The Passing of Morocco, by Frederick Moore

For several years I had been watching Morocco as a man who follows the profession of ‘Special Correspondent’ always watches a place that promises exciting ‘copy.’ For many years trouble had been brewing there. On the Algerian frontier tribes were almost constantly at odds with the French; in the towns the Moors would now and then assault and sometimes kill a European; round about Tangier a brigand named Raisuli repeatedly captured Englishmen and other foreigners for the sake of ransom; and among the Moors themselves hardly a tribe was not at war with some other tribe or with the Sultan. It was not, however, till July of last year that events assumed sufficient[viii] importance to make it worth the while of a correspondent to go to Morocco. Then, as fortune would have it, when the news came that several Frenchmen had been killed at Casablanca and a few days later that the town had been bombarded by French cruisers, I was far away in my own country. It was ill-luck not to be in London, five days nearer the trouble, for it was evident that this, at last, was the beginning of a long, tedious, sometimes unclean business, that would end eventually—if German interest could be worn out—in the French domination of all North Africa west of Tripoli.

Sailing by the first fast steamer out of New York I came to London, and though late obtained a commission from the Westminster Gazette. From here I went first to Tangier, viâ Gibraltar; then on to Casablanca, where I saw the destruction of an Arab camp and also witnessed the shooting of a party of prisoners; I visited Laraiche against my will in a little ‘Scorpion’ steamer[ix] that put in there; and finally spent some weeks at Rabat, the war capital, after Abdul Aziz with his extraordinary following had come there from Fez.

Of these brief travels, covering all told a period of but three months, and of events that are passing in the Moorish Empire this little book is a record.

Six letters to the Westminster Gazette (forming parts of Chapters I., IV., VI., XIV., XV., and XVI.) are reprinted with the kind permission of the Editor.

I have to thank Messrs. Forwood Bros., the Mersey Steamship Company, for permission to reproduce the picture which appears on the cover.

It was in August, 1907, one Tuesday morning, that I landed from a P. & O. steamer at Gibraltar. I had not been there before but I knew what to expect. From a distance of many miles we had seen the Rock towering above the town and dwarfing the big, smoking men-of-war that lay at anchor at its base. Ashore was to be seen ‘Tommy Atkins,’ just as one sees him in England, walking round with a little cane or standing stiff with bayonet fixed before a tall kennel, beside him, as if for protection, a ‘Bobbie.’[2] The Englishman is everywhere in evidence, always to be recognised, if not otherwise, by his stride—which no one native to these parts could imitate. The Spaniard of the Rock (whom the British calls contemptuously ‘Scorpion’) is inclined to be polite and even gracious, though he struggles against his nature in an attempt to appear ‘like English.’ Moors from over the strait pass through the town and leisurely observe, without envying, the Nasrani power, then pass on again, seeming always to say: ‘No, this is not my country; I am Moslem.’ Gibraltar is thoroughly British. Even the Jews, sometimes in long black gaberdines, seem foreign to the place. And though on the plastered walls of Spanish houses are often to be seen announcements of bull fights at Cordova and Seville, the big advertisements everywhere are of such well-known British goods as ‘Tatcho’ and ‘Dewar’s.’

I have had some wonderful views of the Rock of Gibraltar while crossing on clear[3] days from Tangier, and these I shall never forget, but I think I should not like the town. No one associates with the Spaniards, I am told, and the other Europeans, I imagine, are like fish out of water. They seem to be of but two minds: those longing to get back to England, and those who never expect to live at home again. Most of the latter live and trade down the Moorish coast, and come to ‘Gib’ on holidays once or twice a year, to buy some clothes, to see a play, to have a ‘spree.’ Of course they are not ‘received’ by the others, those who long for England, who are ‘exclusive’ and deign to meet with only folk who come from home. In the old days, when the Europeans in Morocco were very few, it was not unusual for the lonesome exile to take down the coast with him from ‘Gib’ a woman who was ‘not of the marrying brand.’ She kept his house and sometimes bore him children. Usually after a while he married her, but in some instances not till the children had[4] grown and the sons in turn began to go to Gibraltar.

