Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 28

  Arriving in Hanoi in the pleasant winter weather, Lyautey was introduced to his duties as head of the 2nd Bureau of the military staff, and immediately found them engrossing. It was his task to collate operational and intelligence information about the grinding fight against the rebels and brigands all over the four military territories into which Lanessan had recently divided Tonkin.12 However, Lyautey’s first impressions of his colleagues were not favourable: they all seemed to hate Tonkin and despise the people, and their envious self-interest was as bad as anything he had encountered in home garrisons. They had no officers’ club but lived in furtive, gossipy cliques of four or five together, mirroring the introverted society of the tiny colon population. On expressing his surprise at the lack of a club, Lyautey was told that such an institution would only be a trap where they would be spied upon by police informers.13 He was pained to find that despite their lack of interest in Indochina there were no collective subscriptions to French newspapers and journals, but any need for entertaining stimulus disappeared within ten days of his arrival.

  A combination of illness and absence among the staff suddenly propelled Lyautey into the post of acting chief-of-staff to General Duchemin, the commander-in-chief. He had to throw himself into a ridiculously demanding crash course of self-education on the job – about the country, the operational and logistic systems, current plans and problems, even relations with the Chinese Guangtung Army on the north-east frontier. He rose to the challenge, loving the urgent and varied work, and he found his new colleagues to be friendly, helpful and several cuts above the time-servers he had first met. These were real colonial soldiers – knowledgeable, pragmatic, widely travelled and experienced in action. Recent years had provided them with plentiful opportunities to acquire such experience.14

  SINCE THE TREATY OF TIENTSIN IN 1885, contacts between the commanders of Chinese and French outposts facing one another along the Tonkin border had become warily correct. By the mid-1890s General Liu Yung-fu was far away, leading his Black Flags against the Japanese on Formosa (though still carrying Lieutenant Garnier’s pocketwatch as a souvenir of his glory days); nevertheless, there was no shortage of rebels-cum-bandits, both in the high country and along the Delta rivers.15 On the borders, Chinese officers maintained lucrative relations with the gang leaders, and their own troops often slipped over to make freelance raids that would be blandly denied at the next meeting with their French opposite numbers. The ex-soldiers and bandits sustained themselves by preying on the local tribes, with whom they had no ethnic links; they simply took what they wanted – food, women (both for their own pleasure and to sell as slaves in China), buffaloes and opium. Down in the Delta they terrorized and taxed the nearest villages and raided those further afield, and even villages within sight of Hanoi were sometimes burned. Some rebel leaders had useful contacts with mandarins, whose hand could be detected in such provocations as the kidnapping of French officials for huge ransoms (which were almost invariably paid, thus encouraging the practice).

  The capture and exile of King Ham Nghi in 1888 had made the task of pacification no easier; Paris demanded quicker results than the nature of the problem allowed, while declining to provide the funds and troops that might have made a difference. Starved of men and resources, the generals tried to keep watch over the countryside by planting in the most infested areas isolated posts held by single European companies and platoons, each side-by-side with double the number of Tonkinese Skirmishers, but their radius of control was very limited. The bandits’ local intelligence network was nearly always superior, and the rare French success in setting an ambush or making a surprise dawn attack on a hideout depended on the guidance of some vengeful turncoat. The little garrisons were sometimes vulnerable themselves – though usually to night sniping rather than to actual assault – and their resupply parties were doubly so. The terrain and climate were extremely punishing, and the bandits nearly always enjoyed the initiative. Even after the occasional local French success, effective pursuit was usually impossible, so the rebels simply scattered, to reassemble when the French had to turn back.

  If a major rebel fort in the hills was located, territory commanders would scrape up enough men during the practical campaigning season (the European winter months) for a mixed ‘shandy column’ of légionnaires and Skirmishers with a few mountain guns, and the large train of porters needed to keep it supplied for a couple of weeks. Moving such a force along rudimentary jungle tracks through the highlands was slow, noisy and exhausting. Coolies could not carry more than about 35lbs in this terrain; men had to be assigned to guard and escort them – and also the wives of the Tonkinese Skirmishers, who always had to accompany any major movement carrying cooking pots and their husbands’ packs.16 This all made for long and unwieldy columns; it was predictable that they did not achieve much, and more surprising that the bandits – who often had repeating rifles and plentiful ammunition – never dared to attack such a force with determination while it was strung out in broken country. Instead they usually skirmished with its advance guard, buying time for their main group to disperse before they could be brought to battle.

