Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  Suddenly there was a shout, and a few rifle shots rang out; some troops had got disoriented in the high, swishing grain, and there is a suggestion that they ran into some of the unauthorized men without warning. Whoever was at fault, the ‘friendly firing’ not only compromised the operation but wounded several men, including Captain Billaud of 24th Company – which was already missing two of its officers with the rescue party. The wounded had to be carried, which added to the noise. Two hours after crossing the river, when a flurry of grenade explosions was heard perhaps a mile ahead, the battalion were still groping around in dispersed parties. It was about 2am; after waiting for a while, the furious Major Cazaban decided that the best he could do was pass the word for his companies to fall back to the ford – which was at least a fixed point for the rescue party to aim for – and set up a reception position there.

  When they had recrossed the river with some difficulty, the adjutant-major Captain Chavanne went forward again on reconnaissance, but without result. Cazaban held an officers’ call, and it was only then that he discovered that Lieutenants Wable and Belaygères were missing from their companies. As first light was approaching at 4am, he ordered his shame-faced battalion back to Gara de Mezziat. As they approached the camp they were met by Spahis whose commander told Cazaban that three stragglers had come in, and that he was on his way to cross the river and search for the missing Legion platoon. The mood in camp was sombre, and even more so when a full roll-call revealed that about 60 men including the 4 lieutenants were unaccounted for.

  The sources are contradictory over the exact number of survivors who straggled in, but in a private letter to his colonel Cazaban wrote that it was five. They included Corporal Vietorovsky of 23rd Company; he reported that after getting lost several times the rescue party had broken through first one, then the second ring of trenches, but that only one officer and about 10 men got inside the camp. There Lieutenant Bouscatier joined them with some of his men; together they tried to break out to the south, but before they could get beyond the wire they were surrounded by hundreds of Rifians and the action broke up into a series of desperate little hand-to-hand battles in the dark. Vietorovsky had fallen into one of the gulleys and made his way back to the river alone, where he met two other survivors. One Senegalese from the Mediouna garrison also made his way to safety; the Spahis returned without having found any other légionnaires, living or dead. In seven days Major Cazaban had lost about one-quarter of his battalion, at least half of them killed.51

  On 12 June the VI/1st Foreign paraded at Gara de Mezziat before not only Marshal Lyautey but also Marshal Philippe Pétain – the professional head of the French Army – and Prime Minister Painlevé, who had flown to Morocco on a fact-finding mission.52 Painlevé pinned the War Cross for Exterior Operations to the battalion fanion and decorated 50 individual officers and men. The sonorous euphemisms of the unit citation must have caused some uneasy smiles (it called the Mediouna operation a tragically qualified ‘success’), but to be decorated by the prime minister in person made the hard-used battalion feel appreciated. One of four men awarded the Médaille Militaire was a Corporal Poulet of 22nd Company, a veteran of 19 years’ service in the Colonial Infantry and the Legion who had fought at Fes in 1911, with the RMLE on the Western Front, and in Morocco ever since. Pechkoff describes him as the old légionnaire of folklore: promoted and busted many times, a valuable self-taught expert in many skills, a reliable volunteer for dangerous message-running, a father to the young soldiers, but a hopeless and troublesome drunk when in barracks. Hubert Lyautey still had his matchless touch; when Painlevé had pinned the yellow-and-green ribbon to Poulet’s chest the marshal saluted the veteran, took off his white glove, shook his hand, asked him about his service, and then told him to report to his tent after parade. There he sat Poulet down and poured him coffee with his own hand while they continued their reminiscences – an honour of which the légionnaire boasted far more proudly than of his medal. Sadly, it was the undoing of him; his mates got him uproariously drunk that night, he neglected his duty, and finally he had to be sent back to the depot. He was not the only admired old soldier who was straining the patience of his superiors.53

