As soon as VI/1st Foreign reached the summit they began organizing its defence, but the Rifians gave them very little time before bringing them under heavy fire and – since grenades are mentioned – pressing in closely. The fort entrance, on the west, was too exposed to use, and men had to break a new one in the southern wall. Pechkoff complains that ‘we were isolated. There was no continuation of our line on the flank, because the other units did not occupy in the specified time the assigned positions’ – which suggests that one of the Skirmisher battalions that had not kept up had been supposed to occupy the hill immediately to the west and south-west of Astar. The 21st Company occupied the shelves below the north-west corner, covering the access via the western slope; the 23rd held a ‘hillock’ to the south (conceivably the site of the still-visible trenches?), in visual contact with a Skirmisher company around a ‘tower’ half way down that hillside; and the 24th were apparently placed east of the 23rd ‘overlooking the valley’. Major Cazaban:On arriving at the post we found ourselves nose-to-nose with the Moroccans, and had to fight with grenades. Our installation on the plateau was very unpleasant; the Rifs had placed snipers less than 500 yards behind [i.e. on the western hill], and any légionnaire who showed himself attracted a hail of bullets. They also had machine guns, and served them admirably. In short, during the day any work was almost impossible, and by nightfall the battalion had about 50 dead and wounded.
The légionnaires’ grubby khaki drill must have blended well with the hillside, but their off-white képi covers would make them easy to spot, and easy to count in the different positions.
The gun platform at the north-east corner of the summit was ‘on the edge of a precipice’; the 75mm gun was found to have been dragged off and dumped lower down, minus its breechblock. Pechkoff’s 22nd Company held the post itself, sheltering the wounded in the ‘half-destroyed barracks’; the stench of decomposition led them to a shallow grave holding the corpse of a French sergeant whose charred feet and legs showed that he had been tortured, perhaps to reveal the breechblock’s hiding place. (There is no further mention of the prisoners taken during the assault, and we may wonder whether this grisly discovery led to their being shot. Cooper insists that Pechkoff was a reflective and humane man, even towards the enemy; but Berbers surrendered as reluctantly as Japanese soldiers twenty years later, and given their treatment of French casualties there was no inclination to go to the trouble of guarding them.)
Pechkoff placed one of his platoons with machine guns on the artillery platform, ‘formerly connected with the outpost by a trench through which one could walk to the platform unseen. Now the entrance from the post was filled up and there were 20 yards of bare ground to cover before we could enter the trench [, which we] occupied . . .’. (Today the unprotected circular gun platform of beaten clay is quite evident, as is the shallow trace of an access trench with a drystone parapet.) Pechkoff’s légionnaires had not been in position more than half an hour before they wereattacked heavily from all sides. We could not believe . . . that anyone could hide among these steep rocks. Yet on all sides we saw white and grey burnouses creeping cautiously from one stone to another. Our men in the trenches and on the platform had to repel successive attacks . . . Several times the enemy reached the edge of the platform, only to be kicked off by our men. The firing was incessant . . . The Rifians came on us in a flood. We threw hand grenades into [their] midst . . . [and drove] them out of the trench and off the platform with bayonets. It lasted for more than an hour . . .
This account is extraordinary when one sees the dramatic slopes north and east of the gun platform, but Rifians are born mountaineers with legs like steel springs. The exposed platoon almost ran out of ammunition, and Pechkoff describes two of his men walking insouciantly back to the walls to collect more, with bullets kicking dust around their feet. His company took at least 21 casualties, and a platoon from the less hard-pressed 23rd had to come up to reinforce him. There is a suggestion that at about 4.30pm there was an ill-informed signal requesting Cazaban to send one or two of his companies back down to the valley – if this is true, he certainly did not comply. Pechkoff writes that the order to spend the night on the summit arrived in early evening; the night was very dark and misty and the légionnaires were kept on the alert, but no attacks were made on them despite the opportunities for infiltration offered by the badly damaged wire.
