When several battalions of the Legion are in town at the same time they dominate everything . . . On their two pay days [each] month . . . guards on duty at the different posts in the town and camp are entirely composed of légionnaires. The patrols that are sent around the city after ‘Retreat’ to round up any delinquents are always composed of légionnaires. All the other troops are kept in their barracks on those days in order to avoid trouble. A drunken légionnaire . . . if taken by a patrol of légionnaires, will go along with them quietly, but if taken by . . . other troops, trouble will start at once. Considering himself on a higher plane . . . he feels insulted if reprimanded or taken into custody by men of other units . . . 30
IN JUNE, PECHKOFF was sent with his company into the hills south of Beni Mellal to garrison a fort at Ouaouizarht (see Map 19). An independent mission in command of a company is one of the most deeply satisfying experiences in any officer’s career; Pechkoff delighted in the pre-dawn departures under a black velvet sky still ablaze with stars, and in the strong, contented swing of his légionnaires towards glorious sunrises. The company marched up the western flank of the djebel through settled areas around Timoulilt – ‘wonderful kasbahs, built very high of red earth, have shown us their thick walls and high towers. Superb gardens . . . almond trees, figs, pomegranates and groves of olive trees’ – but Pechkoff’s heart sank once he had crossed the pass and saw the isolated fort in the distance below where he was to spend five months with 60 men, while the rest were dispersed.
Such posts were naturally built on high ground, to avoid being overlooked from close range and for visual signalling with those on other summits. Their sources of water were almost always lower down, so small satellite outposts often had to be maintained at some distance to guard these, or to watch some kink or saddle along the mule-tracks that were the garrisons’ only link with each other and a supply base. Life in such even remoter blockhouses, held by a lieutenant with 30 men or even a sergeant with a dozen, was simultaneously tedious and nerve-racking, but even the main garrisons were so glad to see their relief arriving that the handover was accompanied by ceremonial and as good a feast as the stores afforded. After the inevitable business of resisting pressure to sign off inventories until his quartermaster- and ordnance-sergeants had applied due diligence, the new commander watched the old garrison recede into the silent distance under a thinning plume of dust, before he confronted his ‘thousand duties’:He is commandant of the post, commander of his unit, manager of the commissariat . . . for the entire region. All the troops in this section of the country are supplied by me. I am a grocer, a baker (we have two ovens . . . ) and a butcher . . . I also have to make contracts and buy the livestock. I have to deliver sugar, flour, lard, wine, and oats and hay for the animals . . . Each day is full, and one does not have a moment to oneself. Everybody comes to the CO with every little thing. The nights are not very calm, either: there are brigands around the post.31
Nevertheless, within a few weeks Pechkoff had settled into the routine and was enjoying himself. His légionnaires had plenty to do; Ouaouizarht – little more than a rectangle of walls when they arrived – would be a supply depot for future operations, and the garrison had to build a large storehouse in addition to constructing their own barrack blocks and stores. Since it was their own temporary home that they were improving, the men turned to with a will; they suggested extra refinements, and shamelessly robbed passing convoys of useful materials. (Starved of so much by the parsimonious commissariat, all légionnaires and NCOs were inveterate thieves and scroungers on behalf of their own units. If a convoy stayed overnight at a fort it was liable to find in the morning that even its best mules and saddlery had mysteriously turned into smaller beasts and older gear – ‘After all, mon capitaine, it is for the good of the service.’)