My first stop at the Rock was for only an hour, for I was anxious to get on to Tangier, and the little ‘Scorpion’ steamer that plied between the ports, the Gibel Dursa, sailed that Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock. I seemed to be the only cabin passenger, but on the deck were many Oriental folk and low-caste Spaniards, not uninteresting fellow-travellers. Though the characters of the North African and the South Spaniard are said to be alike, in appearance there could be no greater contrast, the one lean and long-faced, the other round-headed and anxious always to be fat. Neither are they at all alike in style of dress, and I had occasion to observe a peculiar difference in their code of manners. I had brought aboard a quantity of fresh figs and pears, more than I could eat, and I offered some to a hungry-looking Spaniard, who watched me longingly; but he declined. On the other hand a miserable[5] Arab to whom I passed them at once accepted and salaamed, though he told me by signs that he was not accustomed to the sea and had eaten nothing since he left Algiers. As I moved away, leaving some figs behind, I kept an eye over my shoulder, and saw the Spaniard pounce upon them.

The conductor, or, as he would like to be dignified, the purser, of the ship, necessarily a linguist, was a long, thin creature, sprung at the knees and sunk at the stomach. He was of some outcast breed of Moslem. Pock-marked and disfigured with several scars, his appearance would have been repulsive were it not grotesque. None of his features seemed to fit. His lips were plainly negro, his nose Arabian, his ears like those of an elephant; I could not see his eyes, covered with huge goggles, black enough to pale his yellow face. Nor was this creature dressed in the costume of any particular race. In place of the covering Moorish jeleba he wore a white duck coat with many pockets. Stockings[6] covered his calves, leaving only his knees, like those of a Scot, visible below full bloomers of dark-green calico. On his feet were boots instead of slippers. Of course this man was noisy; no such mongrel could be quiet. He argued with the Arabs and fussed with the Spaniards, speaking to each in their own language. On spying me he came across the ship at a jump, grabbed my hand and shook it warmly. He was past-master at the art of identification. Though all my clothes including my hat and shoes had come from England—and I had not spoken a word—he said at once, ‘You ’Merican man,’ adding, ‘No many ’Merican come Tangier now; ’fraid Jehad’—religious war.

‘Yes, me speak Englis’ vera well: been ’Merica long time—Chicago, New’leans, San ’Frisco, Balt’more, N’York’ (he pronounced this last like a native). ‘Me been Barnum’s Circus.’

[7]The fellow was insulted. ‘No,’ he replied indignantly, ‘me was freak.’

Later when I had made my peace with him by means of a sixpence I asked to be allowed to take his picture, at which he was much flattered and put himself to the trouble of donning a clean coat; though, in order that no other Mohammedan should see and vilify him, he would consent to pose only on the upper-deck.

Sailing from under the cloud about Gibraltar the skies cleared rapidly, and in less than half-an-hour the yellow hills of the shore across the strait shone brilliantly against a clear blue sky. There was no mistaking this bit of the Orient. For an hour we coasted through the deep green waters. Before another had passed a bleak stretch of sand, as from the Sahara, came down to the sea; and there beyond, where the yellow hills began again, was the city of Tangier, the outpost of the East. A mass of square, almost windowless houses, blue and white,[8] climbing in irregular steps, much like the ‘Giant’s Causeway,’ to the walls of the ancient Kasbah, with here and there a square green minaret or a towering palm.

We dropped anchor between a Spanish gunboat and the six-funnelled cruiser Jeanne d’Arc, amid a throng of small boats rowed by Moors in coloured bloomers, their legs and faces black and white and shades between. While careful to keep company with my luggage, I managed at the same time to embark in the first boat, along with the mongrel in the goggles and a veiled woman with three children, as well as others. Standing to row and pushing their oars, the bare-legged boatmen took us rapidly towards the landing—then to stop within a yard of the pier and for a quarter of an hour haggle over fares. Three reals Moorish was all they could extort from the Spaniards, and this was the proper tariff; but from me two pesetas, three times as much, was exacted. I protested, and got the explanation, through the man of[9] many tongues, that this was the regulation charge for ‘landing’ Americans. In this country, he added from his own full knowledge, the rich are required to pay double where the poor cannot. While the Spaniards, the freak and I climbed up the steps to the pier, several boatmen, summoned from the quay, came wading out and took the woman and her children on their backs, landing them beyond the gate where pier-charges of a real are paid.

At the head of the pier a rickety shed of present-day construction, supported by an ancient, crumbling wall, is the custom-house. Not in anticipation of difficulty here, but as a matter of precaution, I had stuffed into my pockets (knowing that my person could not be searched) my revolver and a few books; and to hide these I wore a great-coat and sweltered in it. Perhaps from my appearance the cloaked Moors, instead of realising the true reason, only considered me less mad than the average of my kind. At any rate they ‘passed’ me bag and baggage[10] with a most superficial examination and not the suggestion that backsheesh would be acceptable.

