Lyautey had been enthusiastic about the possibilities of aircraft from the first (perhaps encouraged by his old mentor Galliéni, who had embarrassed more conventional generals by using a reconnaissance plane to help him tear up the script for a summer manoeuvre in France). The 1st Aeronautical Group was sent out to Casablanca on 25 February 1912 with four Bleriots, soon increased to six; by May, Lyautey was even asking Paris for bombs, but the technology did not yet exist. During a programme of familiarization flights, relay stages were planned out and punctuated with emergency landing strips and fuel depots. The first true military mission was flown by Lieutenants Do Huu Vi and Van den Vaéro on 17 August, when they scouted for Colonel Robillot’s column south of Fes. In November, a second section was installed on the eastern front at Oujda with five pilots and Deperdussin two-seaters, flying their first missions in January 1913. The pilots made liaison and reconnaissance flights for ground columns, though with some difficulty. In the heat of summer the 80-horsepower Bleriot could not get above 4,600 feet and air conditions were dangerous, with a great deal of turbulence; dust was constantly penetrating the engines and fuel feed, and engines overheated. Since the cockpit was above the wings, the downwards visibility was very poor, and it was difficult to navigate for lack of mapped landmarks. Frustrated by their lack of weapons, the airmen scribbled hasty sketch-maps and dropped them to ground troops in weighted bags to warn columns of Moroccan concentrations or ambushes ahead of them .27
SULTAN MOULAY YOUSSEF was a French puppet, but he at least played his part convincingly, being intelligent, honest, pious and dignified (and thus a shining improvement on Moulay Hafid). Behind the flimsy screen of the imperial parasol, Lyautey would rebuild the machinery of the Maghzan, playing sympathetically to traditional Moroccan instincts while restricting its responsibilities almost entirely to religious affairs. While ultimately powerless in occupied Morocco, the aristocratic and religious elites were never humiliated, and the reassuring rhythms of Islamic tradition were maintained.
Throughout his period of office (1912 – 25) Lyautey would wield complete authority as a combination of prime minister, foreign minister, war minister, and commander-in-chief of French and Maghzan troops. He created a French administration answerable directly to him, with the emphasis balanced between security, civil government, finance and public works. The activity of the civil departments was generally both honest and constructive. Morocco owes the survival of her ancient cities to Lyautey’s insistence that new French building was to adjoin and not ‘redevelop’ them, and French industrial, commercial and agricultural exploitation of Moroccan resources was targeted and controlled. Lyautey believed in giving both Moroccans and Frenchmen freedom from stifling bureaucracy, but the relatively few colons in Morocco would be curbed in ways unknown in Algeria – most basically, in that they never enjoyed any degree of self-government or political authority over Moroccan communities.
In practice ‘indirect’ government, even through hand-picked Moroccan proxies, never really worked; the cultural gulf was simply too wide, and at every level the impatient French soon snatched at the steering-wheel. Nevertheless, as colonial regimes go, Lyautey’s achievement was respectable, and it certainly stands as a reproof to the French record in Algeria. While his envious admiration of the British Empire had been a thread running through his correspondence since the 1890s, in fact Britain’s Edwardian imperium offers no example of an individual military officer comparable to Lyautey in his years of power. It is tempting to reach back 1,900 years for a comparison, to the great military governors of first- and second-century Roman provinces. Like Agricola in Britain, in Morocco the decisive figure of Lyautey combined virtually unhampered military command with control of civil administration, diplomacy and political initiatives. In theory such a concentration of responsibility and power was, of course, potentially disastrous; Morocco was lucky that Hubert Lyautey was not open to bribery and was exceptionally hard-working.
The Commissioner Resident-General gathered around him a trusted staff and able regional commanders: Ernest Blondlat at Rabat, Henri Gouraud at Fes, Paul Henrys at Meknes, Jean Brulard at Marrakesh and Maurice Baumgarten at Oujda. At local level the eyes, ears and hands of the Protectorate in the military regions of the country were the officers of the Intelligence Service, soon renamed once again the Native Affairs Service. This handful of Army district officers – there were only 194 of them in 1913 – shouldered very wide-ranging responsibilities, and Lyautey sought to apply his long-time ideal of the ‘perfect colonial type’ in their selection (he used the English phrase ‘the right man in the right place’). Inevitably, however, such qualities were not common; many officers were both young and ambitious, and their lack of local experience led to early misjudgements.
