Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  The Africa Army and Colonial regiments underwent complex reorganizations from 1919, as wartime personnel were demobilized and wartime-raised units were disbanded. The largest single contingent in Morocco was still provided by the West Africans, with up to 20 battalions; there were up to 15 of Algerian Skirmishers, and originally 6, rising to 15 battalions of Moroccan Skirmishers – originally Arab, these now began to enlist more Berbers from submitted tribes. Lyautey’s only European infantry comprised between 2 and 4 of the Bats d’Af, and the Legion, which gradually increased its contribution from 4 to 12 battalions and 3 mounted companies, or about one-third of his manoeuvre units.16

  The demands of the unrest in the south-east sparked off by Gaouz, and the general disruption following the Armistice, had reduced activity in 1919 to a more or less maintenance level, but from the spring of 1920 Lyautey could focus once more on the stubborn ‘Zaian bloc’ east of Khenifra. Although his Native Affairs officers had established useful contacts with Moha ou Hammou’s sons and nephews, no lasting progress could be made until new posts could completely deny unsubmitted highland clans access to grazing on the right bank of the Oum er Rebia river. General Poeymirau had now returned to duty, and from April to June 1920 his mobile groups pushed the chain of posts forward; this was so effective that leaders representing perhaps half of the confederacy made terms. In the spring of 1921, old Moha ou Hammou himself, defiant to his last breath, was killed while resisting Zaian partisans now fighting for the French. Late that summer, after negotiations set up by Moha’s sons, the last major pocket of resistance around Bekrite was eliminated by the mobile groups of General Jean Théveney and Colonel Henri Freydenberg, and the seven-year ‘Zaian war’ was finally over.17

  Simultaneously, in northern Morocco the Spanish had been penetrating new Berber territory from both their western and eastern presidios. A sequence of events now unfolded that would shock Europe, and would eventually have profound consequences for both Lyautey and the Foreign Legion.

  THE NAME RIF (in Arabic, literally ‘edge’ or ‘border’) is today applied to the whole mountain chain running behind Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. More properly, it should be used only of the drier highlands in the eastern half of this strip, roughly between Targuist and Melilla, inhabited by peoples called irifyen – ‘borderers’ – in their own Berber dialect (see Map 18). The whole northern region was divided between four major groups of tribes: from west to east, the Djibala, the Ghomara, the Senadja Srir and the Rifians proper, the last being the most numerous and grouped in fewer, larger tribes. All relied upon subsistence farming; the staples were barley and wheat, and farmers kept some livestock – a household might own a cow, a mule and a small herd of goats.

  To the west of Targuist the much better watered and wooded country was known as the Ghomara and the Djibala. In contrast to the parched eastern hills of the Rif proper, the fertile terrain of the Djibala has been compared to the Bernese Oberland; its population was more ethnically mixed than that of the eastern Rif and was mainly Arabic-speaking. While just as quarrelsome, these tribes were described as less austere than the Rifians, with a more cheerful outlook on life and a taste for smoking kif, and other Moroccans told jokes about their gullibility and impulsiveness. In the dry east, arable land was poorer and scarcer than in the west; coaxing a crop out of it required more labour and irrigation, and the Rifians of these harsher hills were famous for their dour pugnacity. In the early sixteenth century, the Arab traveller published as Leo Africanus had noted that ‘All the inhabitants of [the Rif] have the balls of their throat-pipes [Adam’s apples] very great, and are an uncivil and rude people’. Rifian families lived in time-washed single-storey stone and mud-brick houses, typically spaced about 350 yards apart, with their fields and orchards on the slopes nearby. Each homestead was surrounded by a hedge of prickly-pear cactus and guarded by savage dogs, and each had a loopholed pillbox sited to give the best fields of fire.18

