Our Friends Beneath the Sands

  THE BERBER FIRING began to dwindle at about 10am; they had taken many losses themselves, they too were tired, the circling aircraft were bothering them, and they wanted to gather up the weapons and ammunition of the French casualties. The last shots were fired at about 10.30am, and some 15 minutes later Captain Fouré was at last able to halt and regroup his scattered men; they had covered perhaps 9 miles since the first clashes. At about 1.15pm the 1st (Mounted)/ 2nd Foreign finally reached Tarda. Fouré’s men had lost more than 30 killed and wounded, Gaulis’ force as a whole about 100 légionnaires and goumiers, whose bodies would not be found and buried until two weeks later. Late that night, two of those posted missing, Privates Oder and Cerini, walked into the company base at Er Rachidia – a full 25 miles from the battlefield – still carrying their weapons and a pack of LMG magazines.46

  On 30 November 1930, the company fanion was decorated with the War Cross for Exterior Operations. As so often, the words of the citation owed more to official ‘spin’ than to strict accuracy, and the actual behaviour of Captain Gaulis’ men47 was interpreted in a liberal light. Fourés 1st Mounted Company had apparently ‘succeeded in imposing itself on the enemy, stopping their movement and assuring to the end the withdrawal of the auxiliary forces which it was their mission to protect’.

  Bou Leggou was not to be Lieutenant Brenckle’s last fight; nor – despite the ever greater proportion of the task taken over by Maghzan units and irregulars – would it be the last action in which a Legion Mounted Company took significant casualties.

  20.

  ‘Obscure and Unknown Sacrifices’

  1930 – 34

  It is with the flesh and blood of partisans, Moroccan Skirmishers and the Foreign Legion that France is completing her conquest of Morocco. Thanks to these obscure and unknown sacrifices the work begun can be accomplished without provoking questions in the Chamber.

  Pierre Scize, Voilà, 3 June 1933

  Unstable alliance, mutual suspicion, eternal grudges and arrogant domination of their neighbours and of their clients form the leitmotiv of the Ait Atta past, together with a sense of permanent balance through eternal violence.

  David M. Hart, Qabila1

  THE TRANSFORMATION of the Legion mobile units from mounted to motorized took some time, since vehicles became available only in gradual increments, and mules would continue to be indispensable in the southern Atlas for several years. The plan in 1930, presided over by Colonel Georges Catroux (who was now commanding at Ain Sefra), was to entrust long-range desert patrolling to motorized units in collaboration with the camel-mounted Saharan Companies. The first Legion mule company to make the transition was Captain Robitaille’s 2nd (Mounted)/2nd REI based at Oujda, which got its first two trucks in January 1930; but it was November before they received four Berliet VUDB armoured reconnaissance carriers, and although their official designation changed to 2nd (Motorized), the other platoons kept their mules for the time being.

  The intention was to form REC cavalry squadrons each with a troop of turreted armoured cars, one or more troops of light armoured recce carriers and a troop of mechanized infantry in heavy carriers (all these vehicles being wheeled rather than tracked). The new-style Compagnies Montées of the REIs were also to have one armoured car platoon, the others being equipped with either armoured carriers or patrol trucks – ‘Saharan breaks’. In the early days there was no standardization, and operating different types of vehicles simultaneously – all of them designed for European use – was a constant headache for mechanics and quartermasters. In the summer of 1931, Robitaille’s company (now transferred to the Sud-Oranais and retitled Motorized Company /1st REI) had an armoured car platoon with 4 old Whites, a light platoon with 5 VUDBs and a 120-man heavy half-company with 14 Panhard 179 armoured carriers, but the workshops also had to keep a variety of support vehicles running. By 1934, the VI/1st REC had 3 Laffly 50AM armoured cars and 15 VUDBs, but also a ‘softskin’ inventory of no fewer than 10 different types of cars and trucks.2

