Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  During August the balance of General Ludendorff’s ‘Emperor’s Battle’ tipped decisively in the Allies’ favour. After a month to recover, the regiment were sent into the line again on 28 August, and on 1/2 September the Moroccan Division relieved an American formation facing the Laffaux sector of the Hindenburg Line on the Mauberge-Brussels road. Rollet now had four battalions under command (the RMLE plus a Russian volunteer unit), to which a Malagasy battalion would later be attached. They advanced on 2 September, and the offensive continued without respite for 13 days and nights; on 14 September the Hindenburg Line was broken, and the regiment captured and held the village of Allemant the next day. By the time they were relieved on 15/16 September the RMLE had been reduced from a starting strength of 2,563 all ranks to 1,130 officers and men. Their conduct brought a ninth citation, and a double lanyard in the colours of the Croix de Guerre and Légion d’Honneur (an honour shared with only one other regiment in the French Army, the Morocco Colonial Infantry Regiment, RICM). At the end of October 1918 the RMLE went back into the trenches in the quiet sector of Champenoux in Lorraine, where the Armistice found them.

  Legion records list 42,883 men as serving with the various units during the Great War – 6,239 Frenchmen and 36,644 foreigners of more than a hundred nationalities (including roughly 600 US citizens, heavily represented due to America’s late entry into the war, and 266 British and Dominion volunteers). Of that total, 5,172 were listed as killed in action and some 25,000 as wounded or missing, the majority of the missing undoubtedly being fatalities. Total casualties were thus about 70 per cent of those who served.

  The Dardanelles and Macedonia, 1915 – 18

  In February 1915 the Régiment de Marche d’Afrique (Lieutenant-Colonel Niéger) was raised for the Dardanelles campaign, with two Zouave battalions and one from the Legion; III/RMdA (Major Geay) comprised two marching companies each from 1st and 2nd RE. The RMdA embarked at Oran on 2 March, and were landed under fire on 28 April at Sedd el Bahr, on the western flank of the Cape Helles beachhead at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula. Penned on a very confined front under constant Turkish artillery fire, they suffered extremely heavy losses from the start. By June, fighting for the ravine of Kereves Dere had reduced the Legion battalion to about 100 men led by Warrant Officer Léon, and it had essentially ceased to exist by August. It was then rebuilt with 700 légionnaires withdrawn from Indochina, and was commanded by the New Zealander, Captain James Waddell.

  The remnant of the RMdA were withdrawn in October 1915 and shipped to Salonika, as part of 156th Division in the Allied force intended to resist the Bulgarian advance through Serbia. Marched north to the Greek/Serbian border, they endured a winter retreat followed by a virtual stalemate on the Macedonian front during 1916 – 17. Disease caused as many deaths as enemy action, although the RMdA did see significant fighting at Monastir in September – November 1916 and at Trana Stena in spring 1917. By the time III/RMdA were disbanded on 1 October 1917 they had recorded 721 all ranks killed and probably three times that many wounded. A single company remained in Macedonia until the Armistice.

  Appendix 2

  Summary of Foreign Legion operations in the Levant, 1925

  THE DESTRUCTION of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 had the effect of throwing an ethnic and religious jigsaw-puzzle on to the floor, and thereafter all interested parties were simultaneously trying to snatch up particular pieces and fit them into new patterns of their own devising. After 1918, Britain and France each administered some former Turkish possessions under League of Nations mandates, and the 1920 San Remo conference assigned Syria (including present-day Lebanon) to France. By the time the Mandate came into formal operation on 29 September 1923, a French army had already been operating in southern Turkey and the Levant for four years – in Syria, initially against the Amir Faisal’s attempts to retain control, and later against a rash of more than 30 local uprisings and disorders between 1920 and 1925. The 4th Battalion, 4th Foreign Infantry (IV/4th REI) had landed in mid-March 1921, and was followed by V/4th Foreign early in September.1 Locally, the French raised an only patchily reliable 6,500-man Syrian Legion from Circassians, Kurds and Armenians.

