Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  On 9 May, Alix struck out again from Merada, leading 5,000 troops via Safsafte to Msoun, which was occupied on the 11th. An anonymous légionnaire of I/1st Foreign left an account of the final advance across a plain shoulder-deep in barley; each company was deployed in diamond formation, with its four platoons 50 yards apart. A few kilometres from Msoun they came under long-range fire, hearing an appreciable interval between the buzz of the almost-spent bullet and the muffled report of the shot; the légionnaires continued to advance without returning fire, and could soon see figures flitting among the trees and rocks.

  Soon we got close to the hills that surrounded our objective. We started to hear the whistles and cracks of bullets passing over our heads and hitting the ground around us. We were still in the barley field, with only our heads above the crops; we could easily hide ourselves, and we fired back unhurriedly, as if on the ranges . . . [Then] the terrain changed; we entered harvested fields, and the platoons lay down, able to adance only by successive bounds. My comrade was hit in the left arm; he continued to advance, firing now and then with his good hand. A bullet went through my haversack; several men fell and did not get up again.44

  The tribesmen did not wait for the French to close with them, and the battalion occupied high ground around Msoun that evening. The camp outside the ksar was attacked without success that night by men from the dominant local tribes, the Beni Ouarain and Riata, who were no more successful on 24 May. When Riata, Branès and other tribesmen attempted a convergence, General Alix again marched from Merada, meeting them near Kasbah Ain el Arba on 28 May and defeating each of three groups individually; this definitively pacified the plains around Msoun.

  The length of the old Sultan’s Road from Fes to Oujda was 210 miles; when Major Ibos of the Colonial Infantry finished his summary of operations in December 1913 the remaining ‘Taza block’ between Tissa in the west and Msoun in the east was only 62 miles wide. Narrow-gauge rail tracks were being laid from both sides to ease the logistics; the obstacles to a final link-up were ‘hardly considerable and will diminish further as time passes’.45

  THE EASTERN PILLAR of French control had now been built from the mouth of the Moulouya on the Mediterranean all the way down to the Hammada du Guir south of Boudenib, and in May 1914 Lyautey decided to set the lintel on his archway. Any secure success in the north obviously depended on the French opening the corridor between Fes, Taza, Oujda and the supply bases beyond the Algerian frontier. Eventually this would allow coordinated operations against the ‘Taza Pocket’ to the south – the northern Middle Atlas – but reducing that heartland of Berber independence would take many years. In the meantime, tribes at both ends of the northern corridor had been softened up by the usual patient political work.

  In April, General Gouraud carried out preliminary operations against the Tsouls tribe north-east of Fes, during which 3kg aerial bombs were used for the first time in Morocco. These were made locally, using glazed earthenware casings; the bursts produced a considerable moral effect, but the flimsy, underpowered aircraft could only carry a few of them and they had to be dropped almost blind. The tribesmen’s reaction – massed rifle-fire – had both a moral and a physical effect: on 8 April 1914, Captain Hervé and his mechanic Corporal Rocland were brought down beyond the line of outposts and killed by tribesmen, and thereafter Lyautey limited the permitted radius of flights. He judged that the boost to Moroccan morale of bringing a plane down and having souvenirs and heads to show around the villages would outweigh any advantage gained by sending aircraft into actual combat. (His opinion was shared by the General Staff, who judged the experiment a failure. That summer all aircraft were withdrawn to France on the eve of war, and Lyautey would not get any back until 1916.)46

  THE TAZA CORRIDOR was the fertile valley of the Oued Innaouen. Travelling from Fes towards Taza, the valley floor was flanked by white and grey hills cut by gulleys and almost bare except for a sparse scatter of dwarf palms growing on the lower slopes. Perhaps 50 miles from Fes the hills gradually closed in and the dirt road started to rise, to a crest about 1,800 feet high. Beyond this Touahar pass the hills fell back around a broad circular plain; 10 miles further on the town of Taza could be seen on the southern side, perched on a black rocky crag that jutted out into the valley surrounded by ‘a veritable forest’ of fruit trees. Medieval travellers had praised the splendours of Taza, set amid its rich orchards and gardens; but by 1884 Père de Foucauld was describing the town as semi-ruined, and in 1900 the Marquis de Segonzac called it a pile of rubble, stripped by the almost daily attacks of the Riata Berbers, who had strangled trade along this important route and reduced Taza to about 3,000 residents. The hills above the Oued Innaouen were also the territory of the Hayana Arabs, the Meknassa, Tsouls and Branès, these last two Arabic-speaking Berber tribes being the strongest.47