But on another day I had a curious experience at this same custom-house. A new kodak having followed me from London was held for duty, which should be, according to treaty, ten per cent. ad valorem. It was in no good humour that after an hour’s wrangling I was finally led into a room with a long rough table at the back and four spectacled, grey-bearded Moors in white kaftans and turbans seated behind.

‘The thing is only worth four pounds twenty dollars; I’ll give you one dollar.’

This being the right tax, I paid. But I was not to get my goods yet; what was my name?

A writer on the East has said of the Moors that they are the Puritans of Islam, and the first glimpse of Morocco will attest the truth of this. Not a Moor has laid aside the jeleba and the corresponding headgear, turban or fez. In the streets of Tangier—of all Moorish towns the most ‘contaminated’ with Christians—there is not a tramway or a hackney cab. Not a railway penetrates the country anywhere, not a telegraph, nor is there a postal service. Except for the discredited Sultan (whose ways have precipitated the disruption of the Empire) not a Moor has tried the improvements of Europe. It seems extraordinary that such a country should be the ‘Farthest West of Islam’ and should face the Rock of Gibraltar.

I did not stop long on this occasion at Tangier, because, from a newspaper point of view, Casablanca was a place of more immediate interest. The night before I sailed there arrived an old Harvard friend travelling for pleasure, and he proposed to accompany me. Johnny Weare was a young man to all appearances accustomed to good living, and friends of an evening—easy to acquire at Tangier—advised him to take a supply of food. But I unwisely protested and dissuaded John, and we went down laden with little unnecessary luggage, travelling by a French torpedo-boat conveying despatches.

[13]Here I must break my story in order to make it complete, and anticipate our arrival at Casablanca with an account of how the French army happened to be lodged in this Moorish town. In 1906 a French company obtained a contract from the Moorish Government to construct a harbour at Casablanca; and beginning work they found it expedient, in order to bring up the necessary stone and gravel, to lay a narrow-gauge railway to a quarry a few miles down the coast. In those Mohammedan countries where the dead are protected from ‘Infidel’ tread the fact that the tracks bordered close on a cemetery, in fact passed over several graves, would have been cause perhaps for a conflict; but this—though enemies of France have tried to proclaim it—was not a serious matter in Morocco, where the Moslems are done with their dead when they bury them and anyone may walk on the graves. The French were opposed solely because they were Christian invaders to whom the Sultan[14] had ‘sold out.’ They had bought the High Shereef with their machines and their money, but the tribes did not intend to tolerate them.

After many threats the Arabs of the country came to town one market-day prepared for war. Gathering the local Moors, including those labouring on the railway, they surrounded and killed in brutal fashion, with sticks and knives and the butts of guns, the engineer of the locomotive and eight other French and Italian workmen. The French cruiser Galilée was despatched to the scene, and arriving two days later lay in harbour apparently awaiting instructions from home. By this delay the Moors, though quiet, were encouraged, hourly becoming more convinced that if the French could land they would have done so. They were thoroughly confident, as their resistance demonstrated, when, after three days, a hundred marines were put ashore. As the marines passed through the ‘Water Port’ they were fired[15] upon by a single Moor, and thereupon they shot at every cloaked man that showed his head on their march of half-a-mile to the French consulate. At the sound of rifles the Galilée began bombarding the Moslem quarters of the town; and the stupid Moorish garrison, with guns perhaps brought out of Spain, essayed to reply, and lasted for about ten minutes.

But the landing force of the French was altogether too small to do more than protect the French consulate and neighbouring European houses. Town Moors and Arabs turned out to kill and rape and loot, as they do whenever opportunity offers, and for three days they plundered the places of Europeans and Jews and at last fought among themselves for the spoils until driven from the town by reinforcements of French and Spanish troops.

The fighting and the shells from French ships had laid many bodies in the streets and had wrecked many houses and some[16] mosques. Certain Moors, less ignorant of the French power, had asked the French to spare the mosques and the ‘Saint Houses,’ domed tombs of dead shereefs, and when the fighting began the Arabs, seeing these places were untouched, concluded, of course, that the protection came from Allah, until they entered them and drew the French fire.

