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previous: Chapter 1 This webpage reproduces part of Giraud and the African Scene by G. Ward Price The Macmillan Company, 1944 The text is in the public domain. This text has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 3

 p18  Chapter II

Adventures to the Adventurous

In red pantaloons, with long-skirted, blue greatcoats looped up to their waists, and képis like those of the American Civil War on their heads, French troops, on the morning of August 28, 1914, filled the roads south of the Belgian frontier as they fell back into their own territory.

The first combats of the Great War of thirty years ago saw them defeated a week earlier in the battle of Charleroi, and Marshal Joffre had already made up his mind to retire to the line of the River Marne. On the banks of the River Oise, the army commanded by General Lanrezac was preparing to fight a regulated action, to hold off the advancing Germans and gain time for its own retreat.

In the 18th Division of that French Army, a tall, slim, 35‑year‑old captain, Henri Honoré Giraud, was getting his company of the 4th Zouaves ready for another desperate fight.

At Charleroi their losses had been heavy, but Giraud himself came through unscathed. Now once more they were to make a stand against the invaders of their country.

The First World War was by no means his baptism of fire. Except for a couple of years at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in Paris, all the fourteen of his military service had been spent in Africa, and he had taken part in several of the fights that occurred between 1906 and 1912, when France was establishing her authority over Morocco. But those had been operations against poorly armed tribesmen, generally reprisals for attacks on French nationals. Here on the Belgian frontier he, like everyone else, was seeing real war for the first time.

Giraud's second action, the battle of Guise, on August 29th, was a French success, though it did no more than check the enemy pursuit. The Germans were stopped for a couple of days, which gave  p19 Lanrezac time to continue his withdrawal to the south, but he was obliged to leave his dead unburied on the ground.

Among them was reported to be Captain Henri Giraud. He had been seen to fall in one of those bayonet-charges — "En avant ! A la baionnette !" — which at that time were the favorite tactics of French infantry. His blood-stained cap had been picked up by a man of his company, and his death was officially communicated to his wife. But Madame Giraud refused to believe that her husband had been killed. Her confidence proved justified.

When that charge was ordered, Giraud had sprung to the front of his company, his tall figure a conspicuous mark.

He had run but a few strides when a bullet hit him in the lung, and he fell unconscious. One of his sergeants, named Sabiani, thinking he was dead, stopped for a moment to snatch the regimental orders and other confidential papers from his pouch. While doing so, he was himself hit, and fell lifeless across his officer.

In the cool air of the summer night that followed, Giraud recovered consciousness, to find himself lying beneath the dead sergeant's body. With difficulty he managed to push it from him, and to get onto his feet. He had lost a great deal of blood; his head was swimming; his legs would barely carry him. Yet, grimly resolute, he staggered on through the darkness in what he thought would be the direction of the French lines.

Three times he fell, taking long to rise. After the third fall he was too exhausted to move again.

There, at dawn, a party of German stretcher bearers found him, and carried him to one of their field hospitals at Origny-Sainte-Benoîte, the nearest village.

The German surgeons extracted the bullet from his lung, and, being in the prime of life and of exceptionally robust constitution, Giraud was soon well advanced in convalescence.

His first thought was to escape. Creeping from his hospital ward he found some clothes belonging to French workmen employed by the Germans around the hospital. On his six‑feet‑three tall figure they were more of a betrayal than a disguise. Hardly had he got  p20 outside the hospital grounds before a sentry stopped him and marched him back.

The next bed to his was occupied by another French officer, Captain Schmitt.

The two had many long conversations as their wounds gradually healed, and Giraud found in Schmitt a character somewhat similar to his own. Both of them were determined to take the first opportunity to escape from captivity and get back to France for the purpose of resuming the fight.

They knew that the enterprise would be difficult and dangerous. By this time the French front was far off to the south, and the Germans had imposed a system of circulation permits, which meant that anyone moving about the country without the proper passes was liable to be arrested by the first military policeman who demanded to see his papers.

The only hope of getting away at all was to procure civilian dress.

Some of the local Frenchwomen at Origny were working as nurses under the German military doctors in the field hospital. Among them was Mlle. Lemaire, whose duties brought her into daily contact with the two captains. They formed a high opinion of her patriotism and courage. Eventually they took her into their confidence, and asked her to help them.

For this brave Frenchwoman the undertaking was full of risk. The German military authorities had fixed the death penalty for anyone helping French prisoners to escape.

But she did not hesitate when Giraud and Schmitt appealed to her.

Day by day Mlle. Lemaire smuggled in one garment after another, hiding it beneath her nurse's uniform. One morning she would bring the blue blouse of a French farm labourer; the next it would be a black beret or a scarf to muffle the face.

Until the disguises were complete, the things were hidden under the mattresses of the officers' beds, and Mlle. Lemaire meanwhile managed to provide them with enough money for a few days.

At length, on November 15, 1914, twenty-five days after Giraud's first unsuccessful attempt to get away, he and Schmitt managed to slip unseen out of the hospital at Origny and took to the open country  p21 in the guise of farm labourers seeking work. Being without any passes, they had at all costs to avoid passing a German military post, and this involved making the greater part of their journey across the fields.