  ON 13 JUNE, PRINCE AAGE was with General Colombat at Ouezzane, where the senior commanders were convened by Marshal Pétain and Prime Minister Painlevé.54 The French forces were still on the defensive right along the Rif ‘front’, and tribal irregulars were changing sides in their thousands. Lyautey was well aware that apart from Foreign Minister Briand he had little influential support in Paris, while Philippe Pétain enjoyed huge public respect and authority. In any post-mortem on the reverses of the past two months Lyautey could point to the long delay in satisfying his request of the previous December for reinforcements; nevertheless, his confident insistence on the effectiveness of his time-honoured methods had been discredited. After so many years of unchallenged authority in his field of special expertise he was bound to feel embarrassed and resentful at close scrutiny, on his own ground, by a powerful ‘new management’ who pressed him, however politely, to justify his opinions. A man who habitually argues his views with passion only to then shift them loses credibility: Lyautey was now urging not only the paramount importance of military rather than political action, and full cooperation with the Spanish, but even an attempt to get the British involved.55

  Although there were encouraging signs that the Hayana confederacy north of Fes were resisting the Rifian incursions, villages around Tissa were still being burned, and there was little good news elsewhere. While General Bilotte tried to shield the capital, and Freydenberg was barely keeping alive the remaining northern posts on his central front, Colombat Force was having increasing difficulty maintaining those north of Ouezzane. Europeans had now been evacuated from Private Ziegler’s ‘enchanting’ town, and his unit was taking serious casualties. In the lush countryside around Zitouna, Major Deslandes’ II/1st REI provided the rearguard for a convoy that was ambushed in strength on 14 June, and its 8th Company were isolated for three hours while they and the 5th manoeuvred against heavy opposition to cover one another and break free. In camp that night near Brikcha, Ziegler tried to wash away the memory of his dead comrade Kersten’s bullet-smashed face with ‘an excellent cold punch’, mixed by the medical orderly Weisse from pilfered ampoules of chloroform, water and a little sugar.56

  The Deslandes battalion’s operations to sustain Brikcha, Ouled Allal and Rihana continued without respite, and on 17 June they made first contact with a unit of the Spanish Tercio near the Rihana border post. The Madrid talks were achieving the first steps towards coordinated if not necessarily combined operations, and both armies could now exercise rights of hot pursuit across the zonal border. During these weeks the Moroccan Skirmishers and légionnaires needed artillery support to fight their way through gorges and over ridges to reach the encircled posts, and the fighting sometimes came to hand-to-hand. The Mounted Company/4th REI, now operating with II/1st, also saw hard fighting (at Beni Rouber the doomed Private Siegel, with five tribesmen closing in on him, hurled his empty carbine over their heads to his comrades in order to save it). On 19 June, the II/1st REI were fog-bound and short of food and ammunition at Ouled Allal, waiting for a resupply convoy from Ouezzane. The first few trucks arrived with rations, but those with ammunition did not; they had been ambushed and wiped out in the pass of Brikcha, and their cargo could be heard exploding all through the night. On the 20th, the mobile group set off to march back to Ouezzane, and the Mounted Company – already badly weakened by fighting around Rihana, and now with pouches almost empty – ran into punishing fire at the pass. Private Ziegler described a disheartening scene of burned-out trucks and mutilated corpses, and the légionnaires had to tip the wreckage over the edge of the ravine before they could get through.57 On 26 June, Major Deslandes would write to Lieutenant Colonel Rollet:The battalion has already been fighting for a month without interruption, and I believe that we have given satisfaction to the high command. But
the young men have not stood up very well to the great fatigue that we have had to endure, which is really painful. The life that a man leads in Morocco these days is very hard and demands a strong physique to stand up to it. The battalion has lost around 100 killed and wounded since 25 May, and we have another very hard operation in prospect. We hope that we will come out of it decently.58

  BACK ON THE CENTRAL OUERGHA, 14 June brought the extinction of Beni Derkoul post, on which the Rifians had been able to concentrate since the fall of Bibane on the 5th. On 11 June, Sub-lieutenant Pol Lapeyre had laid out a panel signal for an aircraft to pick up a message; this was hung from a cord strung between two posts, and at the seventh attempt a pilot managed to hook it with a dangling grapnel. It informed Captain Pietri at Tafrant that only 11 of the garrison of 39 were still unwounded, and that they needed water by the 14th at the latest. A night sortie to reach a spring had been partly successful, but only at the cost of three of Pol Lapeyre’s Senegalese; their corpses were now dangling upside down 50 yards outside his wire, one of them with signs of a fire under his head. Stored in the post were 1,600lbs of blasting explosive for road construction work; Pol Lapeyre reported that he had piled this up with all his spare ammunition, and laid fuses to the three positions from which he fought.