Casablanca, or, as the Arabs call it, Dar el Baida, ‘White House,’ was a desolate-looking place when we arrived three weeks after the bombardment. Hardly a male Moor was to be seen. The whole Moslem population, with the exception of a few men of wealth who enjoy European protection, and some servants of consulates, had deserted the town and had not yet begun to return. Jews in black caps and baggy trousers were the only labourers, and they worked with a will recovering damaged property at good pay, and grinning at their good fortune. In the attack the Moors had driven them to the[17] boats, but now the Moors themselves had had to go. Native Spaniards did the lighter work.

A Spaniard and a Jewish boy took our luggage to an hotel, of which all the rooms were already occupied, even to the bathroom and the wine closet, as the long zinc tub in the courtyard, filled with bottles, testified. The proprietor told us that for ten francs a day we might have the dining-room to sleep in, but on investigation we decided to hunt further. Speaking Spanish with a grand manner, for he was a cavalier fellow, the hotel-keeper then informed us through an interpreter that he wanted to do what he could for us because he too was an American. The explanation (for which we asked) was that in New York he had a brother whom he had once visited for a few months, and that at that time, ‘to favour an American gentleman,’ he had taken out naturalisation papers and voted for the mayor.

But this man’s breach of the law in New[18] York was his mildest sin, as we came later to hear. He had many robberies to his credit and a murder or two. For his latest crime he was now wanted by the French consul and military authorities, but being an American citizen they could not lay hold of him except with the consent of the American consul, who happened to be a German, and, disliking the French, would let them do nothing that he could help. Rodrigues (this was the name of the Spanish caballero) had defended his place against the Arab attack with the aid only of his servants. The little arsenal which he kept (he was a fancier of good guns and pistols) had been of splendid service. It is said that when the fight was over forty dead Moors lay before the hotel door, half-a-dozen horses were in Rodrigues’s stable, and bundles of plunder in his yard. It was a case of looting the looters. On tinned foods taken from the shops of other Europeans (whom he had plundered when the Arabs were gone from the town)[19] he was now feeding the host of newspaper correspondents who crowded his establishment. But we were not to be looted likewise by this genial fellow-countryman, and our salvation lay at hand as we bade him au revoir.

Leaving the Hôtel Américain we turned into the main street, and proceeding towards the Hôtel Continental came upon a party of French officers, who had just hailed and were shaking hands with a man unmistakably either English or American. Beside him, even in their military uniforms the Frenchmen were insignificant. The other man was tall and splendid and brave, as the writer of Western fiction would say. He wore a khaki jacket, white duck riding trousers, English leggings, and a cowboy hat; and over one shoulder were slung a rifle, a kodak, and a water-bottle. To lend reality to the figure—he was dusty, and his collar was undone; and as we passed the group we heard him tell the Frenchmen he had just returned[20] from the ‘outer lines.’ How often had we seen the picture of this man, the war correspondent of fiction and of kodak advertisements!

Both Weare and I were glad to meet the old familiar friend in the flesh and wanted to speak to him, but we refrained for fear he might be English and might resent American effrontery. As we passed him, however, we noticed his name across the flat side of the water-bottle. In big, bold letters was the inscription: ‘Captain Squall, Special War Correspondent of “The Morning Press.”’ This was characteristic of Squall, as we came to know; neither ‘special correspondent’ nor ‘war correspondent’ was a sufficient title for him; he must be ‘special war correspondent.’

We had heard of Squall at Tangier and thought we could stop and speak to him, and accordingly waited a moment till he had left the Frenchmen. ‘How-do-you-do, Captain?’ I said. ‘I have an introduction to[21] you in my bag from the correspondent of your paper at Tangier.’

‘You’re an American,’ was the Captain’s first remark, not a very novel observation; ‘I’ve been in America a good deal myself.’ He adjusted a monocle and explained with customary originality that he had one bad eye. ‘What do you think of my “stuff” in the Press?’ was his next remark.

‘A little personal, isn’t it? I read that despatch about your being unable to get any washing done at the hotel because of scarcity of water, and your leaving it for that reason.’

‘Yes, that’s what the British public like to read, personal touches, don’t you think?’

‘Come with me. You know the Americans were always very hospitable to me, and I like to have a chance to do them a good turn. I’m living on a roof and getting my own grub. You know I’m an old campaigner—I mean to say, I’ve been in South[22] Africa, and on the Canadian border, and I got my chest smashed in by a Russian in the Japanese war,—I mean a hand to hand conflict, you know, using the butts of our guns.’