  Their bases had usually been abandoned long before the column arrived, but when a major fort was found, attacked, and defended, the fighting was often more difficult and costly than French commanders had expected. Until they had actually seen one with their own eyes they did not seem to appreciate that these strongholds might be cleverly sited and formidably well built. One captured by General Voyron in March 1892 (after laboriously assembling 6,300 men – about 20 per cent of the whole occupation corps) covered a square mile, with more than 100 buildings and sophisticated triple ramparts, and an Engineer officer calculated that it must have taken 1,500 coolies nine months to build it.17 Despite operations by converging columns, the defenders of such forts could seldom be encircled before they filtered away into the wilderness, to establish a new lair somewhere not far off (they, too, used baggage porters, though in their case kidnapped rather than paid). They knew that the French could not keep large forces in the field for long – and meanwhile, the areas stripped of troops to form the columns were themselves left undefended.

  French operations were thus repetitive and rarely productive, but they were not cheap. Battle casualties were modest – an average of 184 killed and wounded each year in 1893 – 6 – but those from fever were, as always, much higher. Although total Legion combat deaths in Indochina were only 271 in the twenty-two years between 1887 and 1909, disease killed almost exactly ten times as many, and the health of those who survived was often so wrecked that the men had to be shipped back to Algeria for discharge. As already noted, the annual replacement rate needed to keep the four Legion battalions up to strength suggests that they suffered an attrition of 25 per cent of their effectives every year.18

  THE MEMOIRS OF THREE LÉGIONNAIRES – the Bavarian Jean Pfirmann, and the Englishmen Frederic Martyn and George Manington – provide vivid glimpses of life on column and in jungle forts north of the Delta between 1888 and 1894. There was never any shortage of volunteers for drafts, despite the occasionally shocking state of men who returned to the depot, from Indochina; for most of that time Tonkin was the only place a légionnaire could earn bragging rights and a campaign medal. This attraction was powerfully reinforced by legends of clean, compliant women, and by the certainty of colonial double pay and a campaign supplement to any eventual pension.

  The 500-strong Tonkin drafts sailed from Oran on the 5,000-ton trooper Bien Hoa, after enthusiastic send-offs.19 The ship could carry about two battalions; Naval Troops were embarked in Marseille before the Legion draft was picked up in Oran, and the men enjoyed light work and good food during the five-week voyage. In the Suez Canal and during coaling stops at Colombo and Singapore some légionnaires were always tempted to desert, though usually more for the challenge than with any real idea of what they would do if they succeeded. Martyn wrote that, in harbour, Naval Troops sentries were posted around the rails, and when two l�
�gionnaires made a run down the gangplank in Singapore they were shot down, to the incredulous rage of their comrades that the marsouins had not fired wide; for the rest of the voyage the Anchor and the Grenade had to be kept strictly segregated.20

  Haiphong had expanded remarkably since 1883; it now had floating wharfs, and brick buildings along wide boulevards with electric lighting. After a modest evening on the town, Corporal Martyn was collared by the sergeants to help round up the rest of his draft, led astray by their first encounters with chum-chum. (A litre of this vile-tasting distilled rice spirit cost more than three days’ pay, but men pooled their resources – a litre of chum-chum went a long way.)21 The new arrivals were boated up the Thai Binh and Thuong rivers to the Legion depot at Phu Lang Thuong, set among the close-packed Bao Dai hills. A big pagoda was used as a storehouse and magazine, and when Pfirmann arrived in the winter of 1888/9 substantial new barracks of ironwood and bamboo were being built; there was the usual village for the Tonkinese Skirmishers’ families, Chinese shops, and even a store run by a retired Legion NCO. This was, however, very much an operational zone, and at night the glow of burning villages was often seen. Any patrols that responded before sunrise risked ambush, but when they went looking for trouble by day they seldom found any.22