The morning of 5 June dawned clear and sunny, but Major Cazaban was clearly seething with impatience for orders. At 6.50am he signalled Colonel Mativet at Mobile Group Headquarters:1. Will Astar be re-occupied, and if so by what garrison – or will it be abandoned?
2. Send up mules for the machine guns and battalion baggage to the base of the slope an hour before my disengagement.
3. I have three men wounded too seriously for [carried] stretchers and will need mule-litters for them. When I am warned of the mules’ arrival I will transfer the casualties.
4. I need two extra [carried] stretchers for casualties from 24th Company.
5. I have in all nearly 60 killed and wounded.
Mativet replied to this testy signal with assurances that the mules and stretchers would be sent, and that there was no question of holding on to the hill. Below it, the operation by Colonel Callais’ Moroccan Skirmishers to cover the withdrawal from Sker could be seen and heard. The dead were buried on the hilltop and the wounded were prepared for carrying down to the mule rendezvous. From this point the two main accounts differ in emphasis. Captain Pechkoff – writing for publication – has a signal arriving ‘soon’, reporting the success of the Sker operation and informing VI/1st REI that the main force would begin falling back at 7am:‘Keep strict watch to your right and left. Enemies reported in your direction. When you see the blockhouse nearest to you blown up, prepare to leave the post within half an hour . . . You will become the rearguard to protect our retreat.’ The nearest blockhouse was blown up. As always, the heavy material was sent on ahead. The wounded were evacuated. The men carrying the machine guns on their backs followed. Now we had to slip down the mountain as quickly as possible . . . We tried to make our preparations without the enemy noticing; although we could not see them they were certainly all around us. We threw ourselves down from the summit in a cloud of dust, but we had hardly left the post when burnouses began to converge on us from all around.
In fact it was 11 am before Lieutenant Lababe arrived to announce that the mules were waiting, and the evacuation could begin. After the wounded, stores and machine guns reached the mules, the 21st Company, as the furthest from the escape route, clambered up from their outlying shelf and pulled out first, then the 22nd, followed by the 23rd; the 24th should have gone last, but apparently they were confused by flares fired by turcos further down the hill and left rather early, covered by a rearguard under Lieutenant Guyon. At the bottom, 21st Company took up firing positions at the hamlet of Baid. Captain Pechkoff:The men who reached the foot of the mountain first climbed the next crest to cover by fire the retreat of those who followed; these would then stop in their turn and protect the further retreat of the first element . . . Thus the enemy, hoping for a panic flight, were confronted instead by an organized withdrawal during which the steady fire of the légionnaires inflicted heavy losses.
Our pursuers lost contact, but we still had to cross some thickly wooded country. We entered the trees by platoons, separated but in contact. The woods were full of Rifians, whom the légionnaires could not spot until they were a few yards away. The men advanced without hesitation, throwing grenades. The last element, with which I was marching, was violently attacked from the right. My orderly was close beside me, carrying a grenade that he told me was ‘for you and me’ . . . The 20 or 30 men around us were admirably calm, manoeuvring as if on an exercise, stopping now and then to take advantage of the ground and fighting the enemy one-to-one . . . At last we got out of the enemy’s clutches. Not far from camp we stopped to reform our ranks; many men were wounded . . .
After seeing Pec
hkoff in battle, Cooper wrote that the one-armed captain habitually led from the front, firing his revolver with his left hand, but would stop to check the condition of his wounded, and when one of his men was killed he would cross himself in the Orthodox fashion – Cooper once saw him kiss a dying man on the forehead.
Major Cazaban’s private letter to his regimental commander is rather more thin-lipped in tone than Pechkoff’s memoir, and makes clear that the brigade’s staff work had left a great deal to be desired:I assumed that we would pull out at the same time as the battalions at Sker, but for reasons which it is not my place to discuss the order to break out reached me very late, at about 11 am, long after Callais Group had retreated to Taounate. Since 6am, foreseeing the difficulty of disengaging, I had been asking for orders, and had asked for mules to be sent up to the base of the [upper] slope an hour before I was ordered to leave. They arrived only 15 minutes in advance. My orders assured me of flanking units, and battalions placed in forward reserve west of Taounate. That was not what actually happened.