  From July 1920, General Henri Gouraud, the military and political high commissioner, attempted to persuade leaders of the patchwork of different religious and ethnic communities to conclude local agreements, in order to counter any tendency towards assertive political unity among the urban elites (the nationalist People’s Party did not yet represent an organized movement for an agreed model of independence). The Druzes were a population of some 50,000 inhabiting both the Djebel Druze hills about 75 miles south of Damascus and the slopes of the Mount Hermon massif south-west of the capital. A hardy people with their own secretive religion, they had a 900-year history of defending themselves among the majority Sunni Muslims. General Gouraud sent Colonel Georges Catroux to negotiate with the ruling clans, and a Franco-Druze treaty was signed in March 1921. The Druze accepted a small garrison in the regional capital, Suwayda, and the guidance of a Native Affairs officer; the French left local administration in the hands of an elected Druze governor and council.

  The first governor was the paramount chief of the powerful Atrash clan, Salim al Atrash, supervised by an experienced Native Affairs officer, Major Trenga. In 1923 Salim’s death led – bizarrely – to the council electing as governor not one of their own but Trenga’s successor, an arrogantly impatient innovator named Captain Gabriel Carbillet, who made himself widely resented. Despite appeals to remove Carbillet and warnings of growing unrest, the current high commissioner, the 70-year-old General Sarrail, at first prevaricated and then, in mid-July 1925, treacherously arrested three Atrash chiefs.

  AFTER PRELIMINARY INCIDENTS, on 21 July 1925, followers of the tribal leader Sultan al Atrash killed about half of Captain Normand’s squadron of 12th (Tunisian) Spahis and surrounded the 200-man garrison of Suwayda. Some 8,000 – 10,000 rebels gathered, Maronite Christian villages were massacred, and refugees fled to Damascus. Leading a 3,000-strong relief column towards Suwayda, General Sarrail’s chief-of-staff General Roger Michaud suffered a shocking defeat on 2 August at Ezra, losing about 400 casualties and another 400 local troops ‘missing’. This news reached Paris just as the Painlevé government and Marshal Pétain were having to strip troops from the Ruhr to deal with the crisis of the Rif War. The two conflicts were quite unconnected, but their coincidence naturally had a powerful impact on the French public and the Muslim world.

  On 19 August, a nationalist delegation agreed a pact of mutual support with Sultan al Atrash, who led thousands of Druzes and Transjordanian bedouin towards Damascus, but they were halted at Al Kiswah by French aircraft and the 21st Spahis. Nationalist Party leaders fled a French security clamp-down in Damascus, and on 9 September called for a national uprising in the name of a provisional government. Early reinforcements raised the French forces commanded by Michaud’s replacement, General Gamelin, to some 20,000 men, safeguarding the cities but overstretched by widespread chaos and bloodshed in the countryside.

  Al Musayfirah, September 1925

  On 11 September, during preparations for the relief of Suwayda, the only available Legion units – the tired and understrength V/4th REI (Major Kratzert), and the newly landed IV/1st REC (Captain Landriau) – were posted to the village of Al Musayfirah (French, Messifré) about 15 miles south-west of that town.2 The village had few two-storey buildings, but an old Turkish police post in the centre was overlooked by a shrine with a domed roof. Discontinous positions surrounding the police building (Post E, ‘the redoubt’) were held by Landriau’s 178 cavalrymen, plus machine-guns and one armoured car; their horses were tethered under guard in courtyards nearby (Post F). Four sandbagged posts (Posts A – D) some 300 yards outside the village were each held by a company or a platoon of V/4th Foreign, with machine guns and two more armoured cars.

  Major Kratzert was warned late on 16 September that some 3,000 Druzes were approaching from the north. Before dawn on the
17th, the northern Posts A and B were attacked, and simultaneously many infiltrators inside the village opened fire both on them and on the REC positions. About two hours of confused close-range street-fighting followed; Post F was wiped out and the squadron’s horses were stampeded through the narrow streets (all were eventually killed). In the darkness repeated assaults were made on positions held by the troopers, and defenders of Posts A and B were also sending dangerous return fire into the village. A sortie had to be made from the redoubt to clear riflemen from the roof of the shrine, but daylight allowed more effective fire by the machine guns and the armoured cars’ 37mm cannon, and at 6am renewed assaults on Posts A and B were driven off. (Their defence was an intimate experience: Post B was a triangle of sandbag walls only 20 yards on a side, held by perhaps 30 men, two MGs and an armoured car.)