  Historically, the Maghzan had enjoyed a wary arm’s-length relationship with the Rifians; men were periodically enlisted as soldiers, taxes were occasionally extracted, but (with some notable exceptions) the sultans were generally content to recognize local leaders and to leave these surly highlanders well alone. Some of the coastal tribes occasionally attracted European wrath by their ferocious piracy, and when the regent Ba Ahmad sent an army from Fes to punish the Ibuqquyen in 1898, their neighbours, the Ait Waryaghar, were happy to share in the killing and looting alongside the Maghazan horde. Their victory over Bou Himara (El Rogi) on the Oued Nekor in 1908 had later cemented the Ait Waryaghar’s local ascendancy and confidence. This tribe inhabited a large region west of the Nekor river, running southwards on both banks of the Rhis river from Alhucemas Bay on the Mediterranean coast, roughly as far inland as the southern limit of the Djebel Hammam massif around Targuist. They were divided into nine named segments, which were traditionally separated between five alliances, and one estimate numbers the tribe at about 40,000 people.19

  All Rifians shared a strong regional personality, characterized by a belligerently egalitarian attitude and the pursuit of bloody vendettas, so the acquisition of a gun was every boy’s overriding priority. All Berbers feuded constantly, and a great part of their complex customary law was devoted to codes of compensation for thefts and killings; however, it was noted that in the Rif really serious sanctions for murder only seem to have applied if the killing disturbed the weekly markets on which everyday life depended – the crime lay not in the killing, but in ‘breaking the peace of the market’. Rifians also differed from Berbers elsewhere in pursuing deadly enmities even within the immediate blood family. A major feature of Berber society was the range of liff or factional pacts between individuals and groups. Any Rifian considered himself the equal of any other and resented life’s inevitable inequalities; competition for relative status was constant and was pursued by means of faction. These factional divisions routinely cut across other group identities at every level; so, given the innately quarrelsome relationships between individuals, families, blood lineages and tribal segments, there were very few times when a Rifian of proper manliness was not pursuing some kind of sworn enmity, with a gun. It has been estimated that in 1900 – 1920 there were no fewer than 193 identifiable feuds raging within the Ait Waryaghar tribe alone.20

  The American ethnographer David M. Hart patiently traced the successive stages of one typical Ait Waryaghar feud. In baldest summary, it began some time before 1884, and involved the family of an aged man (a fugitive since his youth following a killing in his original home region). He and his sons simply attracted the jealousy of another family, and shots were exchanged when these neighbours came to burn his house down. Other enmities – over inheritance, marriage, factional obligation and simple personal dislike – spread over time and place from this first spark. Both the original antagonists died peacefully in their beds, but by the time the rise of Abd el Krim brought the vendetta to an enforced end some forty years later at least fifteen people had died by the bullet, the knife or poison (unusually, one of the victims and one of the killers were women.)21

  FOLLOWING THE END OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR the Spanish high commissioner, General Damaso Berenguer, became determined to punish the insolent treachery of Ahmad er Raisuli in the Djibala. Although some 32,000 Spanish troops and 8,000 Spanish-led Moroccan Regulares were based in the western Comandancia, the new Ceuta – Tetuan railway was still being cut repeatedly, and troops venturing far outside those towns risked battalion-size engagements.22 Berenguer stripped Raisuli of his Maghzan governor’s title and declared him outlaw, and in October 1920 he thrust south to capture the town of Chefchaouen, thus cutting off Raisuli’s base in the Beni Aros hills from eastward access to the Ghomara country (see Map 18).

  (One of the assets that Berenguer deployed in the Djibala and Ghomara soon afterwards was a newly formed volunteer regiment. The Tercio de Extranjeros, authorized in September 1920, was the creation of Lieutenant Colonel José Millán Astray y Terreros
of the Regulares. Millán Astray had argued successfully that in Morocco the conscript army needed a spearhead unit of professionals like the French Foreign Legion, which he studied during a visit to Sidi bel Abbès in October 1919. In fact the Tercio differed in several fundamental respects, most obviously in that foreigners never actually made up more than about 10 per cent of its manpower. Pay was three times higher than that of Spanish conscripts, but discipline was even harsher. Millán Astray chose as his second-in-command the 27-year-old Major Francisco Franco, as fearless as himself but a great deal luckier. The Tercio’s first three battalions went into the front line on 20 November 1920.)23

  While Berenguer was an admirer of Lyautey’s political methods, his deputy in the Melilla Comandancia was now Raisulis old enemy the impatient General Silvestre, with some 20,600 Spanish and 5,100 native troops under his command. Silvestre chose to ignore the cautionary advice of both Berenguer and Colonel Gabriel Morales, his experienced native affairs chief, and during 1920 he pushed his lines of blockhouses south and west across the plain and into the edges of various highland tribal territories, with the intention of extending Spanish control as far as Alhucemas Bay in Ait Waryaghar country during the 1921 season.