  His company commander had been warned that if Beni Derkoul fell, the local Beni Mesguilda tribesmen would kill their pro-French chief and rally to Abd el Krim. Captain Pietri managed to get a whole squadron to drop medical supplies, a box of medals and ice blocks, but only three blocks fell inside the perimeter. Whether or not he believed it, Pietri promised his subaltern a relief column on 16 June, and gave him the option to break out if he could, though he knew that Pol Lapeyre could not carry all his wounded and would never leave them to the Rifians. On 13 June the garrison was down to six unwounded men, and on the 14th Pietri could see tribesmen swarming all over the slopes. He had no artillery – two days previously the battery had been taken eastwards to support another sector – and the range was too long for his machine guns to make any difference. At 11am the lamp flashed ‘Am under determined attack’; and at 2pm, ‘Tower taken. Fire on our position. At what time should I . . .’. There were no more signals; but at about 7pm an enormous fireball rose from the smoke-covered hilltop, followed by the growl of a thunderous explosion. After holding out for 61 days, young Pol Lapeyre had finally declined to let his men be taken alive. The Beni Mesguilda duly changed sides.59

  By the end of June, 43 of the 66 French posts north of the Ouergha had been either overrun or abandoned during the ten weeks of fighting, with the loss of some 50 guns, 35 mortars, 200 machine guns, 5,000 rifles and a great deal of ammunition. The French were admitting to 1,955 troops dead or missing, plus 3,780 ‘natives’ of imprecise definition. Rifian pressure both north and south of the Ouergha would continue throughout July. Taounate was closely surrounded and occasionally attacked; on 8 July the Rifians hit Tafrant again; on the 12th, Kelaa des Sless was encircled, and old Portuguese ruins on the heights of Djebel Amergou just south of Fes el Bali were lost. Ain Aicha was definitively relieved only on the 20th, and the last French post to fall, Ain Bou Aissa, was destroyed as late as 30 July when a shell hit the magazine.60

  AT THE TURN OF JUNE AND JULY, while Ahmed Heriro’s men were closing in on the frontier posts north of Ouezzane and refugees were pouring south to Fes, another and even more serious threat developed far to the east, where Cambay Force was shielding the northern edge of the Taza corridor.

  The hills around Kifane, about 20 miles north of the Taza – Msoun stretch of the road and railway, stood between Abd el Krim’s Gzinnaya allies and the vital French line of communication with Algeria through the country of the submitted Tsouls and Branès (see Map 20). Abd el Krim was competing fiercely for the obedience of these important tribes and, beyond them, for the gates to the still unpacified Taza Pocket in the northern Middle Atlas; if the clans around the corridor could be detached from the French Protectorate, then the strategic consequences might be dramatic. Since April an important part in countering Rifian pressure had naturally been played by Native Affairs officers and their local goumiers, and Lieutenant de Bournazel – the ‘Red Man’ – was leading part of Captain Schmitt’s 16th Goum at the post of Souk el Djelma south of Kifane. This sector, inadequately covered by a mobile group commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Henri Giraud of the 14th Algerian Skirmishers, was now threatened by about 4,000 Ait Waryaghar and Gzinnaya under Abd el Krim’s regional general Haddu n’Muh Amyzzan, and from mid-June separate clans of the Tsouls and Branès began to waver and crumble. Although the Spahis at Kifane itself held out, smaller posts further south began to fall; some Native Affairs officers were killed by their own men, and Bournazel, isolated in hostile territory, had a narrow escape when his own Branès irregulars decided to change sides.61

  The eastwards link between Freydenberg Force on the upper Ouergha, and Cambay Force on the northern approaches to Taza, was the upper Oued Leben, whose valley ran for some 25 miles through an almost trackless stretch of hills roughly between Ait Maatouf and Bab el Mrouj. In the fourth week of June the Rifians and their allies attacked both on the upper Leben north-west of Taza and around Sidi Belkassem on the upper Oued Msoun north-east of the town. They made considerable progress west of Taza, at one point tearing up the railway tracks, and 23 – 27 June was probably the most dangerous moment of the war for the French. Still with barely 60,000 troops in the whole of Morocco, General Daugan was now responsible for a discontinuous and apparently failing ‘front’ stretching nearly 200 miles, and in the face of Rifian successes tribes all along it were continuing to come out for Abd el Krim.

