Our Friends Beneath the Sands

  Starting from the oasis of Akka, Trinquet’s 100 armoured vehicles and 350 supporting ‘softskins’ would cut south-westwards to Icht, and then divide into two prongs driving westwards to the north and south of the escarpment to meet on the lower Oued Draa, sweeping up any fugitives as they went. This force – in effect, the French Army’s first trial of a light armoured brigade operating independently – consisted of three armoured car squadrons of 1st Africa Light Horse, the two mechanized squadrons of 1st Foreign Cavalry, and the two motorized companies of 1st and 4th Foreign Infantry.39

  The operation was launched from 21 February 1934, and was a complete success. Trinquet’s force reached Icht on the 25th and divided; the southern prong reached Assa on 2 March, the northern – including the Legion units – Fasq on the 5th and Goulimine on 7 March. There were minor skirmishes at Foum el Hassane, Taghjicht and Tighmert, but generally the local tribes submitted with the minimum of drama. Belkassem Ngadi and his Ait Hammou and Ait Khabbash made a last dash southwards from Goulimine for the Rio del Oro frontier, which French troops were strictly forbidden to cross. They were pursued by Trinquet’s units, and the race to cut them off from the Draa officially ended in success at a spot called Mechra Chamnar on 11 March. Captain Marion’s V/1st REC had in fact sent two troops some way south of the border before turning back, and it was seeing them cross that convinced the fugitives to give up, since they believed that the Spanish must be cooperating with the French to deny them refuge. In 18 days Trinquet’s units had covered nearly 1,100 miles, and this first test of a wholly motorized brigade was judged a success, although their repair trucks had used up more than 7 tons of spares (25 per cent of the Laffly armoured cars had suffered breakdowns, and fully 60 per cent of the fragile VUDB carriers).40 The formal ceremony of submission – of about 4,000 people not native to the area, with some 1,200 rifles – took place on 13 March.

  The surrender of Belkassem Ngadi, and General Giraud’s arrival with the Legion motorized companies at the oasis of Tindouf on 31 March 1934, closed the final chapter of the French invasion and subjection of Morocco – a story in which the Foreign Legion had been intimately involved from the first to the last page.41

  MARSHAL HUBERT LYAUTEY DIED on 27 July 1934, at the age of 79. His wish to be buried at Rabat was honoured, despite some local objections.42 After Moroccan independence in 1956 the marshal’s remains were exhumed and brought home, where he lies today a few steps from Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides. In the end, he could hardly have asked for better. It could all so easily have ended in some briefly marked hole in North Vietnam – or, perhaps worse, under the gravestone of a wholly forgotten retired colonel in a village churchyard in Lorraine.

  It was one minute to midnight for two kinds of North African fighting man, who had existed in a kind of symbiosis for a hundred years. The challenge of the first had called the second into being; now that the one was on the point of becoming a legend to be told around younger men’s campfires, the other also faced the threat of extinction for simple lack of a useful role. However, it is logically obvious that even after the last wolf in Scotland had been killed, there must still have been a few hopeful hunters ranging the hills.

  Epilogue:

  The Fort at the Edge of the World

  The boys who served in my time called Foum el Hassane the arsehole of Africa.

  Former Légionnaire Andreas Rosenberg, October 19851

  THE VERY LAST WOLVES in Morocco seem to have been about 30 Ait Khabbash Berbers who kept up intermittent banditry until July 1935; and finally one Zayd u-Mhad, whose career as a lone outlaw in the Dades valley was ended by partisans who tracked and killed him near Tinerhir on 5 March 1936.2

  In the edge of the true Sahara, chiefs of the Regeibat – a numerous tribe of camel-riding raiders – surrendered to the French at Atar on 8 March 1933. Since the French-led méharistes of the Saharan Companies never numbered more than 800 men, the vastness of the desert would always provide refuge for small bands of incorrigible optimists, but their occasional freelance djichs would be no more ‘political’ than the activities of the last desperadoes on the American frontier. By that time the Legion’s part in the watch over the northern Sahara, as heavier back-up for the méharistes, had been decided.