  PHU LANG THUONG WAS A CROSSROADS for communications, being linked to the 2nd Territory headquarters at Lang Son by the old Mandarin Road. The area of operations lay to the north of the depot in the region called the Yen The (see Map 7), roughly between Thai Nguyen and the Cau river on the west and south, the Thuong river and the Mandarin Road on the east, and Van Linh in the mountains to the north. The southern Yen The was mostly a fertile plain where villagers raised tobacco, yams, and mulberry trees for silkworms. About 20 miles north of Phu Lang Thuong this rich – and therefore vulnerable – country sloped up into heavily wooded hills and the chaotic Ngan Son and Bac Son mountains. These ranges were part of the wide territory that would become infamous in the 1940s – 50s as the ‘Viet Bac’, the almost impenetrable redoubt of the Communist Viet Minh, and its selection by General Giap for his secret bases had solid historical precedents. In the 1880s – 90s the mountains had been bandit country for thirty years; they formed a corridor giving access to sources of rich booty in the south, and to suppliers and markets in the north, astride the Chinese frontier all the way between Cao Bang and Lang Son.

  Pfirmann’s 4th Company, I/1st RE provided rotating detachments for small posts at Kep, Bo Ha and Bac Le; he was told that their main adversaries were a band led by one Doi Van – Sergeant Van – a deserter from the Tonkinese Skirmishers. (There was a loose chain of command among the rebels; the Yen The country was the fief of one De Tam, a lettré who had answered the call when King Ham Nghi took to the hills, and the whole territory was essentially under the parallel rule of a former military mandarin named De Nam.) In the spring of 1889, Corporal Pfirmann was sent with Captain Bonnet’s company to finish building and then to garrison the post at Bo Ha on a small, snake-infested hill above the banks of the Thuong river. The ground had already been cleared and two 50-yard-long thatched bamboo barracks built, for one platoon of légionnaires and two of Skirmishers. Now the post had to be ditched and walled; the work was urgent, but it was delayed by the need to send out frequent patrols. Prickly heat, painful boils and dysentery were a constant; the commissariat was lax about supplying mosquito nets, and quinine and bismuth – while freely given – were prescribed on a distinctly hit-or-miss basis. However, although there was no informed medical treatment, when Pfirmann went down with his first bad attack of malaria his mates cared for him with a tenderness that touched him.

  The captain kept the men’s spirits up by distributing extra wine (creatively accounted for by the quartermaster-sergeant), and encouraging evening sing-songs and theatrical turns. The 4th Company badly needed cheering up after 23 June. The first thing Pfirmann had been told on arrival at Bo Ha was that a tiger had just taken the captain’s horse from its stable, and tigers were never far from his thoughts after that date, when the night-sentry Private Gatelet suffered the same fate while distracted by rolling a cibiche (sentries were allowed to smoke, to keep off the mosquitoes). ‘We buried him on his 23rd birthday. He came from Metz, following his brother, who was a sergeant-major in the 2nd Foreign.’23

  DURING THE RAINY SEASON IN JULY 1889 two mixed columns were assembled from six post garrisons to search the Bao Dai hills. Pfirmann’s column was soon more or less lost and suffering badly from heat in the stinking jungle east of Bac Le, and two officers and several men came down with fever. The few villagers they came across were too scared of the bandits to give the troops any information, or even to sell them food unless forced to do so. In the same area a couple of years later, Manington described the terrain:The little track we followed passed [for nine miles] through a succession of jungle-covered valleys, and over hills hidden in primeval forests of teak, banyan, ironwood and palm trees, some of which were of enormous size, with an impenetrable undergrowth of fern, interlacing creepers, orchids and spiked rattan. In these woods the light of day was almost shut out by dense foliage; no birds seemed to live there, and the strange, weird silence was only broken now and again by troops of chattering brown monkeys, which, disturbed by our approach, would scuttle away through the branches. 24