The two men headed for the town of St. Quentin. There they presented themselves to the mayor, M. Gilbert, ostensibly for the purpose of obtaining a permit to seek employment. The mayor, however, was too wide awake to be deceived by their dress. He recognised them at once as French officers who had escaped. This was not the first case of the kind with which he had had to deal, and, being a patriotic Frenchman, his plans for helping such fugitives were already made. He got into touch with M. Venel, the owner of a hotel on the outskirts of St. Quentin, who was taken into the secret and agreed to employ the two officers until some means could be found for getting them back to French-controlled territory.

Giraud was given a job in the stables, where his experience as a horsemaster in North Africa made him useful. Schmitt worked in the kitchens.

From time to time, during that winter of 1914, German officers were billeted at the hotel. Giraud helped the orderlies to groom their horses. He spoke enough German to understand their conversation, and by thus making himself useful to the enemy he picked up items of information about the German forces, which his local French friends managed to smuggle through the lines to headquarters.

At last, one soldier, more suspicious than his comrades, began to have doubts about the genuineness of the tall French stableman who showed himself so obliging. He reported his misgivings to the clerk German Kommandantur, and M. Venel was questioned as to how long he had had Giraud in his employ.

That was a danger signal. Giraud did not wait. He left St. Quentin, becoming again a fugitive liable at any moment to be arrested, for German troops were in every town and village, and the French population was kept under close control.

He had already made up his mind that it was impossible to get back to the French Army except by way of Belgium, Holland and England. By this time the front in France had settled down into a  p22 continuous line of trenches which formed an impassable barrier.

For a time leaving the hotel he acted as clerk to a coal merchant. Then his luck favoured him again. He fell in with a professional smuggler named Richard, whose peacetime occupation consisted of running contraband goods like tobacco across the Belgian border with France. This man was familiar with every ford and path along the whole frontier, and he undertook not only to guide Giraud into Belgium, but to bring his comrade Schmitt across to join him.

The two thus found themselves together again on Belgian soil, but they were in as great danger as before, since Belgium too was under German occupation. Nevertheless they found friends. They were not the only French soldiers trying to make their way into Holland, and, by a sort of tacit understanding, the Belgian peasants held themselves ready to help these fugitives with food and money.

On one occasion, as they were making their way through a lonely forest, they were challenged by a German post. In a flash they turned and ran, dodging from tree to tree. A crackle of German rifle-fire broke out. Schmitt fell. He had been hit in the leg. This wound was not serious, but bad enough to stop him walking for a day or two. Giraud hoisted his companion onto his shoulders and, stumbling over the snow-covered ground, carried and dragged him to the deserted hut of a charcoal-burner. There for three days he nursed him, eking out the scanty provision of food they carried, until Schmitt could hobble along again.

On the outskirts of the next town stood a large circus tent, flanked by hobby horses, swings, and the other fittings of a fun‑fair.

The two men were hungry, cold and wretched. An idea suddenly occurred to Giraud. "We can't go on like this," he said. "What we must do is find a job. Why shouldn't we see whether we can get taken on at this circus? We are less likely to be challenged by German posts if we are moving about the country with a caravan."

"But what sort of job could we do in a circus?" asked Schmitt.

"Well, for one thing I can do some conjuring tricks," was are reply, "and we can both handle horses, so that we can make ourselves useful in several capacities."

 p23  Once more the baraka worked. Giraud presented himself to the circus manager and showed him some tricks which he had used his leisure as a young officer to learn from Arab jugglers. The manager was delighted, and at once added to his programme a number called "The Mysterious Magician of the Desert." Dressed in Oriental robes, and keeping up a conjurer's patter, half in Arabic, half in French, Giraud was a success in the villages where the circus stopped.

Eventually they reached the outskirts of Brussels, and there, one night after the show, as Giraud was walking over to the van in which he slept, a man in civilian clothes stepped close up to him out of the darkness.

"Mon capitaine !" he whispered.

Giraud's first instinct was to knock the stranger down and run. He might well be a German police spy, trying to startle him into admitting his identity. But the stranger went on.

"I, too, am French, and a soldier," he said. "I recognised you at the circus tonight. I have seen you before. My regiment was brigaded with yours at Charleroi, and you have a figure that one does not easily forget. I want to help you."

"How did you get here?" asked Giraud.

"I am ashamed to say that I am a deserter," was the answer, "and I bitterly regret my crime. Since I got into Belgium I have been trying to atone for it by doing what I can to help French prisoners who have escaped. As a deserter I dare not go back to France. The only way to quiet my conscience is to serve our country in the way I have told you. I am in touch with a secret organisation which helps French and English prisoners to escape into neutral Holland. I have already had more than two dozen of them through my hands, and, if you agree, I will help you as I have helped them."

Giraud thought it over for a moment. The man was obviously a Frenchman, but he might nevertheless be in the service of the German police as a decoy. Yet there was a note of sincerity in his voice that carried conviction.

"How do you propose to do it?" he asked.

"I will take you to the house of a Belgian doctor, who will pass  p24 you on to others, and they will see that you get across the Dutch frontier."

Once more Giraud decided to trust his luck. He called Schmitt to join him, and the French deserter took them to the doctor's house.

Giraud insisted on going in alone as a patient for a consultation. The wound in his chest had, indeed, reopened under the strain of his hard life in the circus, and it was only when the doctor had examined it and prescribed immediate treatment that his visitor confessed that he was a French captain trying to get back to France.

The doctor then told Giraud and Schmitt that he was in touch with an English hospital in Brussels conducted by Miss Edith Cavell, who, throughout the first year of that war, continually arranged the dispatch of escaped prisoners across the Dutch frontier, until, in November, 1915, she was arrested, sentenced to death, and shot.

