Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  In the camps on the dusty plateau fringed by the blue-green woods of Dar Debibagh, Jewish pedlars from the Mellah ghetto offered bundled firewood and baskets of fruit, barley-bread and potatoes, quickly finding customers among men who had been on hard tack for three weeks – as did more eyecatching figures who sashayed around the tent-lines offering their services as washerwomen. In the mansions, courtyards and gardens around the sultan’s palace in the ‘new city’ of Fes el Djedid harassed staff officers supervised the installation of headquarters, commissariat stores and the artillery park. Those with more leisure strolled, revolver at hip, in the cool shade of the Boujeloud gardens connecting Fes el Djedid with the ancient walled medina of Fes el Bali, around the foot of whose crumbling towers and ramparts ‘a necklace of dead camels and horses’ rotted peacefully in the sun, stinking.

  Any orderly sent into the old city’s maze of crowded souks on a chore for his officer was wise to hire one of the eager guides, but off-duty Colonials and légionnaires preferred to explore more casually with their mates. Inside the convoluted labyrinth of narrow alleys, archways and flights of steps, barred with sunlight and shade from the overhead mats, French soldiers with rifles slung and cork helmets at a jaunty angle tried to look worldly as they examined local handiwork and cheap European trash – embroidered slippers, gimcrack daggers, dubious postcards, and flasks of rosewater to combat the nauseating wafts from the sewers. Wobbling tables constricted their passage past hastily painted signs – ‘Café du Commerce’, ‘Rendezvous des Bons Enfants’ – where soldiers dallied, unwisely sampling various local liquids, while urchins gazed shyly at them or plucked boldly at their knees piping demands for baksheesh. Through this purposeful chaos of buying and selling, donkeys, mules, horses, even camels somehow threaded themselves along the lanes, their bulging loads forcing the crowds against the walls; as they picked their way past they left steaming trails of dung on the cobbles, to tempt the flies away from the butchers’ purple offerings. Above the hubbub of voices the call to prayer echoed from the minarets of the great Kairaouine and the city’s other mosques, water-pedlars announced their arrival by tinkling their strings of metal cups, jewellers tapped at chiselled silver, and smiths hammered sickles for the coming harvest .22

  The old city was not exclusively a quarter for the poor and industrious; it had grown organically, and the pinched alleyways had closed in to embrace a number of mosques, medersas and lordly town-houses. The master of one of these, near the southern Bab el Hedid gate, was unexpectedly prevented from exploring a lucrative relationship with General Moinier. In May 1911, the sultan was happy to agree with a French suggestion that Grand Vizier Madani el Glaoui’s dismissal would calm the tribes he had tormented. Madani and his many relatives were stripped of all Maghzan authority and much of their property north of the Atlas, and when word of their disgrace spread, they had to fight even to defend their territory in the mountains.23

  A SECOND AND MORE SERIOUS Franco-German crisis flared up in July 1911 when the Imperial Navy gunboat Panther anchored at the Atlantic port of Agadir, supposedly to reassure German merchants installed there. The Wilhelmstrasse considered that France’s advance on and continuing occupation of Fes had torn up the Act of Algeciras, and in return demanded German control of the Sous – the south-western region around Agadir. Confronted with a major international incident, General Joffre gave President Armand Fallières a gloomily realistic assessment of the Army’s readiness for war, and for five months, operations in western Morocco were put strictly on hold. Since safe corridors from Fes and Meknes to the Atlantic coast had not yet been secured, many troops were dispersed in small outposts along these routes, vulnerable and hard to resupply.24

  At Fes, Major Ibos describes 6,000 bored soldiers with 3,600 animals enduring the sirocco in stupefyingly hot, dusty camps with bad water and no sanitation. By mid-June half the horses and mules were already dead or sick; their dung and corpses bred a biblical plague of flies, and in three weeks a hospital with only 30 beds and 2 doctors took in 140 dysentery, malaria and typhoid cases. No food convoys arrived for five weeks, and the Fassi merchants grew uncooperative, seeing French inactivity in the face of public German threats as a sign of weakness. The urgent need to improve General Moinier’s communications with the outside world motivated the Engineers to perform prodigies of ingenuity in setting up a wireless station at Dar Debibagh: four flimsy pylons were improvised from wooden ladders lashed end to end, and strung with ‘an immense Aeolian harp’ of wires, while officers struggled with a transmitter, receiver and petrol generator knocked about during their transport on camel-back.25

