Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  On the Middle Atlas front, the drain of officers to the ‘real war’ continued; Major Curie of VI/2nd RE had left for Salonika in February 1916 and was replaced from April by Major Auger. In service to Lyautey’s plan for trans-Middle Atlas links, the mobile groups were nibbling eastwards into the edges of those ranges, and in May, Auger led his unit south from Timahdite in a column commanded by Colonel Joseph Poeymirau. (This officer was a veteran of Lyautey’s staff in the old days at Ain Sefra, who later in 1916 would replace General Henrys in overall operational command when the latter returned to France.) In June the VI/2nd Foreign built a temporary home at Ain Leuh, the new advance base for Poeymirau’s Meknes Mobile Group; the battalion was under-strength, with 13 officers, 39 NCOs and 598 rankers, but it had finally acquired a second machine-gun platoon.23

  IN THE SOUTH-EASTERN DESERT, the years 1914 – 15 had been quiet for Captain Sainville’s 2nd (Mounted) Company/1st RE at Boudenib. Camel caravans across the eastern plains to the railhead at Colomb Béchar attracted the occasional opportunists, usually from the south rather than from the Tafilalt; every now and then Sainville took a half-company out to intercept or pursue reported raiders from the Hammada, but the more usual reconnaissance patrols and escort missions across the dreaming wilderness were exercises in numbing routine. In March 1916, Captain Sainville departed for France, but soon after Captain Coutance took over things became more active. Lyautey’s intention to tie a zig-zag string of roads across his ‘archway’, reshaping it as a figure-of-eight to separate the northern and southern Berber redoubts in the Middle Atlas, would require approaches from both west and east. In April 1916 he decided to reinforce the weak desert ‘pillar’ with a European infantry unit, but its nature suggested that the Legion in North Africa was nearing the end of its resources. Major Feurtet’s Boudenib Composite Battalion – formed at Colomb Béchar with two Legion companies from the Oranais and two of joyeux from the penal 4e and 5e Bataillons d’Afrique – arrived at Boudenib on 8 May.24

  On 22 May this Bataillon Mixte marched westwards as part of an 1,800-strong mobile group with III/8th Algerian Skirmishers, 15th Battalion Senegalese Skirmishers, some Spahis, and Captain Coutance’s 2nd (Mounted) Company. The pimps and draft-dodgers hauled off the streets of French cities must have been shocked by the utter emptiness of this terrain, in which the flat horizon between white sky and brown wasteland is all that the eyes can fasten upon. Wide stretches of the dreary gravel-desert west of Boudenib will not even support the usual low tufts of leathery vegetation, and single twisted little thorn-trees or dwarf palms are distributed literally miles apart. Eventually the column got into the hills and right up to the treeless plateau around Rich at the head of the Ziz gorges, where a post was to be installed (see Map 23). Picketing the crests must have been lung-bursting work; here stony heights crowd steeply in around stretches of mangy grassland, each hill seemingly born in a different aeon from another only a couple of miles away. Some are topped with jagged rust-red crags carved with fissures and caves, with masses of huge fallen boulders around their feet; others have cut faces that show pale stacked strata tipped at diagonal angles; others still are table-tops, with fretted caps of rimrock undercut by the erosion of the clay slopes, stained with red patches bleeding through the grey. At Rich, the mobile group was divided; half of the Composite Battalion began to build the post, while the other half reconnoitred downriver with the 2nd (Mounted).

  As they came down into the Ziz gorges the geology changed again; the track now zigzagged in and out between interlocking curtains of red rock, each superimposed horizontal stack with its own pattern of vertical fissures, for all the world like crowded giant bookshelves, with here and there a single dramatic needle standing close but alone. Below the track on their right the putty-coloured Oued Ziz, fast but shallow, swung back and forth between pebble beaches edged with a narrow green sleeve of rushes, scrub and trees. On their way back up the gorge on 31 May the légionnaires came under fire from warriors on the tormented orange-grey cliffs that cramp the Ziz into the narrow pass of Foum Zabel; here the track on the east bank crept along a ledge around a great rock buttress thrusting out into a foaming, confined bend of the river, and the mule company lost two men. On 2 June they destroyed a riverside village at Amzoug before the column reassembled and returned to Boudenib.25