It was not possible to make arrangements for Giraud and his friend to start immediately. While they were taking their turn, Giraud got the job of running a necktie-cutting machine in a Brussels factory.

At last, the day for the two men to start arrived. With false papers supplied by Miss Cavell's organisation, Giraud and Schmitt took the train to a town close to the Dutch frontier where they were to report at the house of a Belgiumº doctor, again in the guise of patients. Directly they were alone with him, they identified themselves by a password and sign.

The doctor's rejoinder was brief and businesslike.

"You will leave this afternoon," he said, "with two escaped officers of the Belgian Army who are now asleep in the next room, and are on their way to France to join King Albert.

"At three o'clock precisely, you will be at a certain crossroads, five miles from here. There you will see a man breaking stones, who wears a blue-and‑white spotted scarf round his neck. As you go by, you will whisper the word 'Belgica' and then if you follow his directions, he will share you the way into Holland."

Three hours later, Giraud, with his travelling companions, now three in number, set out. Like him, they were dressed in shabby working-clothes. It was one of those long, straight roads of the Low  p25 Countries down which they had to go, with many cyclists and an occasional German patrol on it. The four kept some distance apart, so as to reduce the risk if any one of them were challenged for identity papers.

When they reached the crossroads, the stonebreaker was, sure enough, hammering away at his heap. The fugitives closed up as they passed him. "Belgica," they murmured in one voice. He grunted, but did not look up. They walked on some distance before he overtook them.

"We leave the road here," he said without further parley, "and I may as well tell you that to get across the frontier is going to be both hard and dangerous. If you are not ready to face serious risks, you had better turn back while there's time."

"Lead on," said the four. The stonebreaker then impressed upon them that they must follow him in single file; they must not speak, and, if he gave a signal, they must fall flat on their faces and lie still.

For the next two hours the little party tramped across fields and through woods, skirting lonely farmhouses and avoiding all main roads. The February evening was fading into dusk when the guide gave a quick wave of the hand. In an instant all five of them dropped to earth and lay prone.

A second or two later, round the corner of the path ahead, came a German cavalry patrol; the stonebreaker's keen ear had heard the jingle of a horse's bit. Chatting casually, the enemy troopers rode by. None of them noticed the figures lying motionless as logs in the rough grass just off the track.

Moving on again and passing through more woods, they arrived after dark on the crest of a slope. At the foot of it was a fire, round which they could make out a group of soldiers. This was one of the outposts that kept watch on the border between Belgium and Holland. . . . Five hundred yards away shone the glow of another fire, and beyond that still more of them. Between these watchfires the Germans maintained a constant patrol.

The guide moves on, and in silence the four men follow him, close on his heels. Creeping down the hillside, they see ahead the gleam of a great marsh. The expanse of muddy water, broken by  p26 tufts of reeds and thickets of brambles, stretches right across the line of watchfires. In single file the men wade cautiously into the morass.

Here begins the most risky part of the journey. If the fugitives fail to follow exactly the course set by their guide, they may be engulfed in the quagmire. If they make the least sound or splash, the German sentries patrolling the edge of the marsh will sweep it with machine‑gun fire.

Every few minutes, a searchlight swings slowly across the swamp. Keen and cruel eyes are following its beam. Each time that it draws near them, their five forms, thigh-deep in the water, must stand rigidly still. The night is clear, and they have the feeling that they must be as conspicuous as flies on a plate. Once the searchlight pauses, full upon them, dazzling their eyes with its baleful white glare. They hold their breath, expecting instantly the deadly rattle of machine‑guns — but Giraud's baraka is at work. The questing beam moves slowly on again.

So, for a thousand yards, they steal forward, floundering wearily through the dark swamp. At last, the ground begins to feel firmer beneath their feet. The marsh shallows, and a moment later they are standing on dry land. Then, for the first time, they hear the voice of their guide in tones above a whisper. It is with a shout of relief and rejoi­cing that he announces "Hollande, Messieurs !"

"Never in my life," says General Giraud, as he tells this story, "have I given a man a heartier handshake."

The two officers had been provided with Dutch money by their British and Belgian helpers. They took the first train to The Hague to report their arrival to the French military attaché there.

It was breakfast-time when they reached the Dutch capital, and, too impatient to await the opening of the French Legation, they walked to the Grand Hotel des Indes, where they had been told the military attaché lived. The porter of this elegant establishment, the best of its kind in Holland, was not a little astonished when two disreputable-looking civilians, plastered with mud to above the knees, presented themselves at his desk and asked to see the officer in question. With the diplomacy of his calling, he replied that he was  p27 not in the hotel, and it was impossible to say when he would return.

Giraud's blue eyes flashed.

"Tell him at once," he said, "that two old friends of his are waiting in the hall for him to come down, and that he will be very glad to see them."

There was no mistaking the tone of authority in his voice, and the porter's manner changed perceptibly.

"Well, if you would kindly give me your names," he muttered reluctantly.

"There is no need for any names," was the firm rejoinder. "Just tell him that two old friends of his are here." The porter's surprise was great when he saw with what warmth the two shabby callers were made welcome, and he was even more startled when the military attaché ordered rooms for them in the hotel.

From that moment the rest of the journey was easy, and within a week, by way of Flushing and Folkestone, Giraud reached London. From there he crossed to Paris and was soon reunited with his wife, who had steadfastly refused to believe the news of his death.