After delaying my disengagement by 10 minutes to permit the removal of the machine guns and ammunition, I was already pinned down inside the post, and it took grenades [to break out – which indicates that the Rifians were within 25 yards]. The enemy who had fought at Sker had moved [south] towards Astar to encircle us and cut off our retreat. We raced down the slopes of Astar, but from the moment of leaving the post we came under machine-gun fire from the very places where our flank guards should have been, since they had long departed. We were isolated. On our leaving the summit the Rifs sent up signal flares [ordering their men] to assemble and cut off our retreat. We speeded up, but the machine-gun fire was worthy of the Great War.
We counted on the fact that once we reached the bottom we would be welcomed and supported by the reserve units from Taounate, as I had been assured. But these units had already left, and had been replaced by the Rifs. Our withdrawal to Taounate was a painful business, under fire from behind, the flanks and the front. Nevertheless, we arrived without too many [new] losses, though exhausted . . .
The battalion has been worthy of its excellent reputation, and the Legion continues to have very strong ribs; unhappily, the affair has again cost us dearly – we lost 71 dead and wounded.47
ON THAT SAME DAY, 5 June, the darkness finally closed over the Colonial garrison on Bibane. It was their eleventh day under direct bombardment by at least two guns, which sent 20 to 30 shells a day into the post. The garrison were forced to spend most of their time on the increasingly battered perimeter, while the Rifians in the surrounding trenches were relieved every 48 hours. Even a successful air-drop of ice blocks only gave enough water for about one mug per man, and their food was semolina sopped in a mess tin of water warmed in the sun. An assault late on 1 June had been preceded by bombardment with captured VB rifle-grenades. On the 2nd, heavy fog prevented any signals contact and kept the aircraft away; down at Tafrant, where General Colombat’s staff had joined Captain Pietri, Prince Aage could hear firing all that day and the next. With Rifian forces already behind him, to his left, in the direction of Fes (and others attacking his own camp every night) Colombat dared not concentrate his overstretched units to save this one position; he knew it was doomed, and so, probably, did the 23-year-old Bernez-Cambot. On 3 June the sergeant signalled that he had lost 8 more men, and asked for artillery support; he got some, but it was fired more or less blind and ammunition was too short to keep it up for long. Prince Aage wrote that at 9am on the morning of the 5th he saw Rifian shells bursting in the air above the post (if true, then a startling sign of the enemy gunners’ growing sophistication). At about 4pm that afternoon he could see movement right up against the walls; soon afterwards the flashing lamp signalled ‘Post done for . . . Sergeant B . . .’ – and then the flashes stopped. Paul Colombat, with his huge white moustaches, was a sternly nineteenth-century figure; even so, Aage wrote that on this occasion the general’s eyes were wet with tears.48
WITH BIBANE GONE, Aoudour and Achirkane were indefensible, but Colombat’s request to evacuate them was again refused by Lyautey. On 7 June, Colombat had to march west for Ouezzane with part of his remaining force, leaving a Colonel Pompey in command at Tafrant; Pompey immediately signalled the two garrisons to break out the following night if they could. Lieutenant Franchi ceased signalling from Aoudour at 9pm; soon afterwards there was a loud explosion, and repeated signals asking Franchi to send up a green flare if he was receiving went unanswered. Later that night movement and grenades were heard, so the artillery fired on fixed lines and a platoon was sent out; at about 1.30am on the 8th they returned, with Franchi and almost all his 50 Senegalese. He had cut small breaches in the front walls for his two field guns, aiming them at maximum depression, and a larger gap in the side facing the escape route, where a shell crater offered cover about 60 yards outside the wall. At the last moment he pulled long lanyards to fire the two guns simultaneously, and slipped out through the darkness. After they broke through one line of enemy with grenades, Franchi ordered his men to unload their rifles, and they cut their way almost silently through a second line with bayonets and knives alone. There was still no news of Achirkane, so a 10-minute box barrage was fired around the post at 3am. Intermittent firing and grenades were heard getting closer to Tafrant, and at about 4am Sergeant Morel and some of his platoon came in, followed by others; after a first clash they had separated into their three squads, and some of each had made it.