  Druzes were still both inside the village and firing on the northern posts, but an air attack early on the afternoon of 17 September was followed by a gradual disengagement, and a relief column arrived before dusk. Although wearing their traditional costume, the Druzes had been armed with Mauser rifles, and many of the 307 dead they left behind had Turkish Army belt kit, haversacks with two days’ rations, and cash pay in their pockets. The V/4th Foreign lost some 30 killed and 50 wounded in the northern posts; IV/1st REC suffered nearly one-third casualties – an officer and 25 rankers killed, 2 officers and 22 men wounded. Both units were cited in army orders.3

  Rashayya, November 1925

  On 30 October General Sarrail was replaced as C-in-C by General Charles Andrea, who was faced immediately with a threat to vital French links between Damascus and the Lebanese port cities. Early in November, Sultan al Atrash’s younger brother Zayd tried to extend the revolt westwards to link up with local Druze uprisings around Mount Hermon and in the mountains running north from it. The first inland range are the Lebanon Mountains, forming the western wall of the Bekaa valley; its eastern wall is the Anti-Lebanon range, with Hermon at its south-west end. In early November, rebels were in control of the eastern slopes of the Anti-Lebanon as far north as Al Nabk due east of Beirut, and were raiding into the Bekaa. To the south of that valley, on 11 November, Captain Landriau’s remounted IV/1st REC – though still reduced to about 100 all ranks – joined Captain Granger’s garrison at the patrol base of Rashayya, a mixed Druze/Maronite village about 6 miles north of Mount Hermon. Granger’s other units were IV/12th Spahis (Captain Cros-Mayreville) and perhaps 60 remaining local gendarmes (Lieutenant Tine) – say 280 men in all.

  The village was built around the remains of a thirteenth-century Crusader ‘citadel’ which the garrison occupied, but this was not easily defensible. Over centuries, the Norman fort had become encrusted with an organic growth of civilian buildings both inside and outside the rough ‘A’-shape of the old walls. The buildings occupied as the HQ redoubt were at the north-east apex; the main gatehouse was in the west wall, close to where a vaulted tunnel also emerged inside; and the old tower in the south wall was overlooked from houses on high ground immediately outside. The crossbar of the ‘A’, perhaps 80 yards long, was apparently formed by water cisterns and low, discontinuous walls that separated the upper and lower courtyards used for the horse lines. The terraced interior of the complex was cluttered, and Captain Granger’s garrison had to burrow new access passageways; outside, where the citadel was closely surrounded by alleys, houses and gardens, they had only been able to clear a few of the buildings abutting the outer walls and were obliged to occupy others.

  At mid-afternoon on 20 November a returning watering party were fired on, and there was sporadic firing and nearby movement all night long. From dawn on the 21st, Druzes closely surrounding and overlooking the citadel opened heavy fire, and made several determined assaults until about noon. These were driven back only at the cost of some 20 casualties and heavy expenditure of ammunition, and for the rest of the day and the night of 21/22 November enemy firing continued while the attackers regrouped. From dawn on the 22nd this redoubled in intensity, with stick-grenades being thrown into the defences from houses only feet away and rushes at the barricaded entrances. At 8.20am Captain Granger was killed, and command devolved to Captain Cros-Mayreville. An air-dropped message that evening promised relief on 24 November.

  The climax came from 5am onwards on 23 November; the southern tower and wall were lost to determined assaults, winning the attackers commanding positions, and a counter-attack across the lower courtyard failed. Essentially house-to-house fighting lasted all day, with rifle and machine-gun fire, grenades, and bayonet-and-sword charges being traded across an encumbered area measuring only about 100 yards by 80 yards, crowded with bucking, screaming horses (which were progressively shot down). The western gatehouse was lost but retaken, and an attack through the tunnel was driven back. Ammunition ran very short, and at nightfall Captains Cros-Mayreville and Landriau had no choice but to withdraw their troopers from the outer barricades into the northern redoubt. This was achieved only with some difficulty, and an assault across the northern courtyard had to be driven back by a bayonet-charge. By now the Spahis and légionnaires had taken about 100 casualties and were down to some 30 cartridges left in each man’s pouches.