After a month's leave, he rejoined his regiment, the 4th Zouaves. Directly he resumed his service, Marshal Joffre, the French Commander-in‑Chief, summoned him to his headquarters. There Giraud received the Cross of a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and was informed that he had been appointed to a post on the staff of General Franchet d'Espèrey, commanding the 5th French Army.

After two years in this staff-appointment, he was promoted to the rank of major, and, to his delight, given command of his old battalion, the 4th Zouaves. Giraud was soon to lead it in one of the most dramatic and successful episodes of the whole war.

The Sixth Army, of which his battalion formed part, was preparing a large-scale attack near Soissons, and a necessary preliminary to this was the capture of a German fort at Malmaison. For over two years its defences had been systematically improved. The Germans regarded the fort as impregnable. It was, indeed, the key to their whole line on that sector of the front, and its importance in the eyes of the enemy was evidenced by the fact that the garrison consisted of the best troops in the German Army, the Prussian Guard.

 p28  To Giraud and his men was entrusted the desperate task of taking this strongly fortified position. The attack was launched at dawn on October 23, 1917, and he himself led the first of the assault-waves. By every law of probability that day should have seen the end of Major Giraud's life and career, but his old baraka was as strong as ever. Men fell by scores to right and left of him under the murderous machine‑gun fire. Soon after dawn that morning, however, he and his Zouaves had driven out the last of the German defenders. They found themselves in possession of six hundred prisoners of the Prussian Guard, together with seventeen enemy cannon and six groups of machine‑guns. That feat won for their commanding officer one of his thirteen mentions in French Army orders.

Two months later, in December, 1917, Giraud was appointed Chief of Staff of the Moroccan division, commanded by General Daugan. In that capacity he won two more mentions in army orders, on May 22 and October 15, 1918.

When the Armistice came, in November, 1918, Giraud accompanied his division in its advance to the Rhine. During the following winter he was stationed at Ludwigshafen. Then his old chief, General Franchet d'Espèrey, who had meanwhile taken over command of the Allied Army in the Balkans and, after the collapse of Turkish resistance, established his headquarters in Constantinople, sent for Giraud to be the head of the Operations Bureau of the Allied forces there.

Later in 1919 he was recalled to Paris to act as a military expert in the peace negotiations with Turkey.

But the strain of long war service began to tell, even upon Giraud's constitution of reinforced concrete. Early in 1920 the wound in his chest started to give trouble again, and he was obliged to go on long leave.

From this, at the beginning of 1922, he was recalled by Marshal Lyautey, the Commander-in‑Chief in Morocco, who had asked for him as Chief of Staff of the sub‑division of Marrakesh, and in the following year he was promoted to be Lieutenant-Colonel of the 14th North African Tirailleurs, a rifle regiment.

 p29  Once more, Giraud had returned to the part of the world with which he was most familiar as a soldier, and it became evident that his desire again to see active service would not have long to wait for fulfilment.

It had seemed a miracle that Morocco, a country so recently brought under French control, should have stayed quiet while France was fighting for her life in Europe. That it did so was due to the ability of Marshal Lyautey, who, from 1912 until his retirement in 1925, combined French military and civil authority in that country as Resident-General. He contrived both to keep control over the Moorish Government of the Sultan and to impose respect upon the still unsubdued Berber tribes of the mountains.

On the eve of the first Great War, Lyautey received an order from the French Ministers of Foreign Affairs and of War to evacuate the interior of Morocco, establish garrisons in the principal ports, and dispatch all the rest of his troops to the front in Europe. "The fate of Morocco will be settled in Lorraine," said this peremptory message.

The reply was characteristic of a man whose example later on undoubtedly had its effect upon the character of Giraud, as it did on that of many other French soldiers who afterwards rose to distinction. Lyautey sent thirty-seven battalions to France, but, though this left him with no more than a skeleton force, he refused to give up the interior. The Germans did their best to stir up trouble in the country by smuggling arms and money to the Moorish tribesmen through Spanish territory, but Lyautey proved able to nip in the bud any attempt at a rising.

"Respect consciences; flatter interests" was one of his maxims, and the latter principle he put into operation by paying substantial subsidies to the great feudal over­lords who exercised a traditional sway over the warlike clansmen of the Grand Atlas.

By such means, and by a bold display of the small forces left to him, Lyautey managed to keep Morocco quiet during the critical years of 1914‑1918, but after his retirement in 1925 French prestige in that country began to undergo a decline. One of the factors that  p30 contributed to this was the failure of the Spanish Government to keep order in the barren, mountainous zone belonging to them along the north coast of the country.

The Riff tribes in the interior of this Spanish territory had been supplied with arms and ammunition by the Germans during the war, in the hope that they would use these against the French. From 1919 onwards, however, they began to turn them against their own rulers.

The Riffans found a leader in Abdel-Krim, the son of a chief, who was an able and intelligent man and had spent twelve years in Spanish service at Melilla. Spanish Army and administration alike proved incompetent to deal with the danger. An expeditionary force under General Silvestre was surrounded and almost annihilated. Its commander shot himself.

The Riffans captured an enormous quantity of war material, and proceeded to lay siege to Melilla.