‘I was the only one they would enlist; I mean to say, my father had some influence with the Japanese minister in London.’

‘Well, I don’t like to say; I mean there’s a reason I can’t tell my age,—I mean, I went to South Africa when I was sixteen; you see that’s under age for military service in the British Army.’ The Captain waited a moment, then started off again. ‘I’ve got medals from five campaigns.’

‘Oh, that’s not a campaign medal; that’s a medal of the Legion of Frontiersmen. I mean to say, I was one of the organisers of that.’

Weare and I recognised the type. There are many of them abroad and some wear little American flags. But, of course, to us they are more grotesque when they affect the monocle. We knew Squall would not be insulted if we turned the conversation to the matter of most interest to us at that moment.

‘For my part,’ said Weare, ‘I could do well with something to eat just now. One doesn’t eat much on a torpedo-boat.’

With the prospects of our companionship—for Squall was boycotted by most of the correspondents—he led us away to his roof to get us a meal; and, for what the town provided, a good meal he served us. He did his own cooking, but he did it because he liked to cook,—he meant to say, he had[24] money coming to him from the sale of a motor-car in London, and he had just lost fifteen or twenty thousand pounds—the exact amount did not matter either to us or to him.

For a fortnight, till an old American resident of Casablanca invited us to his house, we suffered Squall. We three slept on the roof while a decrepit, dirty Spaniard, the owner of the place, slept below. It was a modest, one-storey house, built in Moorish style. There were rooms on four sides of a paved courtyard, under a slab in the centre of which was the customary well. Overhead a covering of glass, now much broken, was intended to keep out the rain. The place had been looted by the Moors, who took away the few things of any value and destroyed the rest, leaving the room littered with torn clothes and bedding and broken furniture, if I might dignify the stuff by these names; nor had the old man (whose family had escaped to Tangier) cleared out any place but the kitchen and the courtyard.

[25]There was a little slave boy whose master had been killed, and who now served a ‘Mister Peto’ and came to us for water every day. As our old Spaniard would not keep the place clean and saved all the food that we left from meals (which filled the place with flies) we hired the boy for a peseta, about a franc, a day to keep it clean. He was to get nothing at all if he allowed in more than twenty-five flies, and for one day he worked well and got the money. But the reason of his success was the presence all that day of one or the other of us engaged at writing, protecting him from the wrath of the old man, who resented being deprived of both stench and flies. The next day when we returned from the French camp there was no more black boy, and we never saw him again, nor could we ascertain from the old man what had happened to him. Thereafter we never drew a bucket of drinking water from the well without the fear of bringing up a piece of poor ‘Sandy.’

[26]As candles were scarce and bad we went to bed early. Weare and I generally retiring first. We climbed the rickety, ladder-like stairs and walked round the glass square over the courtyard to the side of the roof where cooling breezes blew from the Atlantic. There undressing, we rolled our clothes in tight bundles and put them under our heads for pillows. To lie on we had only sacking, for our rain-coats had to be used as covering to keep off the heavy dews of the early morning. Only Squall had a hammock.

Before retiring every evening Squall had the task of examining and testing his weapons, of which he had enough for us all. A ‘Webley’ and ‘Colt’ were not sufficient, he must also bring to the roof his rifle, on the butt of which were fourteen notches, one for each Moor he had shot. He clanked up the steps like Long John, the pirate, coming from ‘below,’ in ‘Treasure Island.’ When he had got into the hammock, lying comfortably on revolvers and cartridge belts, his[27] gun within reach against the wall, he would begin to talk. ‘You chaps think I bring all these “shooting-irons” up here because I’m afraid of something. Only look at what I’ve been through. I’ve got over being afraid. The reason I bring them all up with me is that I don’t want them stolen,—I mean to say there isn’t any lock on the door, you know.’

‘I mean you chaps haven’t got any business talking about me being afraid.’

One night Squall wanted to borrow a knife; his, he said, was not very sharp. He had been out ‘on the lines’ that day, and he wanted it, he explained, to put another notch in his gun.

Sometimes a patrol would pass in the night, and we would hear the three pistols and the gun click. Once the gun went off.