The soldiers were confined within the fort between ‘Retreat’ and ‘Reveille’, but even in such a remote spot sutlers had built lean-to canteens outside the walls where the légionnaires instantly spent their twice-monthly pay. Pechkoff enforced proper discipline, but he learned to handle his men tactfully for 48 hours each fortnight; he got to know them as individual characters, understood what they expected of their officer, and took satisfaction in exercising man-management by intelligence rather than rigidity. By August, when a general turned up with a dozen staff officers, the captain was proud of what he had to show for his men’s work: ‘[The VIPs] were well received on a small terrace that I had put up alongside the wall, under the branches of a giant olive tree which is one of four trees being left inside the fort. A long table was dressed by my orderly, and on it flowers had been placed in empty shell [cases] carved by the men.’ Much else had changed since Major Ibos praised them in 1911, but not the ‘universal handiness’ of légionnaires who could make a ‘rural home spring from the earth, comfortable and well run’.32
IN SUMMER, when the mobile groups were on the move in the hills, post garrisons often enjoyed the distraction of outside contacts, but in winter they led a much lonelier and harsher life. Throughout the year they relied on regular mule convoys and driven livestock for all supplies, but under the lashing late autumn rains the mountain tracks became virtually impassable due to wash-outs and mudslides, and when the snows fell all movement over any distance ceased. Isolated posts had to build up stores of every necessity in advance and simply shut themselves in to sit out the dreary months as best they could. This was wretched enough in a half-company fort, but in a platoon blockhouse it could threaten both discipline and mental stability; keeping his men reasonably busy, sober and even-tempered made immense demands on any young lieutenant. Telephone wires were often down, either cut deliberately or broken by natural accidents; in bad weather the signalling-lamp was only intermittently reliable, and the only method of passing very basic signals between a fort and its nearby outposts was by bugle calls.
While the tribes knew that mounting an actual assault on a post was suicidal, when the winter cut the garrisons’ communications and delayed any chance of relief or pursuit, small war parties grew bold enough to close in, watchfully. At night tribesmen were often lured by the stables for mules and horses built between the outer barbed wire and the walls. After snaking in through the wire, the more ambitious lay up in the shadows at the base of the walls and threw pebbles to try to tempt a dozing sentry into sticking his head out, whereupon a swung rope would coil round his neck and drag him and his rifle over the edge. In January 1924 Captain Pechkoff lost a sentry pulled to his death in this way, and also a platoon commander shot dead as he responded to the alarm.33
Soldiers did not venture far from the walls without good reason, but routine sorties to bring in water and firewood were unavoidable, and these corvées had to be conducted as serious tactical movements. If there were any Spahis with the main garrison they rode out first and occupied high points, but in all cases the machine guns in the watchtowers were cocked, riflemen manned the walls, and look-outs scanned the surrounding terrain with binoculars while the water parties led the mules to the river or well. Such corvées were preceded by an advance guard which went beyond the watering point to picket any overlooking crests while the kegs were filled; the escort fell back by alternate bounds as the mule train withdrew, and when they reached the fort a rollcall was held before the gates were shut. In the afternoons another party carried out any refuse for burial and might go on to cut firewood; again, the escort advanced as if into battle, bayonets fixed and ‘one up the spout’, with the advance squad deployed in line and the others in files on the flanks. Wood-cutting took longer than watering and was carried out at different spots often further from the fort, so pickets in all directions had to stay alert over several hours.
The outlying blockhouse garrisons needed regular resupply and occasional relief, and were not strong enough to send more than a few men down the trail to meet the mules half way. The routes and timetables of both corvées and supply parties inevitably became predictable, and by the tenth time an NCO had carried out
this duty without incident it was equally inevitable that he tended to relax his vigilance. Heads were hunched down into greatcoat collars out of the wind, numbed hands were thrust into pockets, and at a bend or a crest the little column began to straggle. This was the moment at which the Berbers would strike.
A few tribesmen noted for their ambush skills had been watching and remembering every detail for several days; the best shots with the best rifles occupied a height from which they could see far along the back-trail or even to the fort gates, while those with old muskets hid themselves among the rocks and trees a few yards from the track. However antique their weapons, the first blast at point-blank range could always drop one or two légionnaires in their tracks. While they were still kicking the warriors raced forward to pounce on them, thrusting their long knives into the belly and ripping upwards to gut their man and cut his belt with one upwards sweep, so that belt, shoulder braces and cartridge pouches could be wrenched free in one piece like a jacket. Snatching up the coveted Lebels, the Berbers threw themselves over the lip of a nearby gulley, leaping and sliding down the scree and out of sight in seconds, while their brothers kept the other légionnaires pinned down and those higher up covered the escape by firing on anyone emerging from the fort. The machine guns would spray the slopes and crests, blindly and with infrequent success, and by the time a strong patrol reached the survivors the Berbers were two ridges away.