Large reinforcements had to be sent from Spain, and, at much cost in lives and money, the Moors were driven back. Eventually, after dispatching about 60,000 troops to Africa, the Spanish managed to recover control of a zone •some fifty miles deep from the coast, but Abdel‑Krim and his mountaineers remained the masters of the interior. In 1924, as correspondent of the Daily Mail, after weeks of preparation in Africa, I paid a secret visit, in Moorish dress, under the escort of a gun‑runner, to the romantic and formidable leader of this rebellion, and could see for myself how well armed and warlike Abdel‑Krim's clansmen were. The Riff leader gave me a letter to Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, then British Premier, asking him to persuade the Spanish Government to make peace.

Nothing came of that, and, in the year 1925, Abdel‑Krim began to fear that France, whose territory borded Spanish Morocco on the south, would intervene in favour of Spain. He anticipated this move by a sudden and furious attack upon French Morocco, calling upon the tribes there to join him, and massacring those who refused.

The first town across the frontier of the Spanish zone is Taza, and there Colonel Giraud was stationed, in command of his 14th Tirailleurs.

The military authorities in Paris are believed to have recommended  p31 withdrawal before the onslaught of the mountaineers, but Lyautey for a second time refused to evacuate any of the territory under his control. The brunt of fa­cing Abdel‑Krim's savage warriors consequently fell upon Giraud and his men. Many of the French tribesmen had joined up with the Riff invaders, who outnumbered the force under Giraud's command by two to one.

A hard-fought battle took place on the stony, barren plain north of Taza, beginning on August 2, 1925. As usual, Giraud was in the front line with his troops. The fate of French Morocco was at stake. At the end of several days' fighting, the Riff advance was checked, and the discouraged tribesmen began to slip back to their mountain lairs, but, though Giraud had gained an important victory, he was seriously wounded in the fight by a bullet which pierced both his thighs and injured the sciatic nerve. "Good shot!" was his only exclamation as he fell.

After treatment in Morocco, he had to be taken back to Paris. The surgeons thought he would be crippled for life.

Yet, at the end of December, hobbling on two sticks, he rejoined his regiment.

He had been told that he would never be able to ride again. Even attempts to walk caused him acute pain, but Giraud was determined to overcome his injuries. On New Year's Day, 1926, he ordered his horse to be brought round to his quarters, and had himself lifted into the saddle. He was unable to grip with his knees, so he made two rifle­men walk one on either side of him, holding them to the saddle-flaps.

Day after day, he repeated this exercise, until at length he was able to move about unaided either at a walk or a canter. It was many weeks before he recovered sufficient power in his legs to keep his seat at the trot.

Meanwhile Abdel‑Krim and his Riffans, though defeated, were still defiant, and once more Giraud took the field at the head of his Tirailleurs.

Winter had held up the general operations, and they were now renewed with the enemy on the defensive. After a month's further campaigning, Krim surrendered on May 27th at Targuist to General  p32 Boichut, and Giraud had the satisfaction of bringing him back to Taza as a prisoner. The French Government decided to deport the Riff leader to the island of Réunion. He was allowed to take with him his wives, children and personal possessions. These made up 250 mule-loads, and it was Giraud's regiment that escorted the caravan of the conquered native leader on its journey to Casablanca to embark for exile.

In the following year Colonel Giraud was recalled to Paris and put in charge of the infantry course at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre. He was to remain there for three years, and, though the role of a military professor was not congenial to his active temperament, he took up his new task with characteristic thoroughness.

Among the officers who studied under him were several foreigners. One of them, Colonel Flint, of the United States Army, was to renew acquaintance with his professor years afterwards in Algiers.

Another of his students has put on record that: "His lectures were fascinating. Giraud explained everything. The lucidity of his explanations made the most complicated matter seem simple. He was always affable and friendly, and I am confident that all those who attended his courses would have been ready, if necessary, to follow him to the end of the world."

In March, 1930, however, this academic interlude in Giraud's eventful career came to an end. A serious situation was developing in the south of Morocco, and a new command was created for him, as Brigadier-General in charge of the border­land between Morocco and Algiers.

It was there, on the fringe of the Sahara Desert, that Giraud began four years of what may best be described as guerrilla fighting against disaffected tribesmen.

This was for the final subjugation of the mountain-range of the Grand Atlas, then not only unmapped but unexplored. Those lofty peaks had become the last refuge of clansmen who had never been subjected to any authority since history began, whose existence largely depended on brigandage, and whose pastime was war.

From his headquarters at Bou Denib, Giraud gradually pushed forward, Tauz, Tafilalet, Ferkla, Todra, the Oued Dades, and Oued  p33 Draa were the names of districts which he successively occupied, forcing the "dissident" tribes further and further back into the mountains, until at last they were completely surrounded in the recesses of that terrestrial Gibraltar, Mount Baddou.

No one in the outside world heard a thing of these campaigns of skirmish and ambush waged by the Foreign Legion and local French African troops. Little appeared about them in the French Press, for it was not in the interests of the Government that public attention should be directed to the operations.

Occasionally a brief communiqué would be issued, reporting the occupation of some valley or range with a queer Berber name, but, as the place in question was not to be found on any map, it was impossible to judge the extent or importance of the advance made.

Had this gradual completion of the conquest of Morocco required the constant dispatch of troops from France, as was the case with the Spaniards in their zone of that country, these annual campaigns might have aroused anxiety, and even become an issue in French politics. But, since this was not so, little notice was taken of them, except by a few Left Wing members of the Chamber of Deputies, who occasionally made them the subject of protests against the alleged "imperialism" of the French Government.