  Breakdowns were frequent, and keeping numerous spares in store in remote desert bases was a logistic nightmare – particularly as these were at the end of long supply-lines, set up to provide a limited number of items in bulk, at intervals of a month. Heavy demands were made on the légionnaire’s traditional ingenuity in operating ‘System D’ and in knocking up improvisations in the blacksmith’s shop. The Berliet VUDB armoured recce carrier (‘vehicule de prise de contact’) that equipped the light troops and platoons was a particular trial. This pig-nosed, slab-sided steel van had an advanced four-wheel-drive transmission, but since this allowed it to drive over terrain too rough for its mechanical strength the half-shafts were constantly breaking. At 4.9 tons, even before adding the necessary load of fuel, water and ammunition, it was far too heavy for its 40hp engine, and its radius of operation (of about 125 miles before refuelling) was laughable. A photograph of one lurching across a boulder-field in the full glare of the desert sun makes one wince for the crew; an inside temperature of 158°F (70°C) was once recorded.

  Some of the younger soldiers were enthusiastic about this step into the future, but most veterans voiced the same grumbles that would soon be heard from cavalrymen the world over. Their mounts were alive, and had personalities; mules were willing, enduring, and could go anywhere a man could walk – and a légionnaire of ‘la Montée’ could walk across anything. The new iron boxes were dead, heavy, mechanically unreliable, limited in the terrain they could cross, and so unspeakably hot that they reduced soldiers to blind, helpless suffering. Confronted with them, the légionnaire was also reduced from a proud master of his trade to a know-nothing bleu who had to be patiently instructed in every necessary skill by lesser breeds – which was intolerable. In March 1932, while based at Taghit with responsibility for the track down to Beni Abbès, a motorized troop of VI/1st REC completed a Saharan round trip of 1,570 miles in 55 days; no doubt the veterans, ignoring the impressive mechanical achievement, pointed out that men with mules had routinely been surpassing this average of 29 miles a day for the past 50 years. (The squadron’s armoured cars had already given a hostage to military humour in May 1930, when a sniping tribesman sent a fluke bullet down the cannon-barrel of a White TBC whose breech happened to be open, and the ricochetting slug had wounded two crewmen inside.)3

  AS THE LEGION APPROACHED its centenary in March 1931, the challenge faced by the corps went beyond updating its equipment and organization. The raising of the first integral mechanized and artillery units to join the horsed cavalry regiment fell far short of the post-1918 dream that some had nurtured of forming a complete foreign division (which had always been politically impossible anyway, due to its Praetorian undertones).4 The Legion’s raison d’être was fighting North African tribesmen, and it was clear that within a few years that role would disappear. It was not easy to imagine what could replace it, and the need for the Legion’s continued existence was open to question by serious soldiers as well as by the political Left to whom it was a provocative anomaly. At the head of 1st Foreign Infantry and the central depot, Colonel Paul Rollet could do little to influence the ideas of the War Ministry and General Staff as to the Legion’s future place in the Army. Internally, however, his powers were considerable, and he was tireless in promoting not only the well-being and morale and but also the public image of the corps to which he had dedicated his life.

  Rollet’s reign at Sidi bel Abbès in 1925 – 35 would be described as the Legion’s ‘century of Louis XIV, with buildings leaping out of the earth’: modern canteens and shops, a sports hall and swimming pool, a theatre, and – a project close to Rollet’s heart – a retirement home for old soldiers. The central band grew to 180 men, forming a 100-strong orchestra for public performances as Rollet took every opportunity to break down barriers between town and barracks. With a breastplate of medals on his old-fashioned desert tunic, he presided over regular weekly full-dress parades complete with announcements of promotions, decorations, welcomes and farewells. Roun
d any corner officers and men might suddenly encounter ‘Pil’, a slight, fast-walking figure with a dog at his heels, raking everything and everyone with his electric blue eyes and demanding informed answers.

  Ever since his dispiriting return from Europe in 1919, Rollet had been engaged by the need to build a spirit of continuity that would carry the Legion’s special identity into the future, a matrix that could accommodate and mould whatever human material it had to work with. Compared with the British, the French Metropolitan Army has little history of regimental continuity; the fortunes of war and the serial changes of regime since 1789 have caused repeated disbandments and renumberings that have broken the genuine lineages beyond recovery, and while certain famous old names are honoured, the formal allocation of their traditions to current units has always been fairly arbritrary. The Legion had an almost unique advantage in this respect, but harnessing it would take more than simply conducting recruits reverently past the ancestral shrines in the Salle d’Honneur. Paul Rollet was a military romantic, but an intelligent one, and he understood how to nurture the legends that generate ésprit de corps.