Lyautey constantly stressed the need for, and generally achieved, constructive teamwork between military and civil officials, and made slow but real progress in improving the quality of the latter. He recruited the best men from across the empire to head his civil departments, and modelled competitive examinations and specialized training on the British system – insisting, crucially, that the functionaries learn Arabic. He had no intention of saddling his new realm with the sort of lazy, ignorant third-raters who had so repelled him in Indochina. (In the end, however, the French administration in Morocco would still employ three times as many men as governed British India, which had forty times Morocco’s population.)28
Naturally, all of the above applied only to those areas of the country that the French were able physically to control. Despite the fact that his old ally Eugène Étienne was the French war minister throughout 1913, there were always critics – both in Morocco and at home – who were impatient with Lyautey’s necessarily deliberate pace of advance. Some were colonels and generals in love with French firepower, who had no sympathy with his doctrine of careful political preparation for each new military step; others were civilians who simply did not grasp that Lyautey facedtwo Moroccos: the one that we occupy, which is militarily weak and governed by a Maghzan without strength or prestige – and the other, much more important, which comprises the Berber masses who are deeply agitated, fanaticized and militarily strong, and who stand united against us under influences beyond our control.29
The military situation in late 1912 is perhaps best sketched by returning to the analogy of an as – yet incomplete archway being built to surround the untamed and mountainous centre of Morocco. The arch’s western and eastern pillars were being constructed slowly from the top down, southwards from Fes and Oujda; the lintel would have to wait a couple of years, and it would be only in the 1920s that the pillars would reach a common southern base, and could be thickened inwards to extend control into the tangled mass of the Middle Atlas. For reasons of both resources and policy, the southern foundations of the arch in and south of the High Atlas had to be provided by the client Moroccan lords, of whom the Glaoua brothers would soon become unchallengeably the most powerful. Leaving the pacification of the south to them, ostensibly in the name of the Maghzan, meant, unavoidably, turning a blind eye to the continuation of traditional medieval brutalities that sickened those French liaison officers who witnessed them.30 The French were quite powerless to curb these excesses, since even to attempt to occupy and govern this vast wilderness themselves would have been far beyond their resources. More importantly, this demonstration of French/Muslim partnership prevented tribal resistance being promoted convincingly as a straightforward anti-Christian jihad.31
AMONG THE MILITARILY IMPATIENT in the western pillar of operations were Charles Mangin and two subordinate officers, Colonels Reibell and Gueydon de Dives, any one of whom Lyautey might have had in mind when he wrote ‘One must be wary of men who come to the colonies to refight Austerlitz; they are badly prepared for the patient, thankless and obscure tasks which make up the daily duties – the only useful ones – of the colonial officer’.32 Lyautey was determined not to confront the highland Berbers prematurely, but Reibell’s heavy-handed approac
h helped stir up the Beni Mtir and Beni Mguild tribes south-east of Meknes early in 1913. This provoked tribal attacks inspired by Sidi Raho, a charismatic Beni Ouarain religious and military sheikh, and such raids prompted further reactions by officers on the spot, thus dragging Lyautey into difficult mountain country where his intelligence officers had not yet had a chance to prepare the way.