No casualty lists appeared in the news­papers to attract the notice of the general public, and though from time to time the obituary of a young officer killed in Morocco was a reminder that the expansion of French influence into its mountainous recesses demanded a constant toll of lives, the public regarded these remote hostilities as no more than insignificant affairs of outposts.

Many a promising French officer met an obscure yet not inglorious death in attacking the strongholds of the "dissidents," as the defiant tribesmen were officially termed. It was a sad experience to stand, as I have done, by the side of the mule-borne stretcher in which the dead body of some gallant young subaltern had been brought down from the front light, and see his general lay upon its breast the Cross of the Legion of Honour as the first and only distinction of a career which, but for its untimely end, might have been one of long and still more valuable service to France.

 p34  Tourist traffic in Morocco continued, and was steadily developing without any of its European visitors suspecting that they were in a country still only partially subdued, where thousands of troops were engaged each summer in warfare with sections of the native population.

These operations did have the effect of keeping alive the fighting spirit of the French North African Army. When the Allies landed in Africa ten years later, they benefited from finding there a native army experienced in local conditions of warfare. Troops of the kind that Giraud and his fellow-generals had trained provided them with a screen against the 100,000 Germans who were hurried across into Tunisia between November 11 and December 11, 1942, at a time when the American and British armies together could only place in line between twenty and thirty thousand combatants, all of them unfamiliar with the country.

Giraud himself did not escape unscathed from the risks of the Moroccan operations. He had introduced into that theater of war not only the armoured car and the tank, but also the aeroplane, and it was his habit to make frequent personal reconnaissances of the enemy positions by this means, with his aide-de‑camp acting as pilot. Far from any possible landing-ground they would cruise round above the inaccessible peaks, surveying lines of approach and attack. I myself had the experience of flying over these recesses of the Grand Atlas, and well remember what a nightmare-confusion of gorge and precipice they are — a petrified tempest of rock, throwing its billows •12,000 feet into the air, divided by narrow valleys and sheer canyons in which, until the summer of 1933, no European had ever set foot.

The atmosphere above them is full of air‑pockets, and a baffling alternation of upward and downward currents, due to the complicated contours below.

One day, as Giraud and his pilot were over this grim welter of mountains, they passed low across a ridge where a party of the enemy lay hidden behind the rocks. A ragged rifle-volley was fired at their machine, and one bullet pierced the carburetor of their plane. The engine spluttered and stopped, and the aircraft began to lose height.

 p35  With nothing below them but rocky slopes and dark, precipitous ravines, a safe landing was out of the question. Even if they were lucky enough to survive the crash on the mountainside, which seemed inevitable, they could hardly hope to escape an even grislier end at the hands of merciless mountaineers, who were already waving their long knives in triumph at the sight of the sinking aeroplane.

On April 25, 1924, when Giraud was promoted to the rank of divisional general, he could look back upon four years of complete success in Southern Morocco. The entire country had been pacified, and the tribesmen have never given any trouble since.

His promotion entailed a change of post, and for close on two years he lived a more settled life in command of the division at Oran, the second largest city of Algeria. Giraud's duties there were those of peace — routine, and he had time to meditate on the danger of war which was beginning to overhang Europe as a result of the  p36 Nazi Government's declared intention to throw off all restrictions imposed by the Peace Treaty of Versailles, and especially of its defiant return to compulsory military service in February, 1935.

Whatever illusions existed in the United States and Britain as to the strength of the French Army at this time, they were not shared by its senior officers, who had the best information on the subject. I remember the views expressed to me by another French general whose acquaintance I made in North Africa. Giraud said much the same thing to Winston Churchill at Metz a year or two later.

"I believe another war in Europe is inevitable," were my informant's words, "and if it comes, France is worse prepared to defend herself than she has been for two hundred years."

These soldiers blamed the incompetence and corruption of their politicians for the decline of their country's defensive powers. In France, as in Britain, the representatives of the people feared to incur the unpopularity that might result from voting the supplies required for armaments, whereas Hitler's regime could lavish money on preparations for war without consulting anyone.

The mystique of Hitlerism had especial appeal for the German character, and the generation of young Germans which had just missed taking part in the war of 1914‑1918 was now in the full force of manhood, and being systematically impregnated with an aggressive attitude of mind. We are born to die for Germany" was the motto displayed in the first great Hitler Youth camp of 4,000 boys at Murnau, which I visited in 1934.

Most of the tanks and guns belonging to the French Army dated from the last war. Political obstruction from Left Wing deputies was allowed to interfere with the proper training of the troops. Army maneuvers, for instance, were cancelled one year, under pressure from the Socialist Party, on the pretext that there was an epidemic of influenza in the country.

Professional soldiers took a more realistic view than politicians anxious to achieve popularity by limiting the military burdens of their constituents.

Giraud himself was given an exceptional opportunity to appreciate the danger threatening the international relations of Europe when,  p37 on March 7, 1936 — the very day that Hitler marched his troops into the Rhineland, which, according to the Treaty of Versailles, was to remain permanently demilitarised — he was appointed Military Governor of Metz and Commander of the 6th Military Area, one of the most important in France.

In that great frontier-fortress he was well placed to judge the significance of Germany's military preparations, and for three years he continued to denounce to his superiors the weakness of the French Army's organisation and its lack of modern material.

On January 30, 1939, he did express the opinion that the Maginot Line was impregnable. "There is not one chance in a hundred," he said, "that any enemy can cross France's fortified barriers from Basle to Belgium." The Germans, indeed, never tried it.