The daylight hours of 8 June passed quietly, since there was not enough artillery ammunition to shell the Rifians swarming over the abandoned posts and recovering the serviceable guns.These were turned on Tafrant at 9.30pm that night, but although the aim was accurate the shells were duds. Post commanders had instructions to bury the fuzes separately if artillery ammunition had to be abandoned, but in this case they were apparently found within hours, because Tafrant was shelled again to some effect that evening. (That day Major Stephani of the 19th Algerian Skirmishers was killed; from a starting strength of 800 in April, his marching battalion had by now suffered about 70 per cent casualties and was disbanded.) On 9 June, Colonel Pompey was ordered to leave only six companies and a few guns in Tafrant and to march south. From Fes el Bali that night Prince Aage watched the artillery-flashes and ghostly blue-white flares as Tafrant was attacked in force. He thought the Rifians would have done better to bypass it and follow the column, which was tired and low-spirited, burdened with baggage, wounded and 1,200 mules, and protected that night only by hastily scraped trenches.49
TAFRANT AND TAOUNATE, isolated and under repeated attack, were now the essential remaining bastions on the north bank. They seemed capable of holding out, and so for a time did the last lonely northern outposts at Ain Bou Aissa and Beni Derkoul, but Mediouna south of the river clearly was not. The camp at this now unusable airfield east of Ain Aicha was held by about 40 French conscripts and Senegalese of the RICM, and on 10 May Lieutenant Bouscatier signalled that he was out of water and down to the cartridges in his men’s pouches. The now familiar double ring of Rifian trenches surrounded the post, and the most recent attempts to resupply it had been beaten back. At Gara de Mezziat, Colonel Freydenberg ordered the mauled VI/1st REI to try to evacuate the garrison that night.
Major Cazaban decided that trying to mount a battalion attack after blundering across some 5 miles of unknown ground in the dark would be worse than pointless, and instead formed a ‘free platoon’ of 40 men under Lieutenants Guyon and Fain to attempt a coup de main to reach Bouscatier and bring his men out. Cazaban and Guyon selected them from the many volunteers who stepped forward from different companies; they wore canvas shoes or wrapped puttees round their boots, and carried only weapons and ammunition. An aircraft dropped a warning to Bouscatier to disable the guns and have his men ready for a break-out; Pechkoff writes that the white buildings at the airfield were clearly visible from the top of Gara de Mezziat that afternoon.50 The plan was for the groupe franc to leave camp at 11pm, cros
sing the Ouergha ford to the south-east and making their way silently towards Mediouna via the abandoned post site of Oued Drader. The rest of the battalion would follow 15 minutes later to take up a reception position at the old post, where Guyon was to rendezvous if he was successful.
The plan went wrong almost from the start, partly due to the over-eagerness of men who had been rejected for the operation. The rescue party got away on time, but was accompanied by two extra subalterns who showed more courage than discipline (Lieutenants Wable and Belaygères), and was followed without orders by perhaps 15 more légionnaires. When the battalion reached the Ouergha they had difficulty finding the ford and waded the icy river at a deeper point, with the result that in the cold night air the men would thereafter be shivering and distracted. The moon was veiled by high clouds and gave a confusing light, and as the battalion made their way east in single file through tall cornfields the officers were unable to locate the Drader rendezvous (one account puzzlingly places it on a ridge, but there seems to be no such feature between the river and the airfield). The ground of these flats is cut here and there with abrupt drainage gulleys like miniature canyons, at least 6 feet deep, which must have added to the difficulty of quiet movement on a compass bearing.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 74