A crowd gathered on the dockside at Casablanca when Lyautey sailed on the liner Anfa. To a cacophony of sirens and ships’ whistles, boats crowded the roadstead to escort him out to sea, but his own government denied him any naval compliments. It is pleasant to record that the British had better manners; as the steamer passed Gibraltar, two Royal Navy destroyers came out to provide an escort of honour, their crews lining the sides to cheer him. On the grey quayside at Marseille on 13 October he was greeted only by a knot of personal friends; the departmental prefect and the commanding general of 15th Army Corps sent their regrets that they were ‘extremely busy’. Lyautey’s friend Vladimir d’Ormesson would write that the only official communication waiting for this scrupulously honest proconsul at his Paris home was a demand for settlement of back taxes.82
Displays of public recognition may be fairly vain things, but a man of Hubert Lyautey’s character feels their denial cruelly, and few could deny that he had deserved better of the Republic. For some years thereafter he lived in bitter seclusion at his home at Thorey in the Meurthe-and-Moselle department; he yearned for the sunlight and beauty of Morocco, but he refused to speak of it.
THE FINAL PHASE of the 1925 operations was an attempt by General Boichut to push the French right wing northwards from around Kifane and Sidi Belkassem as far as the valley of the Oued Kert, linking up there with Spanish forces driving south-west from Midar (see Map 20).
The offensive kicked off on 27 September, and among the units committed would be Dolet’s II/, Cazaban’s VI/ and Merlet’s VII/1st REI, Major de Corta’s mobile group of I/ and II/4th REI and that regiment’s mounted company, and a single squadron – Captain Bourgeois’ III/1st REC – of the Foreign Cavalry. All achieved their early objectives, but atrocious weather brought the offensive to a premature halt after two weeks. French patrols actually met Spanish on 8 October at Souk el Tleta on the river Kert, but that line could not be consolidated. After General de Jonchay’s cavalry brigade was repulsed at Sidi Ali bou Rekbar on 11 October, the French pulled back to Souk es Sebt d’Ain Amar (modern Es Sebt), where a series of new posts would anchor the front during the winter. The curtailed operation had still forged a solid link with the Spanish, and had put French troops on the crest of the Djebel Nador, looking north along the valley of the Oued Nekor towards the Spanish beachhead in Alhucemas Bay.83
THE TWO LONGEST SERVING LEGION BATTALIONS at the front, VI/1st and II/1st Foreign, had been almost continously in the field – marching, labouring, and in action – since late April and early May respectively, with only four continuous days’ rest each. During those six months they had suffered significant casualties; for example, Captain Derain’s 5th Company of II/1st had lost to enemy action 4 officers, 15 sergeants and 48 corporals and privates out of a maximum of 175, and sickness and drafts would actually push its total losses to about 75 per cent by mid-December. Nevertheless, neither battalion was to be withdrawn from Morocco for another month, and that month would be spent in abject misery.
After two weeks’ hard labour in torrential rain, the Cazaban Battalion was moved back to Taza on 31 October, and on 2 November to Fes, where they were still under canvas. As a unit of the 1st REI, their logistic support throughout their deployment had been dependent not on Fes or Taza but on the depot at faraway Sidi bel Abbès, and – almost incredibly – it was only on 3 November that they were able to exchange their khaki cotton rags for woollen winter uniforms. They were sent to Meknes on the 5th, and at least received a warm and generous welcome at the 2nd Foreign’s depot, where they were given two days’ leave. On 8 November they went south by rail to El Hajeb, where they again had to bivouac in the cold and wet; on the 9th, still in pouring rain, they marched for five hours south to the post at Ito. The rain persisted; the battalion were periodically inspected by visiting doctors, and on one occasion by the local vice-president of the Red Cross, but the légionnaires still had to provide working parties. On 26 November, after more than two weeks spent rotting at Ito, the battalion were ordered to march on foot back to Meknes, and on arrival two days later they had to bivouac in the open once again.