  Since Algeria was the kingdom of 1st Foreign Infantry, the Algerian Sahara would be ranged by its Motorized Company. Captain Robitaille was instructed to build a post at Tabelbala, from where his company would be responsible for a huge loop of the eastern desert extending via Ouargla, Fort Flatters, Fort de Polignac and Ghat to Tamanrasset in the Ahaggar mountains. Southern Morocco continued to be garrisoned by the 4th Foreign, and the regiment’s Composite Automobile Company (CMA) would remain in the Far South. After their operation with Trinquet’s group in February – April 1934 they established a post at Tindouf, but on 2 May the légionnaires of CMA/4th REI were sent 90 miles north-west to the uninviting little oasis of Foum el Hassane (see Map 24).3

  FOUM EL HASSANE – the ‘domain of sand, horned vipers and flies’ – was the point where a pass opened into the desert from the arid Djebel Bani, the southern range of the Anti-Atlas mountains. It owed its existence to a stream that emerged briefly from the rocky defile and watered a small palmerie before disappearing below the sands. On the southern side of the little Arab village and its palm groves, two forts would be built, one for the 300-man 19th Goum and one for the Legion motorized company. With an establishment of 284 all ranks, the CMA/4th Foreign would be the only white troops watching over more than 100,000 square miles of the Western Sahara. Their patrol circuit – south to Tindouf, south-west via Ain ben Tili and Bir Moghreim (Fort Trinquet) to Zouérat (Fort Gouraud), then north-east via Ain Abd el Malek to the cliffs of Chegga, and north-west to Tindouf and home – would be about 2,000 miles. For comparison, this is roughly the straight-line distance of a round trip from London to Naples and back, or between New York City and Pensacola, Florida.

  Rivalry simmered between the ‘Compagnie Montée du Maroc’ and the ‘Compagnie Montée d’Algérie’ from the first, and on the rare occasions when soldiers from the two units encountered one another in a bar, fists would invariably start swinging. This bristling competitiveness was not eased by an apparently longstanding dislike between the company commanders. Captain Louis Gaultier of the 4th Foreign was a pied noir born and raised at Guelma in Algeria, and his légionnaires believed that he had wanted the Tabelbala posting for himself in order to be nearer to his family (though a glance at the map makes ‘nearer’ a distinctly relative term). This tension was in fact creative, since each officer pursued the rivalry by working to make his post something special. In the case of Robitaille, a former Dominican friar, this resulted in the uniquely striking design of Tabelbala, its buildings roofed with 72 shining white kouba domes. Foum el Hassane was more conventional; it was built like a kasbah, with walls and four corner towers topped with by-now purely decorative crenellations. However, Captain Gaultier and his men spared no effort – and no forgery or larceny, when requisitioning materials – to make it not only smart and soldierly, but more comfortable than anyone in this godforsaken spot had a right to expect.

  The building work took many months, since in the meantime platoons periodically had to patrol in search of reported djichs. In early December 1934 the rhythm became more demanding and the company was divided, with an armoured and a truck platoon at Foum el Hassane and the same at Tindouf. For the rest of that month, the Tindouf half-company made wide-ranging sweeps through the desert in concert with units from right across the Western Sahara and southern Morocco; they cooperated with camel-riders of the Groupe Nomade de la Mauritanie and the Compagnie Méhariste de la Saoura, and with armoured cars of the Groupe des Confins Algéro-Marocains including the Legion troopers of V/1st REC from Boudenib. However, the men of 4th Foreign were back at Tindouf in time to celebrate Christmas 1934 in the Legion’s usual expansive style.

