Our Friends Beneath the Sands

  Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, April 19251

  The brutal fact is that we have been suddenly attacked by the most powerful and best-armed enemy that we have ever had to encounter in the course of our colonial operations.

  Marshal Philippe Pétain, August 19252

  THE POTENTIAL VULNERABILITY of Fes to events in the Ouergha valley is dramatized today by the shortness of the journey between them – a morning’s drive, barely 40 miles on a modern road through the arid, cream-coloured countryside that begins immediately north of the capital. The differences of character between the two ends of the journey are rather more noticeable. North of the river the hills press in closely, and once you are properly among them the dominant impression is of steepness, parching heat, separation and privacy. Hamlets, homesteads and fields are fringed with canebreaks, pale green cactus spotted with red flowers and the grey blades of aloes, all standing out against slopes dark with old olive groves. Higher up, the thin soil between the sharp brown rocks is patched with wispy yellow grass and tough scrub, with younger olive trees – planted in recent years, more to stabilize the hillsides than in hopes of a worthwhile crop – somehow sucking a beggarly life out of the sun-baked earth.

  These higher slopes had not yet been planted when, in May – July 1924, Lyautey’s advance initially installed 40 small posts along a shallow arc stretching some 90 miles through the hills north of the Ouergha valley, from roughly Ouezzane in the west to Kifane in the east (see Map 20). Later that year the number was increased to 66, but apart from native auxiliaries almost the only troops defending this whole outpost line were the 2,400-strong 1st Morocco Regiment of Senegalese Skirmishers (1st RTSM). Lyautey had just 40 infantry battalions at his disposal in the whole country; of these, 19 were with General Chambrun on this northern front, and 14 of those were held back in reserve.3

  THE POSTS were typically sited no more than 2 miles apart, each within signalling-lamp contact with its neighbours. The theoretical priorities were a high position with good intervisibility and clear fields of fire, and access to water. In practice, of course, one or more of these requirements was usually compromised, since the specific terrain features dictated everything. Very few of the posts bore any resemblance to the rectangular crenellated forts of the south, and nearly all had irregular perimeters. There are few clear photographs, and while instructional drawings give an idea of what many of them must have looked like, these, again, were naturally an ideal that could not always be achieved.

  Typically a post had an outline resembling an angular ‘D’-shape with circular corner bastions (see Map 21). The largest was a platform for a single field gun to cover the approaches to the neighbouring posts; since the gun needed to be revolved, this platform could not itself be surrounded by walls, but was reached through a chicane doorway in the perimeter wall. The other three bastions were slightly taller than the wall, open at the back, each with a machine gun or one of the garrison’s LMGs mounted on a timber and corrugated-iron floor. The thin soil of these rocky heights seldom allowed the usual on-the-spot production of mud-and-straw bricks, and the walls and bastions were built of piled dry stones, sometimes augmented with timber and sandbags. About 7 – 9 feet high, these drystone walls tapered towards the top, with firing-steps, splayed loopholes and niches for ammunition spaced along the inside. A splash of cement along the top secured a jagged fringe of broken beerbottles, and on the outside a horizontal ‘shelf’ of pickets strung with barbed wire stuck out just below this.

  Within the enclosure were a couple of small ranges of buildings – rooms for the commander, NCOs, stores and cookhouse, and a primitive barracks – built of stones bound with ‘bengali’ (clay mixed with a little lime) and roofed with timbers, corrugated iron and earth insulation. Spaced around these were a concrete cistern for about 5,000 litres of water, an open-air bread oven and a night-time latrine. The entrance was protected by timber and barbed-wire ‘knife-rests’ and a chicane wall. Outside, anything up to 40 yards from the walls to keep grenade-throwers at a distance, was a surrounding barbed-wire entanglement – one or two belts of concertina wire with sloping criss-cross ‘aprons’ on the outer side. On a small hilltop that distance often could not be achieved within direct sight of the walls; on a larger space the belt of wire was sometimes duplicated, with a daytime latrine, rubbish-burning pit, mule lines and sometimes even vegetable plots in the space between the two. The ideal was to keep the post as compact as possible, since the need to hold outworks simply weakened the already overstretched garrison, but sometimes an awkwardly modelled slope making a ‘dead angle’ forced the building of a little external MG position to cover the blind approach, linked to the perimeter by a trench.4