The unit’s medical officer protested about this treatment, pointing out that many of the men were exhausted, verminous and shaking with fever. Finally, on 2 December the VI/1st Foreign boarded trains for Algeria via Oujda, where they stopped over on the 4th. The following day Major Cazaban paraded his battalion, made a speech of appreciation and presented decorations; on the evening of 7 December they at last reached their depot at Saida, where they would spend the rest of the month in relative comfort. (Three NCOs and 58 men had been detached at Meknes and sent as a draft to Major Lacroix’s I/1st REI down at Khenifra; they had drawn a spectacularly unlucky card – the Lacroix Battalion would be transferred up to the mountains of the eastern Rif in January, in exchange for Merlet’s VII/1st Foreign at Bab Soltane, north of Tizi Ouzli.)84
At Saida, from Christmas Eve until 29 December, the Cazaban Battalion were able to offer a hospitable welcome in their turn to the II/1st REI passing through on their way back to Géryville; it was now the Derain Battalion, since the captain who had led 5th Company throughout the campaign had at last been confirmed in command. The légionnaires whose fatigue had worried Major Deslandes six months earlier were in dramatically worse condition by the time they were finally pulled out of Es Sebt on 10 December. Dank fog had clung to the wooded hills, every gulley was a torrent, and mudslides tore the tracks off the slopes so that mule-trains could not get through. Their sodden uniforms hung off men who were too wasted with sickness to fill them, but the medical officer’s appeals for the battalion to be replaced went unanswered. Private Ziegler: At Souk es Sebt the storms were ceaseless; worn-out tents tore like paper, and it was impossible to erect them on a ridge in the strong wind. It never seemed to stop raining . . . It rained through the tents, now as thin as cigarette-paper; it rained on our mouldy bread; it rained on our rusty rifles (which were hardly worth cleaning, because the rust would bloom again in a couple of hours) . . . Rain ran through the tents, where men sat shivering on stones with their knees against their chests. The sentries were belly-deep in mud – luckily they had nothing to fear, since the Rifs were too sensible to leave their huts. Officially the II/1st were here for road-building, but in this weather work was often impossible. The death-list grew, from fever, dysentery and exhaustion, and the battalion became skeletal. New cases of sickness were continually thinning the ranks without a shot being fired – except by the night sentries, at the jackals quarrelling over the graves of the recently buried.85
The number of the buried, and of those who had no known graves, was only now becoming clear. On 21 October, the prime minister had informed the Chamber that French Army casualties in northern Morocco during the six months between 15 April and 15 October 1925 had been 39 officers and 2,137 rankers killed, and 8,297 all ranks wounded – a total of 10,473 casualties (a statistic that may exclude those who, like Ziegler’s comrades at Es Sebt, had died not from enemy action but from sickness and neglect). In mid-December, after two more months during which virtually no fighting had taken place, the war minister told parliament that the death toll had been revised upwards and the wounded downwards to 140 officers and 2,500 rankers killed, and 259 officers and 7,300 rankers wounded – 10,199 casualties. However, in December an additional figure was also released: 20 officers and 1,200 rankers listed missing in action, thus raising the total casualties for the year to 11,419. (Of the 1,220 men posted as missing, just 158 would later be recovered alive.)86
AT SAIDA, MAJOR CAZABAN was due to go on severance leave as soon as he had handed over interim command of VI/1st Foreign to Captain Villiers Moramé; the first officer to fall wounded on the slope of Taounate in the long-ago May sunshine had now taken over as second-in-command from Captain Chavanne, who was on his way to Tonkin. Of the company officers (originally 4 captains and 10 lieutenants), 4 lieutenants had been killed, 3 captains and 4 lieutenants wounded, and several others evacuated sick. Of th
e company commanders, only Captain Depesseville of the 23rd was still in post, and the 21st was on its third commander since May.
On Christmas Eve the major toured the barracks saying goodbye to his officers, NCOs and légionnaires. On 26 December he slipped quietly away while most of his companies were out on the exercise field; only the 21st, on barrack duty that day, saw him go, and provided the corporal’s guard that presented arms as his car drove out of the gates.87 The unit that Jean Cazaban had led for so many hard miles would soon be known as the Théraube Battalion; marshals and majors alike might come and go, but the Legion never broke its step. The holy routine of guard-mounting, inspections, maintenance, fatigues, instruction, exercises and rifle practice must not be interrupted; next spring the VI/1st Foreign, with nearly 200 new faces in the ranks, would be on their way back to the front line.