At daybreak we would rouse old Squall[28] to go and make coffee, and while he was thus employed we were entertained by the occupants of a ‘kraal’ (I can think of no better description) next door. In a little, low hut, built of reeds and brush, directly under our roof, lived a dusky mother and her daughter. The one (I imagine) was a widow, the other an unmarried though mature maid. They were among the score of Moors who had not fled, and there being no men of their own race about they were not afraid to show their faces to us. The mother was a hag, but the younger woman was splendid, big and broad-shouldered, with a deep chest. Her colour was that of an Eastern gipsy, bronze as if sunburned, with a slight red in her cheeks; she was black-haired, and she always wore a flower. From her lower lip to her chin was a double line tattooed in blue, and about her ankles and arms, likewise tattooed, were broad blue bangles, one above her elbow. The clothes that she wore, though of common cotton,[29] were brilliant in colour, generally bright green or blue or orange-yellow, sometimes a combination; they were not made into garments but rather draped about her, as is the way in Morocco, and held together with gaudy metal ornaments. Two bare feet, slippered in red, and one bare arm and shoulder were always visible. While this younger woman cooked in the open yard, and the old crone lean and haggard watched, they would look up from their kettle from time to time and speak to us in language we could not understand. We threw them small coins and they offered us tea. But we did not visit the ladies, to run the risk, perhaps, of dissipating an illusion.

‘Coffee, you chaps,’ sounded from below, and we went down to breakfast with good old ‘Blood-stained Bill.’

Though at times unpleasant, it is always interesting to come upon the scene of a recent battle. Casablanca had been a battlefield of unusual order. The fight that had taken place was not large or momentous, but it had peculiarities of its own, and it left some curious wreckage. Windowless Moorish houses with low arched doors now lay open, the corners knocked off or vast holes rent in the side, and any man might enter. Several ‘Saint Houses’ were also shattered, and a mosque near the Water Port had been deserted to the ‘infidels.’ The French guns had done great damage, but how could they have missed their mark at a range of less[31] than a mile! A section of the town had taken fire and burned. One cluster of dry brush kraals had gone up like so much paper and was now a heap of fine ash rising like desert sand to every breeze. Another quarter of a considerable area was untouched by fire, though not by the hand of the Arab; and what he had left of pots and pans and other poor utensils the Spaniard and Jew had gathered after his departure. At the time that we came poking through the quarter only a tom-tom, and that of inferior clay with a broken drum, was to be found. Hut after hut we entered through mazes of twisting alleys, the gates down everywhere or wide ajar; and we found in every case a heap of rags picked over half-a-dozen times, a heap of earthenware broken to bits by the Moors in order that no one else might profit. So silent was this quarter, once the living place of half the Moorish population, that the shimmering of the sun upon the roofs seemed almost audible. Twice we came upon Algerians[32] of the French army, in one case two men, in the other a single stalwart ‘Tirailleur.’ We came to a street of wooden huts a little higher than the kraals, the sok or market-place of the neighbourhood. Invariably the doors had been barricaded, and invariably holes hacked with axes had been made to let in the arm, or, if the shop was more than four feet square, the body of the looter. In front of the holes were little heaps of things discarded and smashed. What fiends these Moors and Arabs are, in all their mad haste to have taken the time to destroy what they did not want or what they could not carry off! They had hurried about the streets robbing each others’ bodies and dressing themselves, hot as the season was, in all the clothes they could crowd on, shedding ragged garments when they came to newer ones, always taking the trouble to destroy the old. And I have heard that in collecting women they acted much in the same way, leaving one woman for another, ‘going partners,’ one[33] man guarding while the other gathered, driving the women off at last like cattle, for women among Mohammedans have a definite market value.

Though the bodies were now removed from the streets it was evident from the stench that some still lay amongst the wreckage. Flies, great blue things, buzzed everywhere, rising in swarms as we passed, to settle again on the wasted sugar or the filthy rubbish and the clots of blood. Emaciated cats and swollen dogs roused from sleep and slunk away noiselessly at our approach. One dog, as we entered a house through a hole torn by a shell, rose and gave one loud bark, but, seeming to frighten himself, he then backed before us, viciously showing his teeth, though growling almost inaudibly. Evidently he belonged to the house. At the fall of night these dogs—I often watched them—would pass in packs, silently like jackals, out to the fields beyond the French and Spanish camps, where the bigger battles had taken[34] place and where a dead Moor or a French artillery horse dried by the sun lay here and there unburied.