As regards the unfortified remainder of the French frontier on the east, Giraud always maintained that it would be a vital necessity for France, in case of war, to anticipate a renewal of the German attack through Belgium, on the lines of 1914, by herself occupying that country, and helping the Belgian Army to man its fortifications along the German border.

The plans of the French Government, however, included no dispositions of this kind. That was why, when Winston Churchill, as a private member of Parliament, visited Giraud at Metz in 1936 during his governor­ship, he found the General very pessimistic about the increasing perils of the European situation. "Your country and mine," said Giraud to Churchill, "are playing a dangerous game by interfering in European affairs without sufficient strength to sustain their point of view. France has at least a defensive army and the Maginot Line. England has only a navy."

Though no one could accuse Giraud of being an "appeaser," he did, in fact, hold the view that France and Britain should do everything in their power to avoid war with Germany, if possible until 1940, in order to gain time for making up their inferiority in armaments.

He maintained the same opinion when, in June, 1939, he was made a member of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, that committee of senior generals which determined French military policy.

 p38  At its meetings he brought forward on several occasions bitter reproaches against individual French Ministers whom he held responsible for the deficiencies of the army and air force in respect of war material. He had now been appointed to the rank of full General, in command of the 7th Army, whose headquarters were at St. Omer.

When the second Great War at last began, this army was posted at the extreme left wing of the French front, with the British Expeditionary Force on its right.

It was his hope that he might be allowed to lead his troops into Belgium before the Germans did so, but through the whole of the winter of 1939 and the spring of 1940 he had to remain inactive.

The orders were that the Allied forces on the Belgian frontier should be ready at any moment to cross it, and meet the Germans if they entered Belgium from there side. Yet the fear of giving the enemy any provocation to take this step caused the French Supreme Command to forbid any preliminary reconnaissance on Belgian territory, or any advance arrangements for cooperation with the Belgian forces.

Giraud was perfectly frank in his pessimistic appreciation of this position. To André Maurois, who was acting as an officer of the French Propaganda Department, he criticised the French Army's lack of equipment, especially in aeroplanes and guns.

"Do you know how many airplanes I have at my disposition as an army commander? Eight. That is less than a German Colonel has! I have, in fact, more air colonels than I have planes."

During the first seven months of the war, which on the French front were a time of stagnation, Giraud was mentioned in government circles as a possible successor to General Gamelin, the Commander-in‑Chief, whose inertia while the Germans were organising their overwhelming armoured drive against his country must be held partly responsible for the ease with which French resistance was overcome.

Paul Reynaud urged his claims for this post, describing Giraud as a man "made for the offensive." He was now 61, and his dominating presence and heavy moustache combined with the masterful  p39 expression of his blue eyes to remind the British troops on his flank, whom he occasionally visited, of Lord Kitchener, the military hero of Britain at the outset of the First World War.

May 10, 1940, was the day on which the war in Western Europe really began. At dawn the news came that the Germans were attacking the Dutch and Belgian frontier fortifications, and at 11 o'clock that morning the armoured cars of Giraud's army led the way into Belgium to meet them. Giraud carried out the order to advance with despair in his heart. He had wanted to take this step six months earlier. To venture forward onto unreconnoitred ground was a risk which he knew must be fatal.

By 7 o'clock the same evening, however, his reconnaissance units were in contact with the most forward elements of the Germans between Breda and Turnhout, while Giraud himself had established his headquarters near Antwerp.

Next day furious battle began near Breda. The scanty air force attached to the French 7th Army was annihilated by a tenfold superiority of German aeroplanes. In the night of May 14‑15 Giraud was forced to fall back before superior numbers of the enemy. He withdrew his army into the entrenched camp of Antwerp without leaving a single tank or gun in German hands.

That same evening a telegram from General Gamelin reached Giraud's headquarters, ordering him to leave the 7th Army and take over the command of a new group of armies which was being formed on the Meuse. He was to replace General Corap, commander of the 9th Army, whose front had been broken on May 13th by a sudden drive of German Panzer divisions across the Meuse at Sedan. The advance into Belgium of the Allied troops on the left of the line had, as Giraud foretold, played straight into the enemy's hands.

The situation at this moment entirely confirmed his original contention that the French and British armies either should have been allowed to establish themselves in Belgium before the Germans attacked that country, or else should have remained on the defensive in such fortified positions as they had been able to prepare during the winter along the northern frontier of France. Their rush to meet  p40 the German invaders of Belgium had been countered by an enemy thrust at a weak sector of the line held by the French which their forward movement had made their flank.

As soon as the national territory of France had thus been entered, all the Allied forces which had penetrated into Belgium were threatened with encirclement, so that they were forced to fall back toward the Straits of Dover.

Motoring all night across the roads of Belgium, crowded with troops and refugees, General Giraud reached Vervins, east of St. Quentin, to take over from General Corap.

The situation he found there was one of confusion. The wreckage of the broken 9th Army was being hastily filled out by reinforcements. For four days Giraud worked almost without sleep to form these troops into a new line of battle.

He succeeded in checking the German thrust through Maubeuge, but the swift advance of the German armoured divisions was sweeping round his left flank and reached the towns of Lens and St. Quentin, threatening to cut his lines of communication.