In March 1913 he gave command south-east of Meknes to one of his old team from Ain Sefra, Colonel Paul Henrys, who by July had suppressed the attacks and planted a new post at Immouzer-Kandar to protect the Meknes – Fes road from the south (see Map 19). Meanwhile, however, Colonel Gueydon de Dives had hastened a confrontation further south with the large and warlike Zaian confederation that Lyautey particularly wanted to postpone. 33 This wide-ranging Berber people had sent warriors to fight the Landing Corps on the Chaouia in 1907 and to harass the first Fes relief column in 1911; they totalled some 8,000 fighting men divided into two main branches, both of which spent summers in the Middle Atlas and winters on lowland pastures along the Oum er Rebia river. The Ait Zgougou tribe were led by Mohammed Aguebli, and the Ait Yacoub by a formidable old caid named Moha ou Hammou el Zaiani, who had enjoyed growing regional prestige over thirty-five years.34
In December 1912 – without permission, but probably with Mangin’s encouragement – Colonel Gueydon had installed a post at Oued Zem about 25 miles north-west of Kasbah Tadla (see Map 19). No political effort had been made to prepare the Berbers for this intrusion; an influential war chief, Moha ou Said (’Irraoui, retaliated by ravaging the lands of submitted tribes in the area, and attacked the post directly in February 1913. Thereafter Oued Zem would be an isolated garrison, its resupply subject to repeated ambushes, and it threatened to become a focus for hostile tribes all the way from the Chaouia across to the Middle Atlas.35 Lyautey sent General Louis Franchet d’Espérey to reinforce this sector, while Colonel Henri Simon – who had been the first leader of Moroccan goumiers, and was now head of his Native Affairs Service – kept the tribes to the west under control. In March 1913 both Simon and Mangin achieved victories over various tribal groupings, and thereafter Simon was given command of the Oued Zem sector.36
Mangin, now campaigning north of the Oum er Rebia between Oued Zem and Kasbah Tadla, was impatient to move east and take on the Zaians around Khenifra and on the left bank of the river. Lyautey understood that such a move into the middle of the Zaian pasture range would invite highland Berbers down on to the plain in retaliation, and – given the Moroccan way of thinking – that this would inevitably drag him into a grinding mountain campaign that he simply could not risk on the probable eve of a European war. He insisted that Mangin stay on the right (northern) bank, and only reluctantly agreed to a small advance patrol post – not a permanent base – being established at Kasbah Tadla. Meanwhile he sent Moroccan intermediaries led by Colonel Simon to try to negotiate with Moha ou Said.
The contact was rebuffed, and on Simon’s advice Lyautey reluctantly agreed to Mangin’s request to make a hit-and-run raid on Moha ou Said’s large camp at El Ksiba, east of Kasbah Tadla. Mangin took 4,200 men across the river, but the subsequent fighting of 7 – 10 June 1913 was badly mishandled; his cavalry commander was foolishly eager, 77 men were killed and 170 wounded, and he was finally harried back across the Oum er Rebia leaving his dead behind. The French probably killed eight times as many Zaians, but in tribal terms this was a heartening victory that stiffened resistance. The Oum er Rebia was confirmed as the limit for military operations for the time being, and Charles Mangin returned to France (where the next few years would give him unlimited opportunities to exercise his particular talents).37
The limits of Lyautey’s western Moroccan ‘pillar’ now ran roughly from Sefrou in the north to Kasbah Tadla in the south, then westwards along the Oum er Rebia to the Atlantic. The edges were naturally porous, and during the winter of 1913/14 his intelligence officers would pursue his favoured kind of political and trading contacts across the margins. Their aim was to prepare the way for a spring campaign to tidy up a salient around Khenifra. By so doing, Lyautey hoped to divide the Zaian confederacy.38
THE SPANISH ZONE TO THE NORTH of Lyautey’s western pillar was a mild irritation in 1913. Following the declaration of the French Protectorate, a more far-reaching agreement between the two countries had been signed on 27 November 1912. Its terms required Spain to take responsibility for security north of a vaguely delineated east – west line through the Mediterranean littoral, but the French were sceptical of Spain’s ability to do this.
The nature of the tripartite agreements between France, Spain and the Maghzan made no logical sense. France had a treaty obligation to the Moroccan throne to protect and develop the whole of the sultan’s territory in harmony with the Maghzan. In long-agreed recognition of British concerns about the control of the coast facing Gibraltar, France subcontracted its duties and rights in the northern zone to Spain, whose high commissioner would rule that territory in harmony with a regional khalifa appointed by the sultan. The sultan would remain sovereign over the Spanish zone, and its external relations would be controlled by France; but Spain had no direct treaty relationship with the Moroccan Maghzan, only with France. Thus, Lyautey was in the position of having some theoretical diplomatic responsibility, but no power to control events, on the northern side of a border that Spain jealously insisted could not be crossed by French troops.39
The frontier between the French and Spanish zones was an entirely arbitrary line on the map, often simply following the supposed but unconfirmed contours. The tribes through whose historic range it passed were eventually informed that those north of it were now subject to Spanish rule and those south of it to France. Large areas on both sides of the notional border would long remain unoccupied and even unvisited by the armies of either nation. The Spanish had no coherent plan for the occupation or development of their zone, and their activities were spasmodic and piecemeal; Walter Harris would write that Spanish progress was hampered by inexperience, disorganization and lack of imagination, ‘sacrificing practical results to an exaggerated sentiment of amour propre’ – in other words, they insisted on their dignity as ruler, while being unwilling or unable to do a ruler’s work.