The return of the Moors to the wrecks of their homes began about the time of our arrival. At first there came in only two or three wretched-looking creatures, bare-footed and bare-headed, clad usually in a single shirt which dragged about their dirty legs, robbed of everything, in some cases even their wives gone. As the Arabs of the country sought in every way, even to the extent of shooting them, to prevent their surrender, they were compelled to run the gauntlet at night; and often at night the flashes of the Arabs’ guns could be seen from the camp of the French. The miserable Moors who got away lay most of the night in little groups outside the wire entanglements till their white flag, generally the tail of a shirt, was seen by the soldiers at daybreak. The Moors who thus surrendered, after being searched for weapons, were taken for examination[35] to the office of the general’s staff, a square brush hut in the centre of the French camp, where, under a row of fig trees, they awaited their turns. Some Jews among them, refugees from the troubled villages round about, were careful in even this their day to keep a distance from the elect of Mohammed, remaining out in the blinding sun till a soldier of ‘the Legion’ told them also to get into the shade. The Jews were given bread by their sympathisers, and they went in first to be questioned because their examination was not so rigorous as that through which the Moors were put—humble pie this for the Moors!

When a Moor entered the commander’s office he prostrated himself, as he would do usually only to his Sultan or some holy man of his creed; however, he was ordered to rise and go squat in a corner. An officer who spoke Arabic—and sometimes carried a riding-crop—drew up a chair, sat over him and put him through an inquisition;[36] and if he showed the slightest insolence a blow or two across the head soon quelled his spirit. When the examination was over, however, and the Moor had been sufficiently humiliated, the French were lenient enough. The man’s name was recorded and he was then permitted to return to his home and to resume his trade in peace. He received sometimes a pass, and, if he could do so in the teeth of his watchful countrymen outside the barriers, he went back into the interior to fetch such of his women folk as were safe. But every idle Moor was taken from the streets and made to work as it is not in his belief that he should—though he was fed and paid a pittance for his labour. Medical attention was to be had, though the Mohammedan would not ordinarily avail himself of the Nazarene remedies.

I should say the French were just, even kindly, to the Moors who surrendered without arms but to those taken in battle they showed no mercy. The French army returning[37] from an engagement never brought in prisoners, and neither men nor officers kept the fact a secret that those they took they slaughtered.

The French spread terror in the districts round about, and after they began to penetrate the country and leave in their wake a trail of death and desolation, the leaders of several tribes near to Casablanca came in to sue for peace. These were picturesque men with bushed black hair sticking out sometimes six inches in front of their ears. The older of them and those less poorly off came on mules, the youth on horses. They saw General Drude and the French consul, and went away again to discuss with the other tribesmen the terms that could be had: no arms within ten miles of Casablanca and protection of caravans bound hither. But soon it came to be known that the sorties of the French were limited to a zone apparently of fifteen kilomètres, and the spirit of the Arabs rose and they became again defiant.

It was to see the war balloon go up that I planned with a youthful wag of a Scot to rise at five o’clock one morning and walk out to the French lines before breakfast. He came to the roof and got me up, and we passed through the ruined streets, over the fallen bricks and mortar, to the outer gate, the Bab-el-Sok. Arriving in the open, the balloon appeared to us already, to our surprise, high in the air; and on the straight road that divided the French camp we noticed a thick, lifting cloud of brown dust. Lengthening our stride we pushed on as fast as the heavy sand would allow, passing the camp and overtaking the trail of dust just as the last cavalry troop of the picturesque French army turned out through an opening in the wire entanglements which guarded the town. General Drude did not inform correspondents when he proposed an attack.

[39]Spread out in front of us on the bare, rolling country was a moving body of men forming a more or less regular rectangle, of which the front and rear were the short ends, about half as long as the sides. The outer lines were marked by companies of infantry, bloomered Tirailleurs and the Foreign Legion, marching in open order, often single file, with parallel lines at the front and vital points. Within the rectangle travelled the field artillery, three sections of two guns each; a mountain battery, carried dismantled on mules; a troop of Algerian cavalry; the general and his staff; and a brigade of the Red Cross. Outside the main body, flung a mile to the front and far off either wing, scattered detachments of[40] Goumiers, in flowing robes, served as scouts. Already three of them on the sky-line, by the position of their horses, signalled that the way was clear.

This little army, counting in its ranks Germans, Arabs, and negroes, as well as native Frenchmen, numbered all told less than three thousand men. It had got into fighting formation under shelter of a battery and two short flanking lines of infantry lodged on the first ridge; and passing through the wire entanglements the various detachments had found their positions without a halt. The force, even though small, was well handled, and the men were keen for the advance. Of course they were thoroughly confident; they might have been recklessly so but for the controlling hand of the cautious general.