  It was only months before he had joined the Legion in December 1899 that the last known survivor of Camerone, Hyppolyte Kunassec, had retired after 27 years’ service; Rollet’s CO in the Sud-Oranais and Madagascar, Paul Brundsaux, had served with Major Marius Cecconi, another Mexico veteran; Cecconi’s elder brother had been killed at Sebastopol in 1855, and their father Giuseppe had joined the Legion in 1832.5 Yet despite such links, of which there were many, before Rollet’s colonelcy the Legion had no coherent body of tradition, just a more or less vague set of ancestral memories surviving across the chasm of 1914 – 18 in the minds of a dwindling number of veterans. It was Rollet who decanted and clarified these memories into a rich blend of history and myth on which the Legion could feed. Remarkably for a man of his time, he instinctively understood that he had to ‘take control of the narrative’ if he was to protect the Legion from indifference and outright hostility.

  Rollet began by perfecting the internal narrative, systematically combining the different elements – the cult of endurance and sacrifice, culminating in the annual celebration of Camerone; the guarantee of anonymity for men seeking a second chance in life; the Legion’s unique uniform embellishments; the family stories and rituals – into an all-embracing sense of proudly distinct identity.6 Rollet wanted this identity to outlast active service; the discharge certificate given in 1905 to Private Gustave Seewald looks like the sort of document you produce to allay the suspicions of a military policeman at a railway station, but that presented to Légionnaire Robert Lincoln in 1935 is the sort that a man frames and hangs on his wall.

  The March 1931 centenary provided the perfect opportunity for consolidating this narrative and for broadcasting it to a wider audience, and Rollet worked towards this climax for several years. It required in particular two major programmes of fund-raising and organization. The sculptor Pourquet was commissioned to produce an imposing Monument to the Dead for the barrack square at the Quartier Viénot, to be dedicated at the climax of the celebrations; thereafter the approach to it – along which the wooden hand of Captain Danjou was paraded on Camerone Day – would be known as the Sacred Way. The monument took the form of a great bronze globe of the earth with the Legion’s theatres of war gilded, supported by four larger-than-life figures in period uniforms (Rollet ensured that the monumental légionnaire wearing the pith helmet and chest pouch of the colonial campaigns had the face and forked beard of Paul Brundsaux).7 The other visible project was the publication of a sumptuous Golden Book of the Foreign Legion, in collaboration with the uniform historian Jean Brunon and with colour plates by Pierre Benigni; an illustrated combination of campaign and uniform history, this would win the Prix Gobert in 1934.

  The ceremonies passed off magnificently in front of an audience of thousands, not only ex-légionnaires from all over the world but also many French and foreign dignitaries and journalists, and on 30 April 1931 the precise liturgy of the Feast of Camerone was finally formalized. (It did no harm that the spring of 1931 also saw the opening of a great Exposition Coloniale in Paris, for which Marshal Lyautey finally emerged from his mourning.) Rollet’s personal reward went beyond his promotion to brigadier-general and command of Tlemcen Subdivision; simultaneously the War Ministry created an Inspectorate of the Foreign Legion with Rollet as the first – and as it transpired, only – Inspector-General. His successor in command of the 1st Foreign was his old second-in-command from the trenches, Colonel Nicolas. Rollet’s plan had worked; he had created a machine for attracting and integrating future recruits, and he had established a positive image of the Legion in the eyes of the French public and the wider world. (Although this would be tragically tested in the Algiers putsch attempt of April 1961, it survived, and Rollet surely deserves his sobriquet of ‘the Father of the Legion’.)8