  On 5 July 1916 the mobile group marched out again, this time heading for the plain south of the mountains through which the liberated Oued Ziz flows towards the Tafilalt. This country was roamed by the Ait Khabbash and Ait Umnasf tribes of the stubbornly hostile Ait Atta people, who had neither been tamed by the Atlas lords nor tempted to talk peace by the French. On 9 July, the column fought a significant Berber force at the oasis of Meski; the 2nd (Mounted) held hillocks north of the village in close fighting, and took seven casualties while discovering that the tribesmen were using German Mauser bayonets as daggers. The next day Coutance’s mounted company made a forced march back to Boudenib in crushing heat, carrying the gravely wounded Captain Bertin of the 15th Senegalese about 51 miles in 26 hours. The rest of the column then marched north-west over the empty desert to Ksar es Souk (modern Er Rachidia), where it began to build another post, thus tying a knot to secure the bottom of the southern loop of Lyautey’s planned figure-of-eight.

  Inevitably, these and subsequent clashes would lead French troops towards the oases of the Tafilalt itself, where on 16 November 1916 the 2nd (Mounted) and the Composite Battalion would clash with Arabs at El Bourouj in the Tizimi palmerie just north of Erfoud, subsequently planting an observation post at the village of El Maadid.26 The wealthy communities and religious brotherhoods scattered throughout the Tafilalt had for so long been a focus for resistance that they exerted a dangerous fascination over some French officers, but Lyautey was adamant that his weak force in the south-east should provoke no direct confrontation. While the sultan had preached that the Muslim Turks were heretics, the French were always haunted by the nightmare of a pan-Arabic jihad right across the Maghreb, and French resources in their eastern Sahara were already stretched to the limit by a serious uprising. At a time of famine, Turkish agents had stirred up the followers of the Islamic reformist Senussi movement in what is now Libya; rebellion had spread to some drum-groups of the southern Tuareg, and in the deep desert the overstretched Saharan Companies would fight at least twenty serious actions during the First World War.27

  GENERAL LYAUTEY had returned to France periodically to confer with the government, and even he could not help but wonder about a command on the Western Front. The battlefront had rolled over his own home in Lorraine, and he had told President Poincaré that he must have a free hand to give promotions and decorations in Morocco because both officers and French NCOs felt dishonoured by their absence from the defence of the homeland.28 In December 1916, the weak Briand administration offered Lyautey not a field command but the War Ministry, probably in the hope of borrowing a little of his lustre; untouched by responsibility for the carnage of the past thirty months, he was still a respected figure. With some misgivings he accepted, on condition that the Moroccan residency-general be kept warm for him by his old deputy General Henri Gouraud (who now had an empty right sleeve, thanks to a Turkish shell during his command of French forces in the Dardanelles).

  The dominant figure in Paris was now the new Chief of the General Staff, Robert Nivelle, and Lyautey’s suspicion that he himself was intended to be a figurehead with symbolic responsibility but no real power was soon confirmed. He was uncomfortable at having to answer directly to a parliamentary Chamber rich in hostile anti-colonialists, and he signally failed to apply his ‘oil-stain’ approach to the task of attracting allies among a class whom he instinctively despised.29 Various generals took the opportunity to share with Lyautey their doubts about Nivelle’s planned spring 1917 offensive between Soissons and Rheims. He was officially briefed on this by an old protégé, Colonel Georges Renouard (the officer who at Ain Sefra in 1904 had taken down his dictated telegram of defiance after
his seizure of Ras el Ain – see Chapter 11). It was an embarrassing meeting, since Renouard had to defend to a man he respected a plan in which he clearly had no faith himself. Subsequently Lyautey tried to argue against Nivelle’s breezy confidence, but was dismissed impatiently as ‘a Napoleon returned from Egypt’. In the Chamber on 14 March 1917 he was shocked to be simply shouted down when he had hardly begun to speak; he resigned his portfolio, and two days later the Briand government fell. The Nivelle Offensive on the Chemin des Dames went ahead on 16 April; on 20 May, after its catastrophic failure, Lyautey left Paris to return to his old command in Morocco.30