Finding ourselves at a rear corner of the block we set our speed at about double that of the columns of the troops and took a general direction diagonally towards a[41] section of the artillery, now kicking up a pretty dust as it dragged through the ploughed fields. Overtaking the guns we slogged on with them for a mile or more, advising the officers not to waste their camera films, as they seemed inclined to do, before the morning clouds disappeared.

The helmets of the artillerymen and Légionnaires hid their faces and made them look like British soldiers; and this was disappointing, to find that the only French troops in the army had left behind in camp the little red caps that give them the appearance of belonging to the time of the French Revolution.

Though inside us we carried no breakfast, neither were we laden with doughy bread and heavy water-bottles, to say nothing of rifles; and after a short breathing spell and a ride on the guns we were soon able to say au revoir to the battery and to press on ahead. Our eagerness to ascertain the object of the movement led[42] us towards the general’s staff; but we did not get there. The little man with the big moustache spied us at some distance and sent an officer to say that correspondents should keep back with the hospital corps. Thinking perhaps it would be best not to argue this point, we thanked the officer, sent our compliments to Monsieur le Général Drude, and dropped back till the artillery hid us from his view, grateful that he had not sent an orderly with us.

It was only four miles out from Casablanca, as the front line came to the crest of the second rise, that the firing began. About half a mile ahead of us we saw the forward guns go galloping up the slope and swing into position; and a minute later two screeching shells went flying into the distance. A battery to the left was going rapidly to the front, and, keeping an eye on the general, we made over to it and passed to the far side, to be out of his view. It happened that by so doing we also took the shelter of[43] the battery from a feeble Moorish fire, and our apparent anxiety brought down upon us the chaff of the soldiers. But we did not offer to explain. With this battery we went forward to the firing line; and as soon as the guns were in action, the Scot, forgetting the fight in the interest of his own mission, began dodging in and out among the busy artillerists, snapping pictures of them in action. Though the men kept to their work, several of the officers had time to pose for a picture, and one smart-looking young fellow on horseback rode over from the other battery to draw up before the camera. All went well till the general, stealing a march on us, came up behind on foot. I do not know exactly what he said, as I do not catch French shouted rapidly, but I shall not forget the picture he made. Standing with his legs apart, his arms shaking in the air, his cap on the back of his head, the little man in khaki not only frightened us with his rage but made liars of his officers. The same men who had posed[44] for us now turned upon us in a most outrageous manner. Some of them, I am sure, used ‘cuss’ words, which fortunately not understanding we did not have to resent; several called us imbeciles, and one threatened to put us under arrest.

‘There,’ said the Scot as the general turned his wrath upon his officers, ‘that will make a splendid picture, “A Critical Moment on the Battlefield; General Drude foaming at his Staff.” Won’t you ask them to pose a minute?’

We moved back a hundred yards, taking the shelter of a battered Saint House, and began to barter with some soldiers for something to eat. For three cigarettes apiece four of them were willing to part with a two-inch cube of stringy meat and a slab of soggy brown bread, with a cupful of water. As we sat at breakfast with these fellows their officers got out kodaks and photographed the group, perhaps desiring to show the contrast of civilians in Panama hats beside[45] their bloomered, fezzed Algerians. With still a hunk of bread to be masticated we had to rise and go forward. All of the army ahead of us moved off and the reserves took up a position on the ridge the cannon had just occupied. As soon as the general took his departure we began to look about for some protecting line of men or mules, but there were none following him. The rectangle had divided into two squares, and we were with the second, which would remain where it was. The object of this manœuvre was to entice the Moors into the breach, they thinking to cut off the first square and to be caught between the two. But the Moors had had their lesson at this game three weeks before.

Realising soon that we were with the passive force we resolved to overtake the Foreign Legion, now actively engaged, and accordingly set out across the valley after them for a two-mile chase. A caravan track led down through gullies and trailed in and[46] out, round earth mounds and ‘Saint Houses,’ often cutting us off from the view of both forces at the same time, and once hiding from us even the balloon. Crossing a trodden grain-field to shorten our distance we came upon three Arabs, dead or dying, a dead horse, and the scatterings of a shell. A lean old brown man, with a thin white beard and a shaven head, lay naked, with eyes and mouth wide open to the sun, arms and legs flung apart, a gash in his stomach, and a bullet wound with a powder stain between the eyes. His companions, still wearing their long cotton shirts and resting on