  BY 1935, THE LEGION’S STRENGTH had fallen sharply from its peak of 33,000 two year
s previously, to 20,445 all ranks. The seizure of emergency powers by the Nazi Party in spring 1933 had led to a rapid decline in German enlistments, from 37 per cent of all recruits in 1934 to just over 19 per cent in 1935. (It would plummet to 11 per cent by early 1937, and not only because of the harsh treatment of returning ex-légionnaires by the new regime. Many Germans of the Left would be attracted instead to the Republican cause in Spain – though some would come to the Legion, alongside many Spaniards, after its defeat in 1939.) The political turmoil in many European countries caused disquiet among the high command about the possible infiltration of the Legion by both Fascists and Communists with long-term agendas, and recruits were now scrutinized by an internal security service.4 It became extemely difficult for a German or Austrian NCO to secure the privileged status of sous-officier de carrière, open to re-enlistees of other nationalities after naturalization and six years’ service.

  Although a posting to the better-paid and generally tranquil fleshpots of Tonkin or the Levant was still a prize for long service and good conduct, the regiments were increasingly stagnant in their long-accustomed stations. The NCO corps, while certainly the most professional in the French Army due to its high proportion of long-service soldiers, was consequently settling into a rather complacent and insular culture; a sergeant was definitely a ‘Morocco NCO’, a ‘Syria NCO’ or a ‘Tonkin NCO’, and there was a tendency to wriggle out of transfers. At Sidi bel Abbès – whose central services demanded large numbers of NCOs – fully half of them were married, and looking forward to the civil service careers in North Africa that usually followed retirement after 15 years in the ranks.5 For the young and adventurous, the two desert motorized companies were virtually the only units in the Legion that still guaranteed a life reminiscent of that in ‘la Légion du Papa’, and in 1935 a young Hungarian political refugeee named (in French documents) Charles Milassin arrived at Foum el Hassane after his first year’s training and service in the north.

  MILASSIN FOUND A FORT straight out of the pages of Beau Geste, though with a far more humane and popular commander than Wren’s ‘Fort Zinderneuf’. Against the backdrop of the date-palms and the tawny bulk of the Djebel Bani, its lime-washed 15-foot walls formed a square about 150 yards on a side, surmounted by a radio aerial and a decoratively crenellated 45-foot water tower flying the tricolour. At each corner squared towers a few feet higher than the battlements protruded slightly, with slits low down in each flank from which two machine guns commanded the adjacent walls and with LMG positions on the roof-platforms. Only the towers were stone-built; otherwise the fort had been constructed in the traditional way from pisé (mud, chopped straw and animal dung), mixed and moulded into big sun-dried bricks by the légionnaires, with the rafters, doors and windows made from palm-tree wood. The gate in the north wall was proudly surmounted by the unit’s title on an arched lintel, and the badge that Captain Gaultier had designed for his company in the Legion’s colours: a red oval surrounded by a green cogwheel symbolizing motorized status, bearing the Legion grenade and ‘4’ above a running ostrich, symbolizing speed in Africa, set against a horseshoe in memory of the old mule companies.

  There was something unmistakably Roman about the fort’s layout, with its barracks, messrooms, stores, arsenal, fuel dump, garages and workshops neatly arranged in four quarters around two large open yards, with the commander’s and the lieutenants’ offices in the centre. Situated about 600 track-miles from the regiment’s Marrakesh depot beyond the Atlas, Foum el Hassane was necessarily self-sufficient, with its own smithy, carpentry and paint shops, fitters’, mechanics’, coachwork and radio workshops. The barrack blocks each accommodated 40 NCOs and privates, with their own latrine and piped-in water. Above the palm-wood ceiling a layer of rammed earth more than 4 feet deep provided insulation between the rooms and the raftered air-space under the galvanized iron roof. There was a shower-block, an infirmary, a laundry, tailor’s, barber’s and shoemaker’s shops; there was also a small cell-block, but this seldom held anything other than a couple of rueful hangovers.

  Foum el Hassane also boasted an electricity generating plant of unusual power, complete – to the légionnaires’ intense satisfaction and pride – with an ice-making machine. This was a tribute to their paternal Captain Gaultier. When word reached him that a fishing boat had run aground and been abandoned on the Atlantic coast about 100 miles to the west, that resourceful officer had sent mechanics in trucks to strip it to its ribs, and they had returned in triumph with its 250hp diesel engine. Within days the fort’s workshops were being lavishly powered and the men’s canteen was serving iced beer; within weeks, it had acquired a 32mm projector and was able to provide a film show every weekend. This canteen – the foyer du légionnaire – occupied three rooms against the south wall. At one end was a well-stocked shop selling at subsidized prices anything a soldier needed for washing, cleaning and mending, tobacco, confectionery and a wide range of other small comforts. At the other end was a library and reading room; from September 1936 the company even produced its own 12-page monthly frontier news bulletin, ‘La Grenade’. In the large central bar room and hall, accommodating about 200 men, they could drink and play billiards, dominoes or cards (but not for money).