The General established his headquarters right amongst his front-line troops, hoping by his personal presence to stimulate their powers of resistance. On May 18th he received an order from the French Supreme Command to take up a new position in rear of Le Catelet, on the road running north from St. Quentin to Cambrai. It was on May 19th that Giraud moved there. He was closely beset by a German armoured force led by General Rommel, with whom he was to measure himself again, more successfully, in North Africa, three years later.

Giraud refused to take up the position in the rear from which an army group commander might be expected to conduct a battle. "A general who has ordered his troops to hold their ground must not retire himself," he said. He consequently lived among his men, regardless of continual shellfire and tank attacks.

For two days he galvanised his discouraged force to maintain a desperate resistance. "Surrounded by a hundred enemy tanks, I am destroying them in detail" was the last message received from him at French General Headquarters, but on May 21st, as he was moving  p41 about the front in his armoured car, a surprise attack of German tanks coming up from the south suddenly surrounded him.

Giraud's car opened fire with its single machine‑gun. It was like David engaging Goliath. The baraka still worked, for one of the first shots found the driving-slit of an enemy tank and set it on fire. But more of the armoured monsters came thundering up. Giraud was caught. He ordered his driver and his staff-officers to get out of the car and raise their hands. For the second time in his life he was a prisoner of the Germans.

They themselves paid tribute to Giraud's fighting spirit. "With great personal courage," said the German commander, reporting his capture, "General Giraud had visited the front, where he had taken command of small units and even of single machine‑gun detachments. He then returned to his headquarters to continue direction of the action, but, in attempting to get back to the front a second time, he was cut off by a column of German tanks, and taken prisoner."

The Germans flew their distinguished captive to Bonn. After a few days he was taken on to Koenigstein, near Dresden, •about 500 miles from the French frontier. There a large castle crowns a precipitous rock, rising •a thousand feet above the River Elbe.

Ever since the twelfth century, a fortified building has stood on that site. The present castle was built some two hundred years ago, and looks like a big barracks, with windows only in the upper part of its walls. It is surrounded by wide blames of solid masonry which have been planted out as gardens, and the road zigzagging up the tree-covered, rocky hill on which it stands leads to a gateway protected by a drawbridge. From the battlements a magnificent view stretches to a •fifty-mile-distant horizon, with the broad Elbe winding across it.

This castle had been set apart by the Germans as a special internment camp for generals. Some were there already when Giraud was led into the forbidding pile which for two years was to be his prison. But he did not see them. He was taken straight to a cell, furnished with rigorous simplicity, and, for some weeks, he was held incommunicado.

The reason for this discrimination against Giraud lay in some  p42 22‑year-old grievance of the German Army about an order issued by Marshal Foch in the year 1918, the nature of which they did not reveal to their prisoner. It would take more than solitary confinement, however, to abate Giraud's ardent spirit of patriotism, and a letter which he wrote to his children and his two sons-in‑law soon after his arrival at Koenigstein eloquently expresses his state of mind at that time.

It reads as follows:

An officer who shared the General's captivity at Koenigstein has related the following story:

There was a room in the castle with a large map of Europe on the wall upon which the German officers in charge of the prison marked the continual progress of the various German armies with small swastika flags.

On one occasion, when General Giraud was present, a German colonel made some sarcastic remarks to the French officers studying this map. Giraud listened in silence, and then replied as follows:

"I must confess that you have told us nothing but the truth. You have conquered a great many countries, won a great many victories, and taken a tremendous number of prisoners, among whom we have the misfortune to be counted.

"It is also true that you have a fine army, wonderfully equipped, which may well win for you more resounding victories. But of course that is not the end of the story. I am sure you realise that. For instance, here am I, General Giraud, as your prisoner, but some day I may no longer be here. I shall escape, return to France, join the Americans and the British, and raise a new French Army. Then, with our Allies, we shall reconquer France and cross the Rhine."

If this story is true, Giraud's forecast of what has since, in part, actually happened, must have seemed so fantastic to his German hearer as to be quite incredible.

 p44  In Koenigstein, the General had a French orderly attached to him, who cleaned out his room and brought his meals. These were scanty enough. Breakfast, at seven, consisted of a mug of ersatz coffee. Lunch, at eleven, was made up of soup and potatoes, while the evening meal, at five filled out the day's ration with a round of sausage and a slice of bread.

Gradually, more French generals arrived until, by the time Giraud was released from his close internment and allowed to take exercise with the other officers in the garden surrounding the castle, there were one hundred and twenty of them. The officers in command of the fortress constantly approached their distinguished prisoners with offers of immediate release if they would only sign a formal engagement not again to take up arms against Germany. Some of the French generals succumbed to this temptation and were sent back to France, where they were usually found official positions by the Vichy Government.

Giraud himself refused to listen to any such overtures. From the very day he entered Koenigstein he began to plan his escape without confiding his intention to anyone.

Once, the commandant of the prison came to see the General in his cell to try to induce him to modify his uncompromising attitude. The German's manner suggested at first that this was no more than a social call by one officer on another, but eventually the commandant reached the topic in his mind, and made a passing reference to the hope, which he said was entered by the German Government, that General Giraud would ultimately be disposed to consider the desirability of collaboration with the Germans in France.

Giraud's tall figure sprang upright. "You may speak to me of collaboration when I am a free man in France," he said. "Then I will answer you as I see fit, but not here."

And walking to the door of his cell, he opened it, with the remark "Au revoir, mon général, I am sorry that our little talk has had to be so short."

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