  Major Ibos’ assessment of the different types of troops present is interesting, if biased by the anchor on his képi. He is prickly about the prejudices of the Africa Army, which affected to believe that Colonials were fit only for a soft life of booze, opium and native porters in balmy tropical climates. However, his complaint that the staff made no distinction in the demands they made on white or brown soldiers does suggest that the Colonials were not as hardened as the Legion, and he admits that after three months some of his companies with a starting strength of 180 had been reduced to half that by illness and exhaustion. He writes approvingly of the cheerful willingness of the small contingent of Senegalese Skirmishers included in the expedition, though admitting that their straggling tail of families appalled Africa Army officers. Ibos praises the Algerian Skirmishers for their marching, bravery, and endurance of harsh conditions, but criticizes their lack of ‘ingenuity, shrewdness and application . . . You look among them in vain for medical orderlies, clerks, storemen, skilled artisans in service units’.26

  The token contingent of Zouaves is dismissed, but Ibos gives more space to the battalion-and-a-half of the Legion who were now present (between Fes and Meknes VI/2nd RE had joined the two companies from the 1st Battalion).27 His confirmation of their reputation by this date is interesting, and – given the traditional rivalry – he is grudgingly generous:There is nothing to say about the Legion that one does not know already; these brave soldiers give us excellent service. Without sharing the snobbery of those who consider them the indisputable elite of the French Army, any impartial observer must recognize that they are, for the Moroccan episode, the most precious European element of the troops from Algeria. They have an intense esprit-de-corps, and the universal handiness of men who have seen and remembered much. In a short time any Legion detachment left to itself far from the telegraph, the theoretical plans or the instructions of superior authorities will make a rural home spring from the earth, comfortable and well run. The fetishistic respect paid to ‘African’ traditions often gives these the angular look of heavily fortified works, but the kitchen garden takes up considerable space; a flock of livestock is assembled with care . . . because a varied diet is the best protection for European troops in exotic countries. Around the post . . . the officers soon draw up a summary map of the region. The soldiers go quietly about their rural activities, waiting for the return of days of glory, when the herdsman, gardener, carpenter, mason and surveyor of roads will take up their rifles again and go looking – in a ravine, beyond a stream, at the foot of a wall – for the bullet that will end their obscure and changeable existence.28

  A Franco-German agreement of 4 November 1911 finally purchased France a free hand in Morocco, in exchange for territories in the Congo and Cameroons and some guarantees for German business interests. France heaved a collective sigh of relief, and a new warmth began to be detectable in public attitudes towards the Army.29 In Morocco, the limitations on military activity were lifted too late in the season for major operations in the hills, and Moinier’s manpower was still being drained by the demands of his lines of communication. Nevertheless, in January 1912 a brigade including the newly arrived I/1st RE was sent to drive back into the Middle Atlas hills tribesmen led by a chief named Sidi Raho, who had come down to attack the post at Sefrou south-east of Fes.30

  THE IMPOSITION OF A FULL FRENCH PROTECTORATE became in
evitable on 12 March 1912 when the Franco-German accord was ratified in Paris, and on 30 March the Treaty of Fes was signed in the courtyard of the Moroccan war minister’s Dar Menebhi mansion. Its declared purpose was ‘to establish in Morocco a fitting government based on internal order and general security’, and Article 1 was brutally clear about which party would be making the decisions:The government of the French Republic and His Majesty the Sultan are agreed to institute in Morocco a new regime comprising the administrative, judicial, scholarly, economic, financial and military reforms that the French government judges it useful to introduce on Moroccan territory.

  The utter capitulation of Sultan Moulay Abd el Hafid enraged his subjects, and within a matter of weeks Fes would once again be under siege. This time légionnaires would be inside the walls, protecting France’s new proconsul and sole intermediary: Commissioner Resident-General Hubert Lyautey.31

  14.

  The Immaculate Raiment

  1912 – 14

  It has often been said that for colonization or intervention in a foreign country to be successful, it must be popular at home . . . or else the political designs that underlie the policy must be clothed or concealed in the immaculate raiment of philanthropic intention. If both can be arranged for, so much the better.