  The flares of an approaching force were seen that night; a final Druze attack the next morning was half-hearted, aircraft dropped bombs on the afternoon of the 24th, and the rebels drifted away. The relief force arrived on 25 November. In their second house-to-house defence within two months Captain Landriau’s 4th Squadron had lost another 15 killed and 43 wounded – half their starting strength, including a number of NCOs and men who had distinguished themselves at Al Musayfirah. The squadron was cited for the second time, bringing them the lanyard of the Croix de Guerre TOE. Rashayya was the furthest west that Zayd al Atrash’s rebels ever reached.4

  Appendix 3

  P. C. Wren, 1875 – 1941

  WREN’S BEAU GESTE, published in 1924, is a tale of self-sacrifice by well-born English brothers seeking the refuge of colonial soldiering in order to spare their family disgrace. It was Wren’s eighth book and his first and only instant best-seller, although it was not his first exploitation of the narrative possibilities of the Legion – John Murray had published a collection of his Legion short stories as early as 1916. Beau Geste was the book that made Wren’s name, and although a prolific writer he never again achieved comparable sales. The chronological accident of the widely reported Rif War in Morocco in 1925 – 6 kept the Legion in the newspapers; the novel had already been reprinted twenty-six times by 1926, when the first of several film versions was released (Herbert Brenon’s, starring Ronald Coleman). The full-blooded 1939 film, directed by ‘Wild Bill’ Wellman and starring Gary Cooper and Ray Milland, provided a later boost to the book’s popularity.

  Today the novel’s style and melodramatic plot seem impossibly dated, but in its own day this blood-and-sand adventure set in an exotic (if vaguely imagined) Araby appealed to a fairly undemanding readership. The 1920s were not a time for war-stories based in the real world, and such yarns as Beau Geste offered escapist excitements that were safely distant from the gruesome truths of the Western Front. Even so, the success of Wren’s stories in fixing a formulaic image of the Legion in the popular imagination was astonishing, probably because in the English-speaking world at that time he had a fictional monopoly of the subject. Several memoirs from the ranks had been published in England before the Great War, but public knowledge of the Legion was scant. For generations after the publication of Beau Geste, if most people heard the words ‘French Foreign Legion’ their attention immediately shortcircuited: even if the information that followed was factual, it was channelled through the familiar fictional matrix installed in their minds by Wren’s tales.

  Needless to say, Beau Geste is not a significant historical document, but Wren’s scene-setting is clearly based on detailed knowledge of barracks life at Sidi bel Abbès in the first years of the century. His short stories are set (again, vaguely) in the context of actual cam
paigns, in Tonkin and Dahomey as well as the Sud-Oranais and Morocco, and many people assumed – still assume – that he had first-hand experience. Wren was a tall, strong, handsome man with a soldierly bearing; but although his Great War service with the Indian Army allowed him to inhabit the public persona of a pukka retired officer, he seems, in fact, to have been a second-generation product of the aspiring working class. Today that would be a matter for pride, but to the unthinking snobbery of the 1920s class background mattered a great deal, and Wren was always deliberately reticent about his early life.

  In the late 1930s he declined to fill in a questionnaire circulated during the preparation of the compendium Twentieth-Century Authors (Kunitz & Haycraft; H. W. Wilson, New York, 1942), and the entry under his name is both vague about his life and completely inaccurate about his antecedents; like almost every other printed source, it also gives his date of birth as ten years too late. Wren allowed the assumption of previous Legion service to stand, while refusing to respond to direct enquiries and never making any direct public claim. However, he told his young stepson that he had indeed been a légionnaire, that he had been decorated, and that he had deserted after striking back at a brutal NCO.

  It is certainly not impossible that Wren did enlist in the Legion and serve for a year or two before making a successful desertion, but the internal evidence of his novels and stories is not, by itself, persuasive. He could have interviewed at least one former légionnaire at length; and it should also be remembered that he lifted two anecdotes straight from the memoirs of the Legion veteran Frederic Martyn, published in 1911. One was the idea of dead soldiers being propped up around the battlements of a fort to exaggerate the remaining strength of the defenders; this story was told to Martyn during his first few days in the Legion by a veteran in a bar, and Wren in turn used it as the climax to Beau Geste. The other, of a French officer in West Africa finding among the enemy dead the very Chassepot rifle that he himself had carried in the Franco-Prussian War, was recycled by Wren in the short story No.187017 in his collection Flawed Blades (1932). Martyn’s memoir, and that of George Manington published in 1907, contain very full details of daily life in the 1er Régiment Étranger at Sidi bel Abbès in the 1890s, and accounts of service in Tonkin and Dahomey. The memoir by ‘Erwin Rosen’ (Erwin Carle) – In the Foreign Legion, first published in German by R. Lutz (Stuttgart, 1909) and in English by Duckworth in 1910 – also attracted a good deal of attention. These books alone would probably have given Wren all the basic background he needed.