  Two French forces would meet at Taza: from the west, General Gouraud led the larger roughly 45 miles from Tissa, while from Msoun in the east General Baumgarten had only about a third of that distance to cover. The two Legion marching regiments were both involved, but Lieutenant-Colonel Girodon’s 2nd Foreign with the Gouraud column had the harder fighting. Both forces set off on 9/10 May, but before marching eastwards along the Innaouen, Gouraud had to strike north to clear his left flank. On 12 May, Girodon was wounded when his troops (including Captain Rollet’s mule company) met stubborn resistance around ‘Tsouls Mountain’ from tribesmen led by Si Mohammed el Hajjami – who was now fighting among ridges and glens that gave better cover than the plain north of Fes where Gouraud had smashed his harka two years previously. Once able to move eastwards, Gouraud made better progress, and his three large squares easily repulsed horsemen near the Oued Amelil. Meanwhile, Baumgarten had reached Taza on 10 May after a single night’s forced march.48

  The anonymous légionnaire of Major Met’s I/1st RE at Msoun recalled that the night of 9/10 May was cold and heavy rain was falling; the column stumbled along through gluey mud, the men cursing and the pack-mules playing up. Suddenly the battalion buglers (the ‘fanfare’) struck up a march called Karoline, andas if by a miracle, everything fell into place – the beasts behaved themselves, the mud was less sticky, and the men got their smiles back. To understand this miracle you had to understand our fanfare and our chief. ‘Daddy’ Met was a good légionnaire and we all adored him; an old bugler told me that he had been in the Legion for 23 years, and others told of serving under him in the Sud-Oranais, Madagascar and Tonkin . . . [He was] of middle height, strong and lively; his face was lightened by a slight smile and elongated by a short, pointed black beard. He was full of solicitude and experience, kept an eye on everything, and commanded with firmness and kindness. He used to declare that with enough wine and a band he could lead his légionnaires to the ends of the earth . . . He paid particular attention to the buglers, having them play popular tunes, but the one he preferred above all was Karoline, which he had adopted to the point that we became known as the ‘Karoline Battalion’. The cannon fired, they played Karoline; the wounded arrived at the dressing station, they played Karoline; that damned Karoline produced a prodigious effect on the unit.

  . . . From Msoun to Taza the terrain differed from other places in Morocco – you would think you were in the Auvergne. In some places the barley or oats came up to your chest. It was really annnoying crossing the many fields of wild artichokes, and we frequently had to cross streams. Little by little the rain eased off, and marching became easier under a fine moon.

  At about 4.30am on 10 May they came to the steep banks of the Oued Aghbat, and halted for nearly an hour while improving a ford for the baggage train. On the far side the ground was much more broken up, but by 6am, from one of the numerous hills, the troops could see the minarets of Taza’s mosques less than 4 miles ahead. The vanguard Spahis exchanged the first shots with Riata scouts, and at 7am Baumgarten’s artillery opened fire on groups resisting the advance:The 2nd Battalion of our regiment [II/1st RE] attacked the serious points of resistance . . .
thanks to accurate fire from neighbouring heights and the machine guns the enemy abandoned their ground. At 12.30pm we crossed the Oued Amelil and assaulted the hill . . . At 1pm the French flag was floating from the kasbah, and soon our battalion was paraded before General Baumgarten and Colonel Boyer, our regimental commander.49

  On 16 May 1914 the Baumgarten and Gouraud columns met at Meknassa Tahtania about 3 miles from Taza. On the 18th, General Lyautey arrived to review the troops, and the colours of the 1st RE, brought from Sidi bel Abbès by Colonel Boyer, were proudly paraded in front of 6,000 men.

