Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  SINCE BEFORE DAWN, meanwhile, other units had been picking their way down a pass from the heights of Bou Khamouj, and at about 8am were advancing on El Mers from the west. In the forefront were Captain Bastien’s VII/22nd Spahis accompanied by goumiers led by Lieutenant Henry de Bournazel, who had been detached from the regiment to the Native Affairs service that same month. The rolling country was covered with tall barley, and as the cavalry rode through this they came under sudden heavy fire from Ait Segrushin concealed all around them. The squadron made too good a target against the sky, and were ordered to dismount and form a defensive square around their horses until infantry came up. In this perfect cover tribesmen easily drew close to the kneeling troopers, and others were attracted to join the fight, both firing down from nearby high ground and converging through the crops. Lieutenant Berger was hit three times; then Captain Bastien took a bullet full in the chest, and Henry de Bournazel took command – as so recently an officer of the 22nd he was better known and trusted by the Spahis than by his own irregulars. He too was hit almost at once, but only by a ricochet that tore his scalp, covering his face with a mask of blood more alarming than serious.

  Bournazel ordered some of his goumiers to remount and follow him, to clear the riflemen from a low ridge that he judged the most dangerous threat. They did not, and he found himself riding up the slope alone – a single bloody-faced horseman in a bright red tunic. The Berbers concentrated their fire on him, but he got within 50 yards of the crest before his horse stumbled and went down. He stayed in the saddle and beat it to its feet again; it lurched on up the ridge, and in the face of this obvious sorcerer whom they could not seem to kill, the tribesmen fell back. By now some goumiers and Spahis had been shamed into following him; behind them the first double-marching infantry had at last reached the Spahis in the barley and were delivering volleys, and the first shells were bursting; nevertheless, the legend of ‘the Red Man’ had been born. (In the culture of the tribes, a leader’s personal qualities were widely discussed, and his supposed baraka was a significant factor in their calculations. It was not mere bravado but shrewd psychology for Bournazel to stick to his scarlet tunic thereafter.) By noon the squadron had re-formed, and cleared several further features during the continued advance on El Mers. Prince Aage saw them coming in from his left front; he took professional pleasure in the skill with which they alternated between mounted movements and skirmishing on foot with carbines, but he noted men being shot from their saddles one after another. Altogether the El Mers campaign seems to have cost the 22nd Spahis some 200 casualties.16

  As the sun set the tribesmen finally gave up El Mers and fell back into the hills to the east. The Legion’s I/3rd REI had also been heavily engaged up on the ridges, and Major Barrière was among the casualties. That night snipers were more active than ever, and Prince Aage estimated that 40 men were hit in his camp alone. In the chill darkness he visited the casualty clearing station at the foot of the Bou Khamouj ridge:Huddled at the base of the escarpment was a group of hastily erected marquees, surrounded on three sides by a brown sea of stretchers, white-spotted with anxious faces. One of the tents had been utilized as an operating theatre for the more urgent cases, while others were used as dressing stations. There was as yet no means of bringing trucks up to this point, so the wounded were evacuated by mule transport.17

  COLONEL FREYDENBERG’S TAZA GROUP was closing in from the north, and, in late June, Major Naegelin’s II/3rd REI and Kratzert’s VI/1st REI finally climbed on to the Taddoute plateau against stiff resistance. Meanwhile the Southern Group moved east from El Mers into Marmoucha tribal country, aiming for the plateau of Immouzer at the south-west end of the long Djebel Iblane (see Map 19). In terms of arrows on the map it looked as if the jaws of General Poeymirau’s groups were closing, but in this terrain no true encirclement was possible; hills might be taken and held, but blocking all the ravines and saddles between them against night movements would have taken half the French Army.