19.
The Reckoning
1926 – 30
The Legion, by their legendary qualities of calm, bravery and devotion, remain the best troops that one could possibly have at one’s disposal. Their battalions are remarkable in both attack and defence, forcing the admiration of those who see them under fire.
Captain Damidaux, 3rd Marching Division staff, 1926
They are magnificent fellows, these Berbers. They do not know the word ‘surrender’; one of them will engage a whole patrol. They never run away. I admire them and I love them, but I kill them on sight.
French officer, Marrakesh, 19341
THE RESTING AND REBUILDING of exhausted units during the winter of 1925/6 still left General Naulin with nearly 100,000 men in northern Morocco. One officer who considered that too many of them were being misused was Captain Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, formerly General Poeymirau’s operations officer in the Middle Atlas, who had five years’ Moroccan experience.
In November 1925, when Naulin had 72 infantry battalions, Captain de Lattre wrote that it was wasteful of men and resources, and bad for health and morale, to keep 60 of them idle in wretched winter posts in the mountains or in sector reserve immediately behind them, with only 12 in general reserve. The Rifians were nursing their wounds; 30 battalions would have been ample to hold the front, where goumiers and local partisans were bearing much of the burden, and the rest should have been getting the training in anti-guerrilla fighting that they so badly needed. De Lattre put this approach down to a Great War mentality: for the men of 1918, everything had to be done on a massive scale. This gave the rank and file the impression that their leaders dared not make any move without huge numbers and overwhelming firepower, thus implying an exaggerated respect for the enemy. De Lattre argued that everything that had been achieved in Morocco had been gained by speed – by well-trained troops, lightly equipped and supple in movement.2 It seems questionable whether Metropolitan conscripts could have been turned into anything approaching self-sufficient alpinists like the légionnaires and turcos in about five months. (The ideal presumably lay in some balance between the Pétain and Lyautey doctrines; but it is interesting to compare the 36-year-old de Lattre’s views with his later exercise of senior command in North Vietnam in 1951.)3 However, the French soldiers transferred from France and the Rhineland certainly needed retraining – at first, simply for movement and camping in terrain and weather that were dramatically more demanding than any they had known – and when they were sent into battle they and their officers would face some mental adjustments.
In the Moroccan hills, regular cavalry could seldom perform their European task of gathering the intelligence about enemy strengths and positions that created for a commander a picture of the early stages of the engagements to come. The partisans provided the most basic warning of contact but no real military information, and over wooded terrain even aircraft were largely blind. Since this weakness of reconnaissance usually made the advance to battle a game of blind-man’s-buff, the infantry had to be taught the colonial doctrine of marching straight at the enemy as soon as contact was made, without waiting for any ‘exaggerated’ superiority of firepower to be assembled. No trainee could be given any real preparation for the shock and confusion of actual warfare, yet now they somehow had to acquire the mindset needed for fighting a fluid, ‘feline’ enemy with a reputation – formed by outraged reports of the 1925 fighting – that made their blood run cold.
Peacetime manoeuvres in Europe had accustomed them only to slogging across fairly level ground as obedient pawns in huge formations; even those among their senior NCOs and battalion officers who had combat experience from the Great War were accustomed to the mental comfort of close proximity to other units, under the umbrella of massive artillery support. Now, while their organization and equipment dictated that these rote-learned lessons could not simply be abandoned, there was a real need to instil initiative and confidence much further down the chain of command, so that a company of 150 men finding themselves alone did not become paralysed by a defensive neurosis.