  ONCE HE WAS BACK IN THE SADDLE, Lyautey gave priority to preparing for his planned cut across the lower Middle Atlas, but no operation in Morocco could ever be mounted in isolation. The northern cap of his ‘archway’ had been under some pressure during his absence in the winter of 1916/17; I/1st RE (Major Giudicelli) had been transferred down to Kasbah Tadla in January, leaving only VI/1st (Major Desjours) and the two mounted companies to represent the Legion on the Taza front. On 13 June 1917, both VI/1st RE and 1st (Mounted) Company suffered casualties near Souk el Had south of Kifane, in an action that is worth brief description simply for its typical character.31

  Like so many of the Legion’s most punishing fights, this one saw the Berbers clinging to the rearguard of a withdrawal through wooded hills. Major Desjours’ battalion got through the narrow pass of Ain el Haout only with difficulty, covered by Lieutenant Chanraud’s machine-gun platoon and Captain Thiébault’s 23rd Company picketing the heights on their left. When that rearguard itself began to fall back it found its flank uncovered thanks to a premature movement by a Spahi troop, and Lieutenant Veseron had to lead his platoon in a bayonet charge to recover his casualties. The Berbers continued to hang on the flanks and rear of the battalion as they withdrew, carrying their dead and wounded. From a summit to the right, Lieutenant Fetaz’s machine guns covered the retreat of Captain Deckmyn’s 22nd Company, but the highlanders bounded forward with extraordinary speed to surround Fetaz; some soldiers only escaped by rolling bodily down the rocky slope, and Sub-lieutenant Perret’s two guns were cut off. He and nearly all his légionnaires were shot down, and in the end the survivors only got clear when 22nd Company, some Senegalese and a mountain artillery section closed up on an opposite slope and created a corridor of fire for them.32 Meanwhile, the 1st (Mounted) were rushed as they withdrew from two jutting crags nearby; together the two Legion units suffered 3 killed and 17 wounded, with another 5 missing in action. Among the dead and lost were an officer, a sergeant, and Warrant Officer Panther of 1st (Mounted), who had saved his lieutenant under fire at Nekhila in April 1913.33 The kind of tribesmen who killed them would be the Legion’s preoccupation for twenty years.

  THE BERBERS OF THE ATLAS were the products of a warrior culture not unlike that of the Pashtun (Pathans) of the Indian North-West Frontier. A mountain Berber’s life depended on wresting a crop from his jealously guarded patch of land, but his honour resided in fathering sons and in fighting – to defend what the clan held, or to take what was another’s. There were differences of dialect and of physical build; the northern Rifians tended to be stockier than the sometimes longer-limbed, longer-faced clans of the Atlas proper, but they were recognizably members of the same people. All had pale olive complexions and usually dark brown hair and eyes, though a minority showed the fairer colouring and pale gaze that so puzzled European academics. Mature men wore beards, sometimes a ‘full set’ but often only a fringe around the jawline (which some French officers copied, up to the 1950s); under a loose turban their heads were shaved except for a scalp-lock. Those who spent time among them spoke of a characteristic facial expression of reserved, watchful but lively intelligence.34

  Like all highlanders born and bred, they had remarkably powerful legs and lungs; they could move up and down steep slopes in their woven sandals far more quickly and for far longer than most booted Europeans, and the race to or from a crest was often a matter of life and death. Since they were also completely familiar with their own wooded glens, ravines and bare ridges, they could thus exploit a cross-country mobility far superior to the mainly track-bound white soldiers with their pack-animals and artillery. Each man carried what little he needed – cartridges, kesrah unleavened bread or a few handfuls of parched grain, some dried fruit – in a leather satchel slung at the hip, so their ‘logistics’ were almost non-existent, and when needed they could seek provisions in the remote upland villages. Over a long shirt and calf-length trousers above woollen stockings or puttees they wore a loose, hooded djellabah robe of tightly woven mixed wool and goat-hair, in browns, greys or unbleached off-whites; this served as both a greatcoat by day and a blanket by night. Every warrior carried a rifle and a long, straight knife.