  While his battalions struggled to stop the Rifians and suppress the Tsouls and Branès around Taza, Colonel Cambay actually suggested that he should abandon the town and regroup eastwards towards the Moulouya river. Lyautey refused to turn the strategic clock back ten years by sanctioning a retreat that would have left about a quarter of his troops cut off from contact with Fes, but on 5 July (by which time the immediate threat was actually diminishing) women and children were evacuated from Taza as a ‘precautionary measure [that] gives the high command a greater liberty of manoeuvre’. However, by the 7th the dissidents had suffered defeats serious enough to persuade the Beni Bou Yahi on the Oued Msoun of the folly of rebellion.

  That week the first of 100,000 reinforcements ordered by Marshal Pétain from the Ruhr and France finally began to arrive in Morocco.62

  DESPITE CONTINUED SERIOUS INFILTRATION in the Ouergha sector, from late June General Bilotte was obliged to rush units south-eastwards to plug the gap on the Oued Leben, and one of these was VI/1st REI from Tissa. Such cross-country movements on foot were no less of a trial than they had been a generation before, and after a ten-hour day on the march, the exhausted and dehydrated soldiers faced hours’ more labour to pitch and entrench a camp before they could eat and – unless they drew guard duty – snatch four or five hours’ rest fully clothed in their bivouac tents.63 On 26 June the Cazaban Battalion were sent against one of a pair of enemy-held hills called Bab Taza, where the Rifians had entrenched themselves and built hides with overhead cover. Under murderous fire the alternating platoons had to worm their way forwards on their bellies until they were close enough to assault each position; the 21st Company got closest, but the rest of the battalion were stalled for some time 300 yards from the hill itself.64 Corporal Cooper, who was with the command group’s escort that day, recalled that at about 4pm a gloomy-looking Major Cazaban ordered Captain Pechkoff to take his company forwards another 100 yards:Pechkoff, as usual, was mounted on his white horse, leading his men . . . After a few minutes he rode back, very pale, and called for a drink of water. Cazaban wanted to know if there was anything the matter? ‘No, I only wanted a drink’, but as he wheeled his horse we all saw the white horse’s side was red with blood. The bullet had gone right through the [spur-] strap on his left boot . . . and out at the heel. I ran up to him and helped him from his horse [
and a] mule-cacolet was brought . . . I shook hands with him, and as he left he called out to me ‘Thanks for the asparagus!’65

  Most of the defenders later slipped off the hill under cover of darkness, and VI/1st Foreign occupied it on 28 June. Between 29 June and 17 July they were marched exhaustingly back and forth to occupy, fortify and hold various sun-parched hilltops on the upper Leben, with serious fighting on the 7th and 13th at a cumulative cost of another 35 casualties.66

  ON 6 JULY THE WAR MINISTRY informed Lyautey of the immediate transfer of the Moroccan Division from Germany, but also of the appointment of General Stanislas Naulin, GOC 30th Corps of the Army of the Rhine at Wiesbaden, as ‘commander-in-chief of troops in Morocco’ with promotion to four-star rank. While Marshal Lyautey’s title as Resident-General was unchanged, he would henceforth be reduced to giving Naulin ‘general instructions’ while confining himself mainly to the civil government of the Protectorate. When the president’s office announced Naulin’s appointment the next day, it stressed Lyautey’s ‘entire approval’ of the decision; he accepted it with outward serenity, and in fact he had asked in June for a senior general (though one to act under his orders, not to supplant him in military command).

  Inevitably, however, he and the whole French politico-military hierarchy perceived the appointment as marking the government’s final loss of confidence in Lyautey and in his 30-year doctrine of unified civil and military authority. General Galliéni’s colonial-style improvisation might have saved Paris in 1914 and earned him a posthumous marshal’s baton, but Galliéni was nine years in his honoured grave. Now the machine-generals of 1918 were going to take charge of this war, employing the massive numbers and firepower of conventional divisions and army corps with an integrated command structure, rather than ad hoc mobile groups cobbled together in the field by harassed colonels. On 16 July, Pétain – an embodiment of chilly pre-war Metropolitan orthodoxy who had never soldiered overseas – would return to Morocco in person for a detailed tour of inspection and to discuss with Naulin the ‘re-articulation of our order of battle’. By the late summer he would have no fewer than 120,000 troops on the northern front and 35,000 in the interior.67