  The garrisons were typically of a single platoon, sometimes of a single squad; for example, at the post of Beni Derkoul the 21-year-old Sub-lieutenant Pol Lapeyre of 8th Company, II/1st RTSM, had a French sergeant and 2 artillerymen, 2 Senegalese NCOs and 34 rankers, with a 75mm gun and two Hotchkiss machine guns. The 8th Company were responsible for no fewer than six posts spread over some 7 miles west to east. Less than 2 miles to the south-east of Beni Derkoul was Achirkane (Sergeant Morel), and beyond that the company commander, Captain Pietri, was headquartered down in the valley at Tafrant, with lines of sight to his posts. A couple of miles further east, another group of three posts were closely spaced on hilltops from north to south: Aoudour (Lieutenant Franchi), Dar Remich (Sergeant Peron), and, on the high and isolated summit of the dominating hill of Bibane, a post commanded by Sergeant Bernez-Cambot.5

  On 12 April 1925, a shepherd warned Captain Pietri that a party of Rifians had come south and were pillaging the local Ouled Kassem tribe, and all that night Lieutenant Franchi at Aoudour saw flames lighting up the horizon. Pietri passed the report back, toured his posts, and was worried to note that Beni Derkoul had only about 600 litres in its cistern. He was at Aoudour on the 15th when Pol Lapeyre phoned him to report Ouled Kassem fugitives from Amjot in his wire, and by the time Pietri got back to Tafrant he could hear shooting from Beni Derkoul and the field telephone lines were dead. He was, of course, as yet unaware that a full-scale war had just broken out, which would cost the French Army more than 11,000 casualties by the end of that year.

  NOW AT THE PEAK OF THEIR STRENGTH, the Abd el Krim brothers had more than 70,000 fighting men potentially available (though not simultaneously). The most reliable were some 7,000 Ait Waryaghar, 6,000 Timsaman, 5,000 Ait Tuzin, and 5,000 Ibuqquyen and Gzinnaya together; the remainder were a mixture of conscripted levies from tribes right across the Spanish zone, from the Anjera west of Ceuta to the Beni Bou Yahi horsemen threatening the Oujda road in the far south-east. Typically these levies, aged between their teens and fifties, were called up for about one week per month and never for more than fifteen consecutive days, so as to maintain the necessary agricultural workforce at home. Thanks to their impressive cross-country mobility they could be rotated through their nearest fighting fronts, in forces that were often stiffened with contingents from the core tribes and units from Mhamed Abd el Krim’s regular brigade. The latter were the best armed, but were far from the only fighters to carry modern rifles. A claim that only about 20,000 such weapons were available has been repeated but may be considerably understated, particularly with regards to the eastern theatre .6 In 1921 – 2 the Berbers had been forced to gather their own ammunition from the battlefield, with Abd el Krim’s regime buying in any surplus; subsequently, gun-runners ran the Spanish naval blockade, and Rifian government arsenals were established in about eight centres. (The Taghzat tribe of the Senadja Srir people – the ‘gunstock Srir’, renowned weaponsmiths – had become adept at making hand grenades from unexploded Spanish ordnance, producing 450 from a single 200kg aerial bomb.)7

  On 13 April 1925, Mhamed Abd el Krim had sent five separate harkas of Djibala, Senadja Srir and Beni Mestara tribesmen, each stiffened with an Ait Waryaghar contingent, south into Beni Zeroual country from three directions. These first attacking waves probab
ly totalled about 4,000 men with the same number in follow-up forces, while Gzinnaya and Ait Waryaghar attacked further to the east around Kifane, the vital guardpost over the Branès and Beni Bou Yahi country. Showing an impressive degree of coordination, the dispersed war parties flooded through the hills independently, isolating the French outposts and bypassing them to maintain the pace of the advance. Clans that resisted were massacred and burned out, as was the Derkaoua Sharif’s zaouia at Amjot; refugees fled south, and the tribes north of the river fell like dominoes within a matter of days. The Abd el Krims appointed their own client chiefs, took hostages, extracted taxes for their war chest, conscripted warriors to fight beside them and forced labour gangs to dig trenches. Infiltrating forces pressed on south of the river, causing destruction and alarm in a dozen places. Before the end of April they would be at Tissa, only 28 miles from the very gates of Fes, and Lyautey would be reporting that tribes that had submitted ten years previously were showing signs of shakiness.8