  THE LINKING OF MOROCCO WITH ALGERIA did not end the fighting in the Taza corridor, and seems in fact to have provoked fiercer resistance. During June and July 1914 there were clashes with aggressive Ouled Bou Rima and Metalsa tribesmen both around the Touahar pass and in the hills to the north of Msoun. One of these actions, at a shrine called Sidi Belkassem on 4 June, was memorable for I/1st RE. In the vanguard of General Baumgarten’s column, the battalion made painful progress over ground cut up by gulleys and hillocks, while taking heavy fire from all sides from tribesmen who remained under cover and denied the artillery any concentrated target:The nearer we got to the shrine the hotter the fire got. We marched in skirmish lines, rifles cocked, bayonets fixed. We came under enfilade fire from a wild olive wood about 400 yards to our right; four légionnaires of my platoon fell, then the platoon commander Lieutenant Petersen, a Danish officer, was killed by a bullet full in the chest. The artillery raked the wood, and enemy riders and foot fell back at a run towards the shrine . . . and seemed to form a centre of resistance on a reverse slope.

  The major [Met] was riding in the midst of us; as always, the buglers were blowing Karoline. We advanced by echelons; the sustained fusillade was deafening, and the hillock on which the shrine stood disappeared in the dust thrown up by ricocheting bullets and shell explosions. My platoon was in the lead as we assaulted, shouting. We were greeted by intermittent and badly aimed fire; the bounding shadows [of the enemy] disappeared into a rocky gulley – there was nobody ahead of us. The major dismounted and came forward to observe. Suddenly violent firing raked us from the edge of the gulley, and we saw him fall; bullets from the rocks ahead and off to our right tore up the ground. With a corporal and another légionnaire I ran towards the major; the other man fell, I was pinned down, and only the corporal reached him. He dragged him along the ground and then, with a superhuman effort, got him up on to his shoulders and stumbled towards the rear, while I covered them as best I could.

  The rest of the platoon were up beside me now, and the 2nd Company reached the hilltop. The firing was so intense that we could hardly raise our heads to fire back, or use our tools to scrape up some cover. Luckily, the right flank pushed ahead and the enemy were forced to give up the hill; when they fell back into a valley the artillery pounded them . . . The corporal rejoined me on the hillock [and] told me that the CO was very badly wounded; a large bullet had broken both his thighs . . .

  In camp that night a rumour spread through the battalion that since Major Met would soon reach the official retirement age for his rank, only a promotion could keep him in the Army. A crowd of légionnaires gathered outside the adjutant’s tent, and after some shuffling and muttering a spokesman respectfully asked that in the name of the whole unit a request should be sent to General Baumgarten to promote Major Met to lieutenant-colonel. Before telling them brusquely to get back to their work, the captain promised that the battalion officers would associate themselves with the request. Within 48 hours confirmation was telegraphed from Paris. The narrator was part of the escort that took the convoy of wounded and dead back to Msoun, and he claimed that when ‘Daddy’ Met was lifted out of the ambulance somebody had already given him a forage cap bearing the five braids of his new rank. (Sadly, he does not mention the subsequent legend that the major’s amputated leg was buried by his men with full military honours.) The battalions and mounted company of 1st Foreign remained in the Taza corridor on security duties throughout that summer.50

  ON THE SAME DAY that Gouraud and Baumgarten began their pincer movement on Taza, down in the south-west Colonel Henrys launched a carefully planned drive to cut off a low-lying wedge of Zaian territory thrusting west from the Middle Atlas and hampering communications between Fes and Marrakesh. His objective was the riverside town of Khenifra (see Map 19).