  During the immediate post-war period, the Spanish authorities had given way to French pressure to extradite some Berbers who had used Spanish territory as a base for wartime attacks into the French zone. This precedent caused considerable alarm, and in January 1919 the Ait Waryaghar activist Mohammed bin Abd el Krim – now released from prison – left Melilla and followed his father into the hills. That spring, his younger brother was summoned back from Madrid, and together they began to recruit followers among their own and neighbouring tribes. In September 1920 their father died, allegedly poisoned on Spanish instructions. His former leadership in raising the tribes against El Rogi had already lent his sons prestige, and now they were by far the most informed and far-sighted personalities in the Rif. The autumn of 1920 saw the fourth bad harvest in succession and the winter of 1920/21 was unusually cold; the tribesmen were in a mood to listen.24

  IN THE SPRING OF 1921, THE WESTERN LIMIT of General Silvestre’s advance ran roughly from Sidi Driss on the coast, north of Anual, to Souk el Tleta on the upper Oued Kert, south-west of Azib de Midar (modern Midar – see Map 18). There were four main camps including Dar Drius (modern Driouch) and Anual, but many of the Spanish troops were dispersed in about 144 tiny blockhouses, each imprisoning a dozen or two soldiers.

  It was later judged that some 130 of these served no sensible military purpose whatever. Lines of communication were long and poorly guarded; the light railway only reached Midar, the roads beyond there were bad (government funds for improvements disappeared into many pockets), and few posts had any intercommunication. The typical blockhouse was a one-room timber cabin with a corrugated iron roof and loopholed walls reinforced on the outside with chest-high sandbags, containing little but an oildrum for water and another for use as a latrine. Most blockhouses were sited with neither easy access to water, nor safe tracks for the convoys on which they relied for their endless diet of rice and beans (the arrival of even these was unpredictable, since much of their rations and most of the commissariat’s supply trucks being quietly diverted to private rackets). The hungry soldiers sweltered or shivered in these boxes for months at a time; their clothing was inadequate and lice-ridden, their medical care derisory, their weapons old and neglected, and any kind of tactical training or even target practice was virtually unknown – some men had never even fired a rifle. Discipline in the ranks was harsh, but among the officers slackness, absenteeism and corruption were endemic. Subalterns were so ill-paid that many had to take second jobs in order to live; their wives bartered cartridges for vegetables in the Moroccan marketplaces, and captains were notorious for embezzling their companies’ ration allowances. Sergeant Arturo Barea described a few officers as kindly, brave and energetic, but far too many as lazy and brutal; so ignorant of their profession that they could not even read a map, they spent their time in the bars and brothels of Melilla rather than training or caring for their men.25

  General Silvestre had brought the local Beni Ulichek and Beni Said tribes to sullen submission by burning their crops and running off their cattle, but he had not disarmed them. During the hard, hungry winter of 1920/21 the tribes heard rumours from the west (as did Silvestre, who responded with contempt) that the brothers Abd el Krim were gathering Ait Waryghar, Ibbuquyen, Ait Ammarth, Gzinnaya, Ait Tuzin and Timsaman tribesmen in the hills. Mohammed Abd el Krim was not a physically impressive figure, but he was a charismatic speaker able to project his vision with intelligence and conviction, and his younger brother Mhamed provided him with shrewd counsel and real military talents. By the summer of 1921 they had assembled between 3,000 and 6,000 warriors, though only a small minority with black-market modern rifles. More significantly, however, Abd el Krim was not merely assembling a harka; he was preaching a political programme, and increasingly exercising political muscle by intimidating other Rifian chiefs who negotiated with the Spanish.26

  Consequently, in late May 1921 one segment of the Timsaman asked the Spanish for the protection of a post planted at Abarran in their territory. A feeble sandbag enclosure, with walls just 3 feet high, was constructed for 250 soldiers and some native police. On 1 June, the native auxiliaries mutinied, killed the officers, and aided Timsaman and Ait Tuzin tribesmen in attacking the garrison, from which only about 70 managed to escape. On the same day the coastal post of Sidi Driss was also attacked, but despite 100 casualties this held out. General Berenguer arrived by ship to confer with General Silvestre on 5 June, but the high commissioner later wired Madrid that there was no cause for alarm. The next day Silvestre ordered the establishment of a new battalion camp at Igueriben, in the hills about 3 miles south of Anual, nearest source of water.27