The only protection against such ambushes was an Apache-like alertness and lightning reactions. At the first hint of danger the NCO shouted ‘Halt! – Drop! – Fire at will!’: every man had to throw himself down, whether behind cover or not, opening a rapid fire at visible enemies and into the cover around them. A few accurate snap shots might stop the immediate rush, buying precious seconds to roll behind a rock and fumble a hand grenade out of the haversack. Sometimes it worked, but seldom without the loss of the first one or two men. Lieutenant-Colonel Fabre hammered home the warning that disaster always punished the unwary sooner or later (though he was writing of the French Army as a whole, not specifically of the Legion):The examples are numerous. At a certain post where the water source was at some distance, three water parties belonging to different units which relieved one another there [successively] were all massacred. At another, a badly guarded work gang left 150 knife-torn corpses; at yet another, a large convoy escort was wiped out at a cost of 92 lives. None of these attacks lasted more than a few minutes.34
ONE EXAMPLE of a heavier than usual ambush, on 19 April 1923, is provided by the post that had now been built in the Tizi Adni pass above Skoura (as Captain Pechkoff’s diary emphasized, that month saw icy rain and snow in the Middle Atlas). Captain Laixelard’s small half-company of III/3rd REI had to send out half their strength that day, to resupply two outlying blockhouses and to establish a new outpost. The platoon had to start up the trail that had been followed by the same battalion under Major Nicolas for its thwarted push towards Taddoute the previous May. In the Tizi Adni the track hugs the hillside on the right (south) and the ground drops away steeply on the left, with wide views north-eastwards over the treetops to the broad Oued Sebou valley and the yellow hills beyond. On the right the stony earth slope, almost sheer at some points, is studded with rocks and thickly grown with tough little holly-oaks; after rain, deep drainage gulleys carve their way down and fallen rocks and mudslides encumber the track.
At 7.30am the 36 men were led out by Sergeant-Major Strohmayer with Sergeants Junnot and Peronne, and they moved tactically as soon as the barbed-wire ‘knife-rests’ were dropped back across the gateway behind them. They advanced cautiously across open, hummocky ground, the two squads deployed side by side in line with the usual files trailing back from the outer ends; behind them the post’s two machine guns were ready to cover their flanks, and QM-Corporal Thirier was manning one of the rare mortars with a crew of his company bakers. Strohmayer’s platoon had only got 120 yards from the fort when, as the right-hand squad topped a small rise, the sergeant-major saw his dog freeze and growl. He shouted the order to halt, drop and fire, and immediately about 30 Berbers concealed behind clumps of scrub began an intense fusillade. The fort’s machine guns and mortar opened up in support, but then a second group of tribesmen whom the patrol had already passed jumped up and charged their right flank. The trailing file of riflemen on that side and a machine gun in the post stopped this rush dead, but not before soldiers had fallen to point-blank fire.
At this point yet a third group of Moroccans were spotted further down the pass behind the post. When rifle-grenades were fired from the walls they slipped out of sight into a gulley, but then firing broke out from the high ground all along the right-hand (up-hill) edge of the upper pass. About 200 yards below the fort a group of white-clad tribesmen were seen on a summit surrounding a man in a red burnous who was watching developments intently, but the bakers’ mortar bombs quickly scattered them into cover. By this time Sergeant-Major Strohmayer was down, with a bullet in his belly and a finger shot off his right hand; Sergeant Peronne took a mortal wound, and other men were falling fast. The medical orderly Private Muller, hit twice behind the right hip, kept firing until directly ordered to crawl back to the fort, where his skills would be needed. Sergeant Junnot took command and led a grenade-charge on Berbers firing from a height to cover the retreat of their main party into the gulleys, carrying their dead and wounded. The firing died away at about 10.30am; the légionnaires advanced, finding two corpses and a Lebel rifle. Strohmayer’s platoon had suffered ‘about half’ its strength killed and wounded; but at 10.45am the new outpost was installed as ordered, and by 1.45pm the two blockhouses had been resupplied.35
IN 1924, DESPITE CONTINUED ILL-HEALTH that forced him to undergo another operation, Lyautey’s attention was increasingly demanded by Spanish Morocco, where a surprise decision that autumn would have direct consequences for the French zone.