  Walter Harris1

  WHILE THE MOROCCAN PROTECTORATE was certainly popular with France’s colonial enthusiasts, no time was lost in reducing its military presence at Fes. General Moinier prepared to march three-quarters of his force back to Rabat and the Chaouia, and the existing military mission was immediately transformed into a skeleton staff for a new ‘Sharifian Army’ to be commanded by General Brulard (late of the 2nd Foreign). The French minister at Tangier, Eugène Regnault, arrived to take over civilian control on behalf of the Quai d’Orsay, installing himself in the former palace of the grand vizier.2

  The ancient city of Fes was cupped between hills, its gently crumbling walls and towers partly surrounding a jaggedly irregular shape vaguely like two pears joined at the stalks (see Map 17). The greater part of some 90,000 Fassis lived in the ‘pear’ at the north-east, where teeming Fes el Bali filled the shallow valley of the Oued Fes, which meandered through and under the streets in a straitjacket of bridges and tunnels. The narrower south-western neck between the ‘pears’ was formed by the Boujeloud gardens, which linked Fes el Bali to the higher and more spacious medieval royal quarter of Fes el Djedid. There, clustered around the magnificence of the sultan’s palace, the silent white or blue facades and high grilled windows of the mansions of the wealthy hid green riad courtyards, where coolness was trapped inside a secret world of tiled fountains, shady citrus trees, roses and birdsong. Immediately south of the palace (convenient for royal extortion, and providing a distraction for any rebellious mob pouring up from the warren below) was the large Mellah ghetto. The curtain walls of the twin city did not form a complete circuit embracing Fes el Djedid, so the European consulates and the Auvert hospital were installed in the more defensible southern quarters near the Bab el Hedid gate.

  A belt of produce gardens and olive groves surrounded the city on most sides. To the north-east, the dark wave of trees petered out up the slopes of the 2,600-foot Djebel Zalagh, whose sawtooth ridge dominated the skyline. Closer to the north, facing the Bab el Guissa gate, a yellow cliff was pock-marked with the cave mouths of looted Merenid tombs. From the bald summit above them, the old fort now called Bordj Nord glared down on the medina, built not to defend it but to hold it in subjection; its partner, Bordj Sud, brooded on a less dramatic height facing the southern walls. To the north-west, in the gardens outside the conjoined ‘pearstalks’, the Kasbah Cherada housed Maghzan troops. To the south of Fes el Djedid the ground fell away and rose again over about 2 miles, to the partly wooded plateau of Dar Debibagh.3

  BY 17 APRIL 1912, General Moinier and all but about 1,500 French troops had left for the coast; while others garrisoned Meknes and Sefrou, the only complete infantry unit at Fes was Major Philipot’s battalion of Algerian Skirmishers in the Dar Debibagh camp with some Spahis, and only odds and ends were still occupying the quarters taken over by the French within the city. That day Moulay Hafid was due to leave his seething capital; but in the early afternoon, before the sultan could depart, a mutiny broke out at Kasbah Cherada.

  Various reforms, real or rumoured, ignited the discontent that had been encouraged by some of the Moroccan officers (each battalion-size tabor had only one French officer and four NCOs). Some askar helped their own instructors to escape to Dar Debibagh, but they hunted down any Frenchmen they did not know. The city mob joined the mutineers, raging through the streets and breaking into houses; they murdered any white men they could catch, and then – with awful inevitability – ransacked the Mellah and massacred several dozen Jews. With the soldiers he had available and some armed civilians, General Brulard organized a perimeter among the occupied buildings inside the Bab el Hedid. Philipot’s turcos were sent down to reinforce this, but they took about 100 casualties from mutineers firing from the southern wall of the Mellah as they passed by on the way to the Bab el Hedid. Major Fellert arrived from Sefrou and took guns up to Bordj Sud, and a few carefully aimed shells into the rebel-held quarters enabled the perimeter to hold out through the night. On 18 April a Legion battalion arrived after a forced march from Meknes, and later that day patrols pushed out from the perimeter to clear the nearer alleys of the medina.4