  Lyautey’s appeals for reinforcements that winter had brought him, early in April, Colonel Barbassat’s three-battalion Morocco Colonial Infantry Regiment (RICM); fresh from the Ruhr, these were mostly young French conscripts completely untrained for colonial fighting. Acclimatized units from Algeria had also been promised, but the first did not begin to arrive even at Oujda until 21 – 30 April.9 On 25 April the marshal organized his available front-line troops in three commands: from west to east, Colombat Force (Ouezzane), Freydenberg Force (Ain Aicha) and Cambay Force (Taza), all answerable to General Chambrun. The battalions, squadrons and batteries forming temporary brigade-sized mobile groups within these commands would spend the next three months frantically marching and counter-marching to and fro along the whole Rif front, reacting at short notice to every individual threat even where the situation argued for local withdrawals. Any sign of weakness provoked more tribal defections to Abd el Krim; in this deadly match any score that was conceded increased the size of the opposing team. Any ground that could possibly be held, had to be held (‘if you come, you must stay’), and even when completely passive, the posts tied down Rifians who could otherwise have pushed more deeply into French territory.

  Against the background of shielding the approaches to Fes and Taza, the most characteristic missions were the resupply, relief and – when it came to that – the extraction of hard-pressed Colonial garrisons. Switched from sector to sector sometimes at 24 hours’ notice, the mobile groups spent almost every day of May to July either marching, fighting or digging; they often outdistanced their supplies, and in temperatures rising to 130°F (54°C) at noon and nearly freezing by night they were soon exhausted, ill-fed, filthy, and so ragged that men had to pin their torn uniforms together with thorns. They had no front line; their camps were rafts shifting around on a sea of dissidence, and while they were fighting to rescue one post to the north, others miles to the south of them would be overrun or abandoned. During these first critical months before reinforcements arrived in any numbers, the available units were mostly West African, Moroccan and Algerian, and the French conscripts of the RICM and a few Zouave companies were of limited value. Initially the hard core of the mobile groups along the Ouergha had to be provided by fewer than three Legion battalions: the II/ and VI/1st REI from Algeria, and half of the II/2nd and the Mounted Company/4th REI from the Middle Atlas. (The I/1st and the bulk of 2nd, 3rd and 4th Foreign Infantry were held back in the interior to ensure security in the Atlas during this anxious period.)10

  Given the complexity and repetitiveness of the lunges back and forth by the ephemeral brigades, no attempt is made here to give a connected diary of their operations. What follows is a representative selection of actions fought by the two most heavily committed Legion battalions and some of the Colonial units they tried to support, set against broad phases of operations, in the hope of conveying at least something of the character of the Rif War as it was experienced by the légionnaires.11

  THE HEADQUARTERS of the 6th Battalion, 1st Foreign Infantry was at Saida, but two companies (half of the battalion) were stationed at Kreider north of Mécheria, where they had spent a monotonous winter of drilling and route-marches punctuated by days-long sandstorms. 12 Despite the tedium of this posting, the commander of 22nd Company, Captain Zinovi Pechkoff, loved the wilderness, and often rode out alone to enjoy its silence and shifting colours. During one Sunday ride he encountered an English légionnaire from 21st Company exploring on foot, and the two struck up a conversation. Corporal Cooper was good at finding wild asparagus, which Pechkoff relished, paying for it with wine.13

  Adolphe Cooper, no sycophant, would write that Pechkoff was the finest officer he ever met in any army; he was immediately impressed by the one-armed captain’s skill in leaping up into the saddle of his grey, holding the reins in his teeth, but later the Englishman commended his brave and humane leadership in battle. Generally Cooper found French junior officers patronizing and lacking in useful experience, being schooled only in conventional European tactics. (In September 1924 this opinion was echoed by Lieutenant-Colonel Buchschenshutz of 2nd REI, who also complained that in the 1923 campaign subalterns had shown themselves deficient in practical knowledge of company weapons, being unable to fix stoppages when they should have been more expert than their men in every respect.)