In the aftermath of the Anual disaster, the high commissioner General Berenguer had been reinforced to a strength of some 150,000 men and instructed to pursue outright conquest of the hostile country around both presidios. At Melilla, although Abd el Krim had generally been content to consolidate in the hills rather than trying to hold the plain, it had still taken 36,000 troops six months to re-occupy the lost territory. With new tribes joining their alliance every few weeks, the Abd el Krim brothers held the hills west of a line running roughly from Afrau on the coast down to Souk el Tleta on the Kert river south-west of Midar (see Map 20). The Spanish conscript units were employed defensively, leaving most of the aggressive fighting to the Tercio and the Regulares, who achieved results but at heavy cost. The Rifians dominated the routes up into the highlands, and they had learned to dig trenches; in the winter of 1922/23, they beat off two Spanish attempts to advance westwards around Tizi Azza, an important central pass between Anual and Dar Drius, inflicting more than 2,000 casualties.
In the Djibala, the Spanish finally captured Ahmad er Raisuli’s base at Tazrut in May 1922 and compelled him to withdraw into the mountains. In the Ghomara country to the east, Abd el Krim was extending his influence; Raisuli regarded the Ait Waryaghar leader with envious hatred, but faced a choice between surrendering to the Spanish or trying to negotiate a junior partnership with the growing Rifian confederacy – an unlikely prospect. In September 1922 his dilemma was solved when Berenguer was replaced by General Ricardo Burguete, who bought off tribal leaders and reached terms that left Raisuli in his Beni Aros hills to rule the Djibala hinterland. As always, Raisuli’s nominal loyalty to the Maghzan was entirely cynical, but he knew that he would not be able to gull Abd el Krim as he had the Spanish – if the Rifians reached the Djibala he was doomed.36
Spanish Army morale was understandably low, and soldiers and public alike were divided between those who hungered for revenge and a strong ‘abandonista’ tendency. All Spain was horrified when, in January 1923, negotiations with Abd el Krim via the International Red Cross finally resulted in the ransom of Spanish prisoners taken at A
nual and Monte Aruit. In return for 4 million pesetas and the release of Moroccan prisoners the Rifians handed over 326 survivors from the roughly 570 who had been taken alive. After 18 months’ captivity they were in a pitiable condition, although some testified that they had been treated as well as could be expected at a time when a typhus epidemic was ravaging the Rif.37
ON 1 FEBRUARY 1923 Mohammed Abd el Krim had himself proclaimed the amir (prince, commander) of the Rif and demanded recognition of its independence, under a provisional government (Jibha Rifiya) headed by himself and a council mostly composed of his Ait Waryaghar relatives. Later French propaganda claims that he was actually seeking to usurp the sultanate were clearly false, but his ambitions, like his capabilities, far surpassed those of any previous Berber leader during colonial times. That same month the abandonista Moroccan affairs minister, Santiago Alba, appointed a civilian high commissioner, Don Luis Silvela, with a remit to negotiate, and in June representatives met on board ship for secret exploratory talks. It is not surprising that they failed, but it was significant that they took place at all.
Abd el Krim was now entering the period of his greatest influence in Morocco and his widest fame abroad. The Daily Telegraph’s man in Tangier, Colonel Repington, might refer to him as ‘that interesting bandit’, but commentators on the Left portrayed him as a statesman who was seeking legitimate rights of self-determination for his people. His agents maintained a network of overseas contacts among anti-colonial idealists and fringe politicians who offered encouragement, though many of these had their own agendas. Abd el Krim (the Spanish-educated journalist) was far more sophisticated than the usual tribal leader, and his communiqués – publicized as far afield as Latin America – were couched in terms designed to appeal to foreign audiences, complete with sonorous references to principles established by the Treaty of Versailles. Visiting correspondents were fed a wide range of stories about his regime’s supposed capabilities and intentions; they wrote more or less gullible reports, barbed with accurate denunciations of Spanish bombing of helpless villagers, and thus created a positive image abroad.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 69