  On 20 April, General Moinier arrived back at Fes; alerted on his way to Rabat, he had turned most of his column around and scraped up outpost garrisons as he came, finally arriving with the equivalent of five-plus infantry battalions, three squadrons and several batteries – about 3,000 men. Rumours of the rising were spreading fast in this populous region, and there were reports of tribesmen converging on the city. Moinier put troops on the hills to north and south, and began to mete out revenge to mutineers and Fassis with firing squads, curfews, fines and forced labour. He quarrelled bitterly with Eugène Regnault over the responsibility for the rising and the handling of its aftermath; Moinier cabled Paris for authority to declare a state of siege and take sole powers, but permission did not arrive until 26 April. In the meantime, he sent General Brulard and Major Girodon of the 2nd Foreign with small columns to push tribemen back from the eastern approaches. He achieved a temporary local stalemate, but outside Fes the facade of the French protectorate over Moulay Hafid’s government was unsustainable, and the sultan himself thought only of escape. The ‘immaculate raiment’ was in urgent need of expert needlework, and such a task was far beyond Charles Moinier’s blunt fingers.5

  IN PARIS, THE FOREIGN MINISTRY was convinced that a military resident-general for Morocco, with full unified powers on the Galliéni model, was essential. Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré had kept the foreign portfolio for himself, and the Quai d’Orsay and Rue Dominique were less distant than under previous administrations. His war minister was the moderate Alexandre Millerand; the Panther crisis had sobered many minds, and Millerand was beginning to repair some of the damage done to the Army during the Combes – Clemenceau years (in January 1912 his first act had been to order the destruction of dossiers on officers’ political and religious opinions). There was only one obvious choice for such a complex and challenging task as the creation and protection of a new Moroccan regime: a cabinet meeting on 27 April endorsed Poincaré’s submission of General Lyautey’s name, and the following day President Fallières formally announced the appointment. With the promise of early reinforcements from France, Algeria and Senegal to bring the 18,000 French troops west of the Atlas up to 32,000, the new proconsul sailed for Algiers (on a warship aptly named Jules Ferry).6

  There he conferred with Oran Division and Ain Sefra Subdivision over the approach to be adopted in eastern Morocco, where General Alix (a former commander of 2nd Foreign) was discouraged from any major initiatives while Lyautey established a grip on the situation in the west of the country.7 Arriving at a tense Casablanca on 13 May, he subme
rged himself in briefings; some of the advice he received was defeatist, some stupidly bloodthirsty, but such contradictions were nothing new to him. He needed an intelligent deputy with local experience to escort him to Rabat, Meknes and Fes, and found him in Colonel Henri Gouraud of the Colonial Infantry, with whom he struck up an immediate rapport. At 44 years old, the tall, dark-bearded Gouraud was the youngest colonel in the French Army, and a man of some reputation. As a captain in West Africa in 1898 he had been lucky enough to capture Samory, the last serious leader of resistance to French conquest, and thereafter he had become a favourite of Étienne’s colonial circle. After command of one of the Fes relief brigades in April 1911, he was now rather under-employed at Casablanca, and was happy to march up-country with Lyautey and two battalions of Algerians. The corridor of little posts up which they rode struck Lyautey as being as fragile as a taut wire.8

  LYAUTEY’S ARRIVAL IN FES ON 24 MAY 1912 coincided with an immediate crisis; most of the Sharifian Army troops had necessarily been disarmed, and a renewed siege by dissident tribesmen closed around the capital just hours after Lyautey rode in. About 400 mutineers had escaped into the hills, the Beni Mtir were swarming up from the south, and another loose coalition had been led west from the ‘Taza gap’ by a pious sharif named Si Mohammed el Hajjami. Altogether, about 15,000 warriors threatened the eastern arc of the walls, from the Bab el Guissa in the north to the Bab Ftouh in the south-east, with plenty of dead ground to mask any assault. Inside the city, General Moinier and Ambassador Regnault were not on speaking terms; the former predicted disaster and urged the harshest measures, the latter was desperate to regain civilian control. The streets were unsafe, and the general’s almost indiscriminate reprisals had for once given the Fassis good reason for the fickleness for which they were already notorious. The chieftains in the hills had sent in word that the French troops were their only targets, and some city fathers were certainly negotiating with them. The walls were in ruins at many points, and too encumbered by centuries of creeping house-building to offer a practical perimeter for Moinier’s 4,000-strong garrison, while the broad valley between the city and his southern outwork of Dar Debibagh made immediate interventions from that direction chancy.