  Henrys knew that it might take Moha ou Hammou’s clans two to three days to assemble and react, by which time he wanted a fait accompli. Three separate columns totalling some 14,000 troops struck towards Khenifra from the west, north-west and north, and by nightfall on 12 June, at a cost of only 7 dead and perhaps 25 wounded, Colonel Henrys was in possession of the blood-red town set among its orchards and willows in the curve of the Oum er Rebia.51 Khenifra was almost deserted when the French marched in, and Moha ou Hammou showed no sign of coming in to seek the aman as Henrys had hoped. On the night of 14/15 June the camp was attacked in such force that Henrys was forced to use searchlights, artillery and machine guns to clear its approaches. He sent out strong columns in several directions, and on 30 June and 4 July two of these were attacked with considerable determination, suffering 94 and 43 casualties respectively in actions that came down to bayonet-fighting – a phrase that is often misunderstood.

  In French histories such terms as ‘taken with the bayonet’ and ‘body-to-body combat’ are used so freely that they are in danger of being read simply as conventional tropes. Obviously, the outcome of Moroccan battles on the plains was decided by the firepower of French infantry supported by both artillery and a few machine guns. Again, most readers of military history are familiar with the fact that for two opposing Western forces to actually ‘cross bayonets’ has been unusual since at least 1800; faced by a determined charge with fixed bayonets the receiving side almost invariably falters and gives way before actual contact. The memoirs of twentieth-century soldiers have accustomed us to the idea that the bayonet was more useful for opening tins of condensed milk than for actual fighting. However, these accounts are all from wars where white armies fought other white armies; colonial battlefields were rather different. In the Moroccan hills, scrambling encounter-actions in overgrown and broken ground had a character quite distinct from the earlier battles against Arab horsemen on the plains. Since the highland Berbers were masters of the guerrilla ambush who deliberately chose broken ground, even battles fought by whole French brigades and battalions could easily involve a series of smaller fights at close range. In order to negate the French advantage in long-range firepower, the whole aim of the warriors’ tactics was to close to hand-to-hand distance, where the odds were not just equal but often in their favour.

  Although they were enthusiastic and skilled marksmen, the Berbers were products of a culture in which firearms had made face-to-face combat with bladed weapons neither obsolete nor particularly frightening, and they felt not the slightest reluctance to carve human flesh with steel. If he could get within arm’s reach, the warrior with a long knife had an advantage over a white soldier trying to manage the nearly 6-foot length of a rifle and bayonet; once he had emptied his magazine the soldier was simply a rather clumsy spearman, and getting inside a spearman’s reach was a game the Berbers had been playing since childhood mock-battles with sticks. The soldier, on the other hand, had been taught bayonet-fighting as a fencing exercise against another man with a fixed bayonet, which was not the same thing at all.

  A heavy, sharp-pointed knife with a blade up to a foot long, in the strong hand of a man completely familiar with its use, could do immediately or imminently fatal damage in a number of ways, most of them more instantly painful and distressing than a bullet wound. A preliminary slash across the scalp could cause instant extensive bleeding, usefully blinding the soldier if a direct stab at his eyes was impractical. A stab or hard slash to the neck could lacerate the jugular vein or carotid artery and damage or even sever the spinal column. A hard stab to the chest did not have to penetrate the chambers of t
he heart to be effective: it could also fracture ribs and puncture lungs. A knife in the belly would usually tear into the bowel, liver, spleen, kidneys or one of several major blood vessels – piercing the aorta or inferior vena cava, for instance, would lead to immediate massive blood loss. Even a soldier who successfully protected his head and central body mass could be disabled momentarily by blows to the arms or legs to open a path to his major organs, and lacerating the femoral artery in the inner thigh was quickly fatal. And of course, if two warriors could attack a single soldier simultaneously then he was usually a dead man. The French troops soon learned these lessons, to the detriment of their morale; even in 1929 the colonial veteran Lieutenant Colonel Fabre would write: What our troops have to fear most are these surprise attacks that can end in merciless hand-to-hand fighting, the prospect of which sometimes weighs heavily on their spirits. Such encounters are nearly always unfavourable to us, and cause four-fifths of our total casualties. They demoralize both the unit involved and neighbouring units, and increase the confidence and ‘bite’ of the enemy. Surprises of this sort have been numerous in Morocco, and whole battalions have been tumbled back with heavy losses by perhaps only fifty Chleuchs. It is painful to accept that it is the better led, organized and armed side that has been forced to yield ground.52