  ON 17 JULY 1921, ABOUT 3,000 WARRIORS from seven Rifian tribes struck all along the Spanish line. Igueriben was cut off, and after four days – and finally reduced to drinking their own urine – Major Benitez’s garrison were overrun and massacred. Anual itself came under heavy fire on 21 July, the day that General Silvestre arrived there in person. Early the following morning he signalled his intention to break out. The subsequent enquiry by the Picasso Commission would report that the garrison was 5,000 strong but with only 40 cartridges per man, and that Anual was so badly sited that the Berbers could almost reach the barbed wire unseen. The withdrawal on 22 June soon degenerated into a rout, and many men were ambushed and cut down. Silvestre and his staff all died; the body of the native affairs officer Colonel Morales was handed back later as a mark of respect, but no part of General Silvestre’s corpse was ever recovered. It should be noted that at Anual the Spanish troops outnumbered the Berbers.

  As the survivors staggered into posts and small settlements further to the east, the plague of panic spread, provoking a wholesale stampede towards Melilla. Many posts were abandoned, with much equipment and even the helpless sick. Some blockhouse garrisons did resist heroically until they were wiped out; it was hardly surprising that others, left in ignorance by their absent officers, surrendered without a fight when offered safe conduct. (These almost invariably had their throats cut on the spot; the few captives who were spared were usually survivors of garrisons that had fought with stubborn bravery.) The news of victory spread within hours, and tribesmen poured down from the hills in their thousands to join in the killing and looting. At Dar Drius, Silvestre’s deputy General Navarro was ordered to hold a line anchored on that camp, to which other garrisons were fleeing, but on 23 July (just as General Berenguer arrived at Melilla with the first few reinforcements) Navarro retreated towards Monte Aruit with between 2,000 and 3,000 men. A refugee train arriving to find Dar Drius abandoned was derailed by tribesmen and its passengers butchered.

  As fugitives straggled across the waterless plain, airmen reported corpses scattered for miles along the tracks in their wake, and some of the bodies later recovered s
howed signs of atrocious deaths.28 Up on the coast at Sidi Driss, just 5 out of 500 men managed to reach the ship that arrived to rescue them on 26 July. Officers at Souk el Tleta chose to lead some 1,200 men south-west towards a French border post, but only about 400 survived repeated ambushes. On 29 July, General Navarro reached Monte Aruit, a rambling adobe village 1,000 yards from the nearest water source. To his credit, he refused to abandon the sick and wounded without whom he might have been able to reach Melilla some 20 miles north. Instead he dug in, waiting for relief that never came; he had hardly any food and no anaesthetics or other drugs, and 167 of his wounded died of gangrene over the following eleven days. After agonies of endurance, the garrison of Monte Aruit surrendered to the Berbers on 9 August; General Navarro and some others were taken alive, but most were massacred at once – when Spanish troops returned there they found 2,600 unburied corpses.

  Some 40,000 refugees crammed into Melilla town, and since General Berenguer discovered that the stores and magazines there were empty, it is hard to imagine what their fate might have been had the Berbers not chosen to withdraw by mid – August with their almost unimaginable loot. This included at least 20,000 Mauser rifles, 400 machine guns, 130 artillery pieces and enormous quantities of ammunition. Although it would be years before the true casualties were admitted (in so far as inadequate record-keeping allowed), in three weeks the Spanish Army – attacked at first by only about 3,000 tribesmen largely armed with obsolete weapons – had lost some 13,200 men killed, or about half the entire Melilla command. To put that figure in context: in June 1876, Custer died with just over 200 of his men at the Little Bighorn; in January 1879, Chelmsford lost about 1,360 men, of whom perhaps 700 were British regulars, at Isandlwana; and in March 1896, General Baratieri lost about 5,000 Italian troops killed by the Ethiopians at Adua. This Spanish disaster was by far the greatest defeat of a white colonial army ever yet inflicted by non-European enemies, and Abd el Krim’s name went around the world.29