  IT WAS ALSO in 1931 that War Minister Maginot ordered more active operations against the remaining pockets of tribal defiance in the Atlas and the South. The despotism of the Glaoua had proved unable to hold banditry in check in the southern High Atlas or to prevent outright warfare in the great west-east corridor of the Draa and Dades valleys below the mountains. Two centres of dissidence were the parallel outlying range of the Djebel Sahro, and the Ziz oases running down into the Tafilalt at the eastern end of the corridor. The recent deaths of the two secondary ‘lords of the Atlas’ (El Goundaffi and El Mtouggi) were drawing French troops up into the mountain passes where their levies had previously protected the new roads pushing south, and in January 1932 the French would supplant the ineffective Glaoua garrisons in the Draa valley, installing a new Native Affairs post at Zagora. Since it was intended to station an increased number of North African troops in France, there was an incentive to complete the pacification of lawless southern Morocco once and for all, but this still involved political risks. The consequences of any significant casualties among the regular troops committed – largely Moroccan Skirmishers – would be serious, and goumiers and irregulars were to be employed in large numbers wherever possible. Maginot would tell the commander-in-chief, General Antoine Huré:If you have one unfortunate engagement, I will hide your losses and I will lie against the evidence; but I can only do that once. If you have a second reverse I will be obliged to tell the truth, and then all those – like me – who wish for the pacification of Morocco will be swept away, like Ferry after Lang Son.9

  General Niéger’s operations in the High Atlas in July 1931 involved about 5,500 irregulars, including some 1,500 Zaians led by a son of Moha ou Hammou under the command of Colonel de Loustal. This officer was a specialist in working with ‘turned’ tribesmen, and his tactics would be influential throughout the remaining mountain campaigns. He would make a night march with goumiers and moghaznis screened by local scouts, halting before first light to dig in on some defensible height until regular troops and artillery could catch up with him. Mounted irregulars provided his reserve; if the dissidents attacked his new crest he would drive them back with machine guns before unleashing these suppletifs in pursuit, and he quite often achieved success without any casualties at all among the regulars.10 After service in Morocco in 1930 – 33 the future Marshal Alphonse Juin, who would command the French Expeditionary Corps in the Italian mountains in 1943 – 4, wrote of what he called Loustal’s ‘Tadla method’:Imposing your will on the enemy without getting yourself killed is a matter of deception. Against an adversary armed only with rifles the way to keep casualties down is . . . to meet him only when you are dug in behind wire with heavy firepower. Since you first have to go and occupy his terrain, you must employ surprise; you have time on your side, so use it to deceive him by false concentrations, diversions and misinformation. The moment will always come when – since the Berbers cannot keep a tribal force together for long – they will relax their vigilance and uncover your objective. Then choose a nice moonlit night, and jump. Send the irregulars in first to roll over the las
t remaining defenders of your objective, but the regulars must follow closely to occupy and organize it. At dawn the reacting enemy should find them already dug in, with wire strung and machine guns and artillery in place.

  To pull this off you need a perfect knowledge of the mountain terrain provided by a very sharp Intelligence service. You also need particularly well-trained troops, both irregulars and regulars, because a night advance demands a mad temerity . . . It goes without saying that it is almost impossible to coordinate such an operation with neighbouring forces, [and it is certainly] for those who prefer to work alone.11

  AT THE END of 1931 the French concentrated on the Tafilalt, from whose refuges Belkassem Ngadi’s band and Ait Khabbash war parties had been intervening rapaciously in various tribal wars that were ruining the fertile valley oases between Boumalne Dades and Tinerhir. In the Draa valley the western Ait Atta tribes were being fragmented by the patient Captain Spillmann at Ouarzazate, and in November 1931 he managed to detach the once resolutely hostile Ait Istful ‘fifth’ from the Ait Khabbash.12 The operation against the Ziz oases was now prepared by General Giraud’s Frontier Group (Groupe des Confins Algéro-Marocains). In this terrain, Loustal’s patient ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ that worked best in the mountains had to give way to what Juin called the ‘Frontier method, whose master is General Giraud’. Here speed was the key to limiting casualties: fast hooking manoeuvres by mobile units, a bold surprise attack to achieve shock, then pursuit and exploitation to the limit. Unlike Loustal’s method, these tactics absolutely required tight coordination of the movement of different units drawing upon carefully pre-planned logistics.13