  During March 1925, Major Cazaban’s VI/1st REI were given warning to prepare for active service; the men were not told their destination, but in a bustle of activity, weapons and equipment were checked, the men drew new uniforms, specialists were given refresher training, and medical inspections weeded out the unfit. While some of these were relieved to be staying in barracks, other older veterans were furiously ashamed to be rejected, and pulled every string they could to get back on the roster. On 19 April the final telegram arrived; it was a Sunday, and at Kreider the men were scattered around the vicinity of the camp when they heard the bugles blowing ‘General Assembly’ to call them in at a run from the farm and the sports fields. As they packed their knapsacks there was fevered guesswork about their destination – Tonkin? Syria? The last meal was cooked and eaten and rations were issued for the journey; the troops paraded in full marching order, the roll was called and the NCOs checked their inventories one last time. By late afternoon on 22 April the two companies were ready to march for the railway halt a few miles from the camp, led by the drums and bugles playing ‘Le Boudin’. Simultaneously the HQ, 23rd and 24th Companies entrained at Saida.14

  For Corporal Cooper the journey to Sidi bel Abbès took two days; after the overnight stop at the colon village of Perregaux many men had to be rousted out of bars, but the officers were indulgent – légionnaires did not desert when going on active service. At Sidi bel Abbès they were greeted by the central band of the Legion, and were finally told that they were on their way to Morocco. It was only when they passed through Tlemcen on the 24th and saw other troop trains heading west that they suspected that something major was going on, and when they alighted at Oujda that evening they heard for the first time of the Rifian attacks.15 Six trains carried the battalion to Taza on 26 April, but from there they had to march the next 15 miles through the Touahar pass to Sidi Abdallah for lack of rolling stock (normally the men went by rail and their mules and horses followed by road, but in this emergency animals were also being packed onto trains). At Sidi Abdallah the companies were met by trucks that carried them to the almost empty Fes depot of the 3rd Foreign. There was no time to celebrate Camerone Day on 30 April, which was passed on the march to an outlying camp. Next morning they set off on foot for the Ouergha front along hot, dusty roads crowded with infantry battalions, Spahi squadrons, gun-teams and gaggles of native auxiliary cavalry.

  On the night of 1 May the battalion bivouacked in a large camp below the rust-red hogsback hill at Tissa. There the VI/1st REI joined II/ and III/ RICM and two Skirmisher battalions to form Freydenberg Force, which marched on 3 May to Ain Aicha. The countryside was insecure, and the brigade moved in a wide, ponderous, tri
angular ‘hedgehog’ formation spread out over the dusty folds of ground and coordinated with difficulty by galloping liaison officers. It took them more than twelve hours to cover the 17 miles to the little town huddled under its jagged wall of grey crags and red fins, their arrival assuring its safety at last. From a hill above Ain Aicha the assembled officers were shown the summits to the north beyond the 5-mile wide river valley, where the chain of encircled outposts had now been awaiting support for a fortnight.16

  THE GARRISONS ALL ALONG THE FRONT had been under pressure since 16 April; the Tafrant group of six posts held by 8th Company, II/RTSM had been under heavy harassing fire by day and night, and Beni Derkoul’s platoon had been rationed to one litre of water per man per day. After a week of this, on the foggy night of 24/25 April determined assaults were made on all six posts, and the following night Lieutenant Franchi at Aoudour – encircled by Rifian trenches dug within 50 yards of his wire – lost the exterior blockhouse that guarded his water point, complete with its machine gun and 10,000 rounds. Captain Pietri managed to get aircraft to drop sacks of ice blocks into his posts to top up their cisterns – a hit-and-miss procedure, since the pilots did not dare fly too low or slowly through the Rifians’ massed fire. Pietri’s request for relief columns was refused by regimental HQ; on both his flanks 5th and 7th Companies were equally hard pressed – Captain Leboin’s 7th Company HQ at Aoulai was under direct artillery fire, and his posts at Mghala, Ourtzagh, Bab Cheraka and Bou Hadi were holding off violent assaults.

  On the night of 30 April/1 May the garrison of Bibane had to mount grenade and bayonet counter-attacks inside their own wire. The next day Colombat Force crossed the new trestle bridge that the Engineers had built from the village of Fes el Bali to the north bank of the Ouergha, but on 2 May the post at Bab Cheraka fell to Rifian shelling and assault (Lieutenant Moulin had already died of a gangrenous face wound, and it was Sergeant Boheme who signalled ‘Adieu . . .’).17 That evening Captain Pietri was told that Colombat would resupply his posts and evacuate his casualties on the 3rd; under cover of this diversion Pietri himself managed to get through from Tafrant to Beni Derkoul, and found young Pol Lapeyre in determined spirits. Rifle and automatic fire had echoed around the hills all day, but when he returned to Tafrant on the evening of 3 May, Pietri learned that General Colombat had been unable to break through the Berber trenches encircling Bibane, despite six hours’ fighting.18