  On 17 July, Théveny’s brigade occupied Ait Mahklouf south of Immouzer, and that evening the bivouac of I/2nd REI came under heavy fire from 200 yards’ range while the légionnaires were still building the murettes. They pushed the attackers away, only for them to return in even greater strength; the Berbers were riddling the camp from all sides, and on the north-west they made dangerous progress and forced one platoon to give ground. Leading the men closest to him in a counter-charge, Major Buschenschutz took a Mauser bullet in the chest and suffered a collapsed lung – in those days always a life-threatening wound – but the counter-attack re-took the lost ground. There was no field hospital within miles; Prince Aage called for volunteers, and picked 20 men to carry and escort Buschenschutz’s stretcher in relays. Despite pitch darkness and difficult terrain the légionnaires covered 12 miles in less than three hours, and the Alsatian major survived. (Aage’s baggage mule was killed during the attack, and his cook served him mule steaks for days – ‘not at all bad’).18

  The occupation of the Immouzer plateau in the last week of July involved three days’ fighting against Marmoucha tribesmen by two columns each led by a Legion battalion – I/3rd REI (Major Susini) and II/2nd REI (Major Jenoudet). The latter unit was ordered to clear and hold a wooded hill; they had hardly reached the top when they were hit by the first of several counter-attacks, and the day cost the battalion 25 men killed and 49 wounded. The moment of first occupying a summit was among the most dangerous, since the Berbers often counter-attacked immediately before the soldiers could organize a perimeter or set up machine guns. (In such terrain one of the two-gun platoons of the battalion’s MG company was often attached to each rifle company.) As the first platoons reached a crest – panting, disordered, and perhaps having lost their subaltern or NCOs during the assault – tribesmen who had dropped a little way down the reverse slope might fire into their faces and launch an uphill rush at extraordinary speed:It is necessary above all to nail the troops to the ground; surprised soldiers cannot manoeuvre, and may turn tail without hearing or understanding the orders they are given. The only comprehensible order [at such moments] is ‘Halt!’ . . . This allows the men to get a grip on themselves and the officer to take them in hand and, if necessary, to force their obedience . . . It is unwise to simply give the order ‘Face the enemy!’, which leads to confusion . . . All you should ask of them is that they fight individually on the spot. Give the command ‘Halt – lie down – individual fire at will – rifle-grenades, fire!’. If despite this the enemy still get within 50 yards the platoon commander should order the designated hand-grenadiers to throw two each . . . We have not given enough emphasis to hand-grenade training in Morocco, but it should play a fundamental role in close combat.19

  The following day, as the Southern Group moved north-east along the edge of the Djebel Iblane towards a junction with the Taza Group coming south, Major Kratzert’s VI/1st REI with Taza Group lost 18 killed and 36 wounded while holding off counter-attacks. On 11 August both II/ and III/2nd REI (Majors Jenoudet and Janson) had to fight their way up slopes thick with holly-oak and ilex, and Janson lost 22 men killed and 51 wounded. Jenoudet’s battalion had an easier time until they reached the summit, where the exhausted légionnaires, with empty waterbottles, had to fight off several counter-attacks from heavy cover. One of these rushes got right in among them; 12 men were killed and 17 wounded, among them Jenoudet himself, shot through both thighs (he was replaced by Major Fernand Maire, the officer who had distinguished himself with Nicolas’ battalion above Skoura the previous year). On 17 August the Taza and Southern groups finally linked up, before elements of the Southern moved south towards Almis des Marmoucha. On 3 September, near Souk de Ait Bazza, a series of fierce attacks on a Moroccan Skirmisher battalion ‘produit un léger flottement’; this elegantly phrased panic (‘a light floating . . .’) was quelled by charges that cost two companies of I/2nd REI another 33 men killed.20 These were not Western Front casualty rates, but they were significant; to put them in perspective, at th
e time of writing such a loss would be regarded as very serious when suffered by a British battalion not in one day but during a whole six-month tour in Afghanistan.