  Other than the free Sundays, the daily routine started with reveille at 5am; work began at 6.15am and lasted until 10.45am; the early lunch was followed by siesta until 2.30pm, then work resumed until evening parade at 6pm. Dinner was at 6.30pm, rollcall at 8.30pm, and lights-out at 9.30pm, or 11pm on Saturdays. After life in Depression-era Hungary, Charles Milassin remembered the food as being excellent, varied and plentful. The basics came from the commissariat and fresh beef and mutton from Arab butchers; the fort raised its own pigs and cultivated fresh vegetables and fruit in gardens in the palmerie. On Sundays the cooks exerted themselves to make the food even better than usual, and the feasts for Christmas, Easter, Camerone and 14 July were ‘prodigious – nobody can to eat all – 11am all big holiday, 80 per cent the people was drunk’ (sic).

  Apart from the daily half-litre ration of red pinard the men could buy beer in the canteen and, although they were never allowed more than 2 miles from the fort, in their free evening hours they could stroll out past the sand football-field to the tiny Arab bazaar. They could visit, but were not allowed beyond, a Lebanese store-cum-bar and the souk adjoining it; the Goum fort and the native village north of this were strictly out of bounds, and the Arabs were forbidden to come further south than the Lebanese store. The légionnaires had exclusive access to Foum el Hassane’s second bar, owned by a Greek named Costas (where they could gamble their pay in strictly forbidden games of poker), and also to the establishment next door – the BMC. This was a courtyard house occupied for three or four months at a time by shifts of half-a-dozen young Moroccan girls, who were inspected by the medical officer twice a week. The brothel was open from 7pm to 9pm for the troops, then until midnight for sergeants (if any officer wished to avail himself of the facility he had to wait until after midnight). This female companionship cost a légionnaire 2 francs (about one day’s pay); any who were tempted to visit a crib in the village nègre for 50 centimes risked the possibility of a knife in the ribs, and the certainty of disease and a spell in the cells.

  MILASSIN’S MEMORIES of routine work on the fort and vehicles, punctuated by modest and monotonous off-duty pleasures, may give an unbalanced picture of life for the legionnaires. Eight-hour working days in such a climate were always tiring, hammer-and-pick work on the local tracks was utterly exhausting, and the frequent local patrols demanded much of both men and machines. A sergeant and 18 men were always on guard, and two duty platoons were always supposed to be ready to march at 10 minutes’ notice.

  The CMA/4th Foreign was organized in a two-squad headquarters échelon; a four-squad workshop platoon (in which Private Milassin served); a general purpose four-squad ‘platoon employed at the disposal of the captain’; a two-squad armoured platoon, with Panhard 165/175 armoured cars and Panhard 179
armoured carriers; and four squads of motorized infantry with 2.5-ton Laffly LC2 patrol trucks. Captain Gaultier and Lieutenants de Kockborne, du Hecquet and du Part had Renault field cars with cork roofs, double radiators and extra fuel tanks; the company also had four water- and four fuel-tankers, a workshop truck and a radio car. In later years Charles Milassin could remember about 140 names, or half the company. They are the usual mix – perhaps a third French, Belgian or Swiss-French, about the same proportion Germanic, a strong minority of Russians and other Slavs, and a handful of Italians, Spanish, Dutch and Scandinavians (though also légionnaires named Grant, Doyle, Bell, and Abd el Halim). There seem to have been four other Hungarians, and Milassin remembered that one of these, Private Hegedüs, was the oldest soldier in the company, a veteran of the Great War RMLE with 23 years’ service.