In Morocco, the artillery were freed of their instinctive fear of counter-battery fire, and if they could get well forward they had the relatively easy task of delivering direct fire on visible targets, but in this often trackless terrain the guns (and, as importantly, sufficient ammunition) could seldom keep up with the leading infantry in any strength. The infantry company had to achieve their own superiority of firepower with their own machine guns and LMGs, and they had to achieve it anew after every movement even over relatively short distances. The flanks had to be covered with scrupulous care, though only a modest reserve was necessary to deal with strictly local surprises. The unit had to have confidence in their weapons and advance at once to feel for the enemy’s flanks or gaps in his line. In defence, a single main line of resistance (with plenty of wire, if available) was normally enough; putting out little advance outposts would simply create ‘honeypots’ for the Berber infiltrators of every soldier’s nightmares. Rifian artillery would so seldom be encountered that there was no need for ‘defence in depth’, but the automatic weapons and rifle-grenadiers had to be sited for all-round defence – particularly at night.4
DESPITE DE LATTRE’S COMPLAINT that the number of troops holding the front line could have been halved, the hills were certainly not silent during the winter of 1925/26, and Lyautey would have been gratified by the vigorous activity of the Native Affairs officers and their goumiers. Gathering around them large gangs of local tribesmen whose chiefs had drawn sober conclusions from Naulin’s autumn victories, these officers were preparing the way for the spring campaign by patiently chipping clans away from Abd el Krim’s confederacy. For example, in December a force of 1,800 partisans led by just three French officers restored an expelled Marnissa caid to his territories north of Kifane; the core of the force was provided by Captain Schmitt with 500 ‘turned’ Gzinnayas, and Lieutenant de Bournazel at the head of 700 Branès. Although Caid Ahmar ben Hamidou only contributed some 350 of his own warriors to the adventure, the French were quick to proclaim him as the victor in order to build up his local prestige. (Henry de Bournazel attracted attention once again, fighting with a revolver when his horse was killed under him.)5
In mid-January 1926, such setbacks for Abd el Krim provoked a sharp reaction to punish tribes that had sought the aman – not only the Marnissa, but also those on the Legion’s old middle Ouergha battlefields. In the third week of the month there was renewed fighting between dissidents and French-led irregulars around Bibane and Dar Remich, which actually led to the defeat and submission of a chief of Abd el Krim’s own Ait Waryaghar. On 26 February, some 1,200 Senadja Srir began pillaging and massacring a submitted tribe in the Oued Sra valley north of Astar; fighting continued until 2 March, and although the Berbers had some machine guns it ended in useful advances by (the French claimed) partisans with French support only from the air. On 18 March the War Ministry claimed that the pacified zone now extended well forward of the military outpost line; the position was better than it had been before the Rifian attacks of April 1925, since for the first time most of the Marnissa a
nd Gzinnaya were now pacified.6
Abd el Krim’s achievement of at least a rolling or serial unity against the Spanish and French had been unique, but he had to work with the same kind of human material as any other Moroccan warlord. Even in times of success, attempting to ‘govern’ Berber chiefs was like herding cats, and Abd el Krim’s authority had begun to fade as soon as his long run of victories ceased in autumn 1925. He had always ruled as a puritan despot, greatly respected but not loved; there had been several attempts to assassinate him, and he, too, had disposed of opponents by secret poison, open execution and selective small-scale massacres. Now he was becoming reclusive, sealed off at his new headquarters at Targuist from all but the hard core of Ait Waryaghar and a circle of trusted lieutenants. As eventual defeat became inevitable, his alliances began to crumble; he had always employed coercion, but now he had to resort increasingly to pure terror to ensure obedience. Nevertheless, in the Djibala his young general Ahmed Heriro was still loyal and – despite his defeat the previous September – still active; in February 1926, he was infuriating the Spanish by shelling Tetuan sporadically with his cleverly hidden artillery. He also raised the tribes in the Loukos valley west of Zitouna to attack French and Spanish posts, but joint operations by Generals Dosse and Riquelme soon drove them back with heavy loss.7
A final Franco-Spanish spring offensive was obviously coming, and in the Oranais both VI/1st REI at Saida and II/1st at Géryville were in a ferment of inspections, exercises, lectures and physical training. The company officers had been obliged to accustom themselves once more to administrative paperwork, and the légionnaires to close-order drill in spotless uniforms. Worn-out kit was replaced, and men were sent on overdue courses to qualify for NCO promotion or to familiarize themselves with new weapons, like the excellent FM24 light machine-gun that was replacing the unlamented Chauchat. During the winter, the Sidi bel Abbès depot had been shaken up by its energetic new commander Colonel Rollet, for whom the needs of the combat battalions were paramount. The training companies were now delivering droves of replacements to fill the gaps in the ranks; in January, they sent 183 to VI/1st and 205 to II/1st Foreign.8
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 77