  The Tonkinese Skirmishers normally provided the vanguard: a point man (with ‘one up the spout’), followed after 40 yards by a ‘cover-point’ of a corporal and four men, and at the same interval again by a half-platoon under a French sergeant. The légionnaires followed after another 40-yard gap (given the Gras rifle’s lack of a safety catch they do not seem to have carried it loaded), and 100 yards behind them a corporal and ten légionnaires formed the rearguard. Exact spacing was, of course, almost impossible to maintain in such thick country.25 By now the Legion in Tonkin were issued with Naval Troops’ khaki drill uniforms and helmet-covers. On column they carried 120 rounds of ammunition and reduced kit in a tent-cloth roll slung round the body horseshoe-fashion; Manington recalls filling his waterbottle with cold, weak coffee, and carrying an 18-inch coupe-coupe machete at his hip.

  Even without knapsacks, it was still exhausting to spend long days climbing and descending steep, slippery slopes, wading streams, cutting trails – almost tunnels – through thick bamboo and elephant grass, and all in humid temperatures of up to 110°F (43°C). Although the night halt would find them completely worn out, the men slept badly; they were tormented by mosquitoes and voracious jungle leeches, and spooked by the whooping of monkeys, the sudden crashing of large animals through the bush, and the occasional cough of a tiger. They hardly ever saw the sky through the forest canopy, and marched by compass bearing – in circles, Pfirmann suspected. These short-range columns took only a few porters; they had left Kep with rations for four days, and by the sixth they were seriously hungry until the problem was solved by the marksmanship of Private Kuhn in a sudden lucky encounter with a stag.26

  Although Pfirmann’s patrol had nothing useful to show for their exertions, as small jungle expeditions went this one got off lightly. When a patrol was several days’ out in the worst terrain it was impossible to carry for long men who collapsed from heatstroke or fever; their reeling comrades were themselves too near the end of their endurance and had to keep moving. Sometimes the casualty was simply disarmed and left behind, but after subsequent searches found bodies decapitated it was generally accepted that a merciful bullet through the head was the only solution. Even if the bandits did not find the poor wretch, huge jungle rats or soldier-ants certainly would.27

  Not all probes into the Yen The highlands were as uneventful. In August 1889, General Borgnis-Desbordes ordered three small columns to converge from Kep, Phu Lang Thuong and further west in an attempt to find bandit hideouts. The first, of 230 men, comprised Pfirmann’s 4th Company, I/1st RE and the 2nd of I/4th Tonkinese Skirmishers (companies in Tonkin were only about 100 strong). On 28 August, creeping along between a rockface on one side and
a ravine on the other, the point party ran into a barricade and came under fire; the Legion’s Lieutenant Montera and a corporal were wounded and 3 men killed, and immediately afterwards the rearguard were also attacked. Pfirmann describes making use of the smokescreen spread in the humid air by their black-powder cartridges to manoeuvre his squad into better positions; 3 of his 8 men were wounded. The ten-minute action cost 10 dead (half of them légionnaires) and 14 wounded including 2 lieutenants. Pfirmann was later thanked by Lieutenant Bonafous’ Skirmishers for bringing in one of their wounded along with his own casualties – they seemed astonished that a white soldier should do this.28

  Each Skirmisher company had a French captain, 2 subalterns and the heavy allocation of 12 sergeants, though virtually none of them spoke any Vietnamese (Manington drew an unfavourable comparison with the Indian Army, where British officers were obliged to learn the languages of their troops). Martyn thought the minority recruited from highland Thos and Muongs excellent – he even compared them to Gurkhas – but about 80 per cent of the total were enlisted down in the Delta, and were scared of the jungle. Manington described them on a couple of occasions as being skittish under fire, but he paid tribute to the lowlanders for their skills in digging and building with bamboo. The Skirmishers were friendly and most spoke a workable pidgin-French; when Manington was based at Nha Nam he became friendly with a Tho sergeant, often spending time with him and his wife in their cabin outside the fort. This NCO had distinguished himself during an assault on a bandit stockade, so much so that the rebels had called out to him to come and join them, offering 100 dollars if he brought a French officer’s head with him (he told Manington that they were black liars – he would probably only have got ten).29