It is important to remember that Spanish operations would always be on two completely separated fronts (see Map 18). The Spanish would never even attempt to open a land corridor across the 130-odd miles dividing the two presidios, and all communication between them was by sea. (Even when the Rif War ended in the spring of 1926, the two fronts would still be separated by at least 80 miles of country that was not only unpacified but unexplored.)40 The line drawn across the map to delineate the southern border of the Spanish zone was roughly 225 miles long from the Atlantic coast in the west to the mouth of the Moulouya river in the east, enclosing about 7,700 square miles and a population estimated at some 760,000. This area – rather smaller than that of Wales, or roughly the same as the state of Massachusetts – was only about 5 per cent of the size of French Morocco.
In the west, the Franco-Spanish line ran across the bulge of the Djibala country about 65 miles south of the presidio of Ceuta at the Mediterranean tip of the Anjera peninsula, but by summer 1913 Alcazarquivir was still isolated at the end of a corridor from Larache, and Spanish troops had pushed only about 20 miles south from Ceuta to Tetuan (see below). Though this would be their regional capital, their wider ‘occupation’ amounted to no more than tentative penetrations from the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. In the Melilla Comandacia to the east the Franco-Spanish line ran across the mountains about 100 miles south of the tip of the promontory, but the average depth of this theoretical territory from the mean line of the Mediterranean coast was only some 30 miles. Here the area of active Spanish operations even by the early 1920s would extend only about 15 miles inland and some 40 miles laterally, from a little way east of the Melilla promontory westwards to Sidi Driss on the coast, and inland to Midar.
In the Melilla enclave, Rif
tribal resistance to the mining and track-laying had more or less ended in May 1912, and such operations as the Spanish did pursue before the Great War took place south of Ceuta. At the end of 1912 the first high commissioner, General Felipe Afrau, had an expeditionary corps of some 40,000 men divided between his two fronts (then nearly half the entire Spanish Army).41 In the Djibala his immediate opponent was Moulay Ahmad er Raisuli, who had been confirmed as the regional pasha by the new sultan; Raisuli exploited his position to the full, expanding his power ruthlessly from his base in the Beni Aros hills.42
General Afrau’s first step was to occupy the town of Tetuan, about 20 miles south of Ceuta on the eastern side of the peninsula, both to rescue it from Raisuli’s depredations and to install the new khalifa there. The Spanish advanced slowly, building a road as they went, and occupied Tetuan on 13 February 1913. When they got there the undisciplined troops, officers and men alike, treated the ‘Moors’ with stupid brutality. Walter Harris put it delicately: ‘There was too great an exhibition of the spirit of conquest. Morocco must give of its best, and amongst its best were its women.’ The Spanish soon made themselves hated; an educated sergeant, Arturo Barea, wrote that the Spanish Army turned occupied territory into a combination of battlefield, tavern and brothel. In April 1913, the Khalifa Moulay el Mehdi was installed at Tetuan, but the charade of Maghzan-Spanish alliance did nothing to reduce hostility towards the occupiers, and ambushes and skirmishing continued.43
IN LYAUTEY’S EASTERN ‘PILLAR’, General Alix decided in February 1913 that the time was ripe for more progress towards Taza from the east. He concentrated troops including the 1st Foreign’s marching regiment at Merada as the base for a systematic exploration of the dreary Djel plain between the Moulouya and Msoun. As he advanced he anchored his columns on new posts including Nekhila in the north and Safsafte in the south, occupying the latter on 8 April (see Map 18). Beni Bou Yahi warriors responded by attacking Nekhila; photographic postcards were quickly published showing wounded légionnaires, including the splendidly named Sergeant Panther of 2nd Company, I/1st RE, whose left hand was smashed by a bullet as he rescued the wounded Lieutenant Grosjean after the death of their Captain Doreau. On 19 April General Alix led 4,500 men forward from Merada, surprising the Beni Bou Yahi camp and inflicting a punishing defeat.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 58