  The Berbers’ guerrilla tactics were classically simple, suited to the terrain and to the stubbornly individualist culture that some Europeans found so attractive. Their fieldcraft – the use of ground, light, cover and stealth to conceal movement – was superb, as demonstrated time and again by their extraordinary success in stealing rifles, even horses, from within night camps without raising the alarm. They were deadly hunters of isolated sentries and small detachments; any outpost of a few soldiers, any firewood or water party, any lagging squad delayed by crossing an obstacle had good reason to fear that lethal Berber eagerness to get within hand-to-hand range that has already been explained. In the face of a European advance they always occupied dominating heights, firing and manoeuvring individually or in small groups, falling back before superior strength only to seek the next ambush position (for this reason they could sometimes be dislodged by an apparent threat to outflank and cut them off). They were accustomed to husbanding their ammunition, and since – unlike the Arab riders of the plains – they usually took steady aim from behind a rock or tree trunk, they made every shot count.

  Their war-chiefs emerged from among the most respected members of the clan councils, and their authority had to be earned by personal qualities of courage, guile and luck. Once the clan was committed, the chosen war-chief might exercise absolute authority, but his practical powers of ‘command and control’ were limited. The Berbers had no notion of attack or defence ‘in depth’ – in successive waves or lines, with reserves held back; every man was committed to the same thin battle-line. Neither did they have any concept of large-scale coordinated movements on the battlefield, nor – since each clan was fiercely independent and egalitarian – the social mechanism to organize them. However, relative lack of numbers at any particular point never deterred them from surprise attacks when the soldiers’ mutually supporting formations became dislocated in the broken ground where the tribesmen chose to fight.

  The Berbers had an uncanny ability to spot and exploit any mistake, and their individual tactical skills seemed to be as innate as their physical hardihood. They flowed through their hills like mercury, dispersing into individual beads in the face of strength, but coalescing instantly to overwhelm any vulnerable group. They were never more dangerous than when soldiers had to fall back in alternate platoons, opening up exploitable gaps and flanks. Captain Guennoun:Berber tactics rest upon two preoccupations: to use mobility to give the illusion of numbers, and to flank and surround their enemy in order to sow confusion. We have seen 25 or 30 Zaians harassing the flank of a convoy between Khenifra and Sidi Ammar on a front of [5 or 6 miles], and creating the impression that they were several hundred strong. Equally, we have seen 100 or 200 warriors oblige a whole mobile group to halt and form fronts to resist simultaneous attacks from four directions.35

  As late as 1929, Lieutenant-Colonel Fabre would write that the French Army had not paid sufficient attention to developing a tactical doctrine for close combat that would protect the troops from such surprises. He argued for the junior officers, NCOs and men to be thoroughly instructed in a strictly limited number of straightforward ‘battle drills’ – procédés – worked out to counter the typical range of Berbe
r tactics, which the troops could adopt at a moment’s notice at the shout of a sergeant: ‘Such techniques exist, but they are too little known.’36

  THE LINK ACROSS THE MIDDLE ATLAS would be attempted by two columns: the stronger Meknes Mobile Group under Colonel Poeymirau would push south-east to meet in the hills; another, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Doury, would march north-westwards from Boudenib. Meanwhile, the Fes Mobile Group would march through the tribal territory of the Northern Ait Segrushin and Marmoucha south-east of Sefrou, to cover Poeymirau from the north; and a column from Debdou would sweep up the middle Moulouya to clear Doury’s northern flank. Poeymirau began his operation in mid-May 1917 by ensuring that his southern flank would also be secure, establishing a post on the north-eastern edge of the Zaian country at Bekrite in the hills south-east of Mrirt as an obstacle between neighbouring hostile tribes (see Map 19).37 That spring, I/ and II/1st RE were tied down in the relentless convoy warfare around Kasbah Tadla, Khenifra and Sidi Lamine, but VI/2nd RE (Major Auger) were assigned to the Bekrite force. They saw a little skirmishing and much hard labour, and in June they marched south-east to build yet another post at Itzer. By the end of June a new track along a hairpin route from Timahdite via Itzer to Bekrite was practical for motor vehicles, though only over several difficult days.