  The year’s operations wound down in early October 1923 as the autumn rains brought major movements in the highlands to an end. To ‘capture’ ground is an almost meaningless term in such terrain, but General Poeymirau had penetrated a great deal of new territory, brought more Berber clans at least temporarily to terms, and installed Native Affairs officers and small post garrisons in a tighter ring around the Taza Pocket. Some of these forts would be held during the winter by dispersed companies of Skirmishers and légionnaires, but the luckier units now marched back to their regular garrisons around Fes and Meknes. Three Legion battalions had earned citations in Army orders, adding the War Cross for Exterior Operations to their flags. Captain Prince Aage wrote that the 1923 Middle Atlas campaign had cost the French Army ‘about 100 officers and 3,000 men killed, with wounded and other casualties proportionately numerous’; to judge by the ratios in individual actions, that means total casualties of perhaps 9,000 all ranks in six months. Marshal Lyautey could be grateful for the fact that few of these were the sons of French voters.

  On 11 November General Poeymirau presided over a ceremonial Armistice Day review of the troops at Meknes. After dining his officers in great style he insisted on strolling round the noisy streets to visit the dives where his soldiers were celebrating; in the Café des Negociants he was loudly cheered and toasted by NCOs of the 2nd Foreign Infantry. Six weeks later ‘Poey’ was back in France, dying of septicaemia from a ruptured appendix 21

  DURING THE 1923 CAMPAIGN, Poeymirau’s operations had been supported by six of the ten air squadrons (escadrilles) then in Morocco, each with eight biplanes, whose major contribution had probably been short-range reconnaissance for ground columns.22 Low flying in the thin, hot, turbulent air between the peaks was always demanding. Messages could sometimes be dropped in weighted bags, though this was highly problematic in broken country; most communication was by a simple code sequence of coloured flares fired from signal pistols, in response to coloured panels laid out on the ground pointing in a particular direction. For instance, a yellow flare meant ‘Ground ahead clear’, and a red one ‘Danger of attack’ (six-star flares, meaning simply ‘Where are you?’, were probably a heavy item of expenditure).23 While some air/ground wireless communication was available to major headquarters, it was one-way: aircraft had only transmitters, not receivers, and the ground station had to signal them in the usual way with panel codes and Morse lamps. This – and the rapid movements of a dispersed enemy – limited the usefulness of aircraft for artillery-spotting.

  In terms of direct support, light bombs were intimidating but aiming them was simply a matter of luck; enemy scattered in thick cover presented an almost impossible target for bombing, though strafing with machine guns could be more effective. A more generally valuable mission was aerial photography, and to make up for the lack of maps the squadrons photographed nearly 6,000 square miles of the Middle Atlas in 1923. Since the start of the 1921 campaign they had also played a supplementary part in the evacuation of the sick and wounded, flying out 1,200 casualties during those three years. The aircraft were general-purpose types, and although each squadron officially had six combat and two evacuation aircraft, additional machines could be rigged for the latter role if needed; in 1921 – 23 this proportion was apparently sometimes reversed.24

  WHILE THE BATTALIONS of the 2nd and 3rd Foreign from Meknes and Fes had been operating with the mobile groups in the central Middle Atlas, further south, those of the 4th REI from Marrakesh had been pushing south-east from Kasbah Tadla. Resistance was not dramatic, and the knots of further posts were tied in the net that Lyautey’s generals were weaving across the mountains.

  The most basic function of all such posts was to lock the ratchet on the advances achieved each summer by the mobile groups; they were the visible symbol to the tribes of French determination (‘if you come, you must stay’), and each spring some of them formed supply depots for that season’s operations. The ‘half-life’ of resistance in newly penetrated country lasted several years, and the forts provided sentry-posts on the limited number of access routes between the territories of submitted and unsubmitted tribes, where reports of clan concentrations or other movements gathered by Native Affairs officers allowed the garrisons to pre-empt or interdict raids. (It was not expected that perfect peace should reign within submitted tribal areas; marauding and pillage were punished, but usually the district officers simply demanded to be kept informed of feuding, and would sometimes specifically agree to a ‘fight of honour’ between the warriors of mutually hostile clans in order to release tensions by giving them a chance for some limited killing. Lyautey always insisted on working with the grain of the Berber character.)25 In times of serious trouble it was believed that an area that would otherwise tie down twelve battalions could be controlled by just four if an armature of posts was already in place.26 Physical control obviously extended no further than machine-gun range from many of these forts, though the larger ones were soon equipped with a single gun manned by a couple of Colonial artillerymen – not for self-defence, but to extend their interdiction of nearby routes.27

  One of the most vivid memoirists of this aspect of Legion life was a one-armed Russian, Captain Zinovi Pechkoff, who, as a 30-year-old corporal, had been gravely wounded and medaillé at the foot of Vimy Ridge in May 1915. Born Zinovi Sverdlov, he had been adopted at the turn of the century by the great writer and liberal activist, Maxim Gorki (A. M. Pechkoff ), and had taken his name. Since his time in the trenches he had performed more confidential services for the Republic; in January 1920 he had been confirmed in the rank of captain in the Legion and posted to Morocco, where he fell in love with both the country and his enduring and ever-resourceful légionnaires. 28 On 1 April 1923, after a punishing march in heavy rain, Pechkoff’s battalion of the 4th Foreign (prematurely issued cotton summer uniforms) began to build a fort for a Senegalese garrison at a spot called Koomsh:The crest of the mountain was thickly wooded, and in order to have a clear view of the ground around the camp we had to cut down trees that stood there like a wall . . . Others with hammers and picks were to break the rocks and clear the ground so that the tents might be pitched. A road had to be made to bring up the guns, mules, horses and men . . . Then the rain started to fall again; torrents of water descended on us and made the ground like jelly . . . Some of the men worked through the night putting up barbed-wire defences, while others built a stone wall to protect us . . . All night the rain did not stop. It grew colder and colder, and before dawn snow had whitened all the slopes of the mountains and also our tents.

  During the morning the snow continued to fall. Nevertheless the work had to be done. Gangs of men went to work – masons, stone-breakers, miners who drilled the rocks in order to dynamite them, men with picks and shovels who traced the outline of the post. Other men . . . dug holes in the ground to make lime kilns; others cut down more trees for firewood to feed the ovens where stone was being transformed into lime . . . We are the pioneers who open a new country [and] who do the hardest work. After the Legion, other men will come . . . Their names will be known. But it is our men of the Legion who have paved the way with their untiring labour. Every path we make bears the pain of our men.29

  By 15 April construction was completed, and the half-company of Africans was installed with three months’ rations. There they would stay, linked to the outside world only by a mail courier twice a month, and a field telephone line that would certainly be cut by the tribesmen.

  On reaching the plains again, Pechkoff was halted at El Ksiba and told that his men were to build a blockhouse on the Ifren plateau for the use of a friendly caid (Lyautey was still pursuing his old policy of creating armed ‘home guards’ among cooperative clans). This meant another three-day ordeal in execrable weather, and when the battalion hobbled back towards Kasbah Tadla on 22 April many were
sick and some stumbled along behind the column, literally barefoot. Nevertheless, when the town commandant sent wagons out to meet them not one man accepted the chance to ride; this was emphatically not the Legion of 1919 – 20. The band and the garrison turned out to welcome them, and the légionnaires were given two days to rest, clean themselves up and draw new uniforms. When they hit town there were always old comrades and new acquaintances to drink with, and female companions happy to help them spend their pay:They fill up all the cafés in the small town. The main street contains almost nothing but cafés. There the légionnaire dances to the music of the mechanical pianos – his képi over one ear, his tunic unbuttoned, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Half-drunk, he is still filled with the vision of the desert, of the mountain, of the dust on the road, of the long marches . . . He forgets himself in the rhythmic swing of an old waltz, or in the quickstep of an ancient polka. They dance their national dances, their folk dances, in a cloud of smoke and dust . . .