the slope, including those of Captain Labordette and Sergeant-Major Tonot. Just 7 wounded had been recovered alive, 2 of them very seriously hurt, and one man was never found at all. When the bodies of Corporal Bréval and Private Petersen were moved it was discovered that, when mortally wounded, they had taken the bolts out of their Lebels and tried to hide them, in the hope of denying usable rifles to their killers. (The rifle bolts were sent back to Sidi bel Abbès, to be preserved in the Salle d’Honneur of the 1er Régiment Étranger).21

  AROUND FES AND MEKNES the arrival of General Moinier’s troops had not yet entirely cooled the ardour of the rebels, but a botched Beni Mtir attack on the camp at Dar Debibagh on the night of 4 June did not prevent the departure of 6,000 men the next day for Meknes, where the claimant Moulay Zain surrendered after a brief and surgical firepower demonstration on 8 June. The tribal chiefs began coming in to seek the aman, the muezzin of the uniquely influential Moulay Idriss mosque announced that the French posed no threat to Islam, and the people of Fes (Fassis) were as eager as ever to do business. Major Ibos, a Colonial officer who wrote as ‘Pierre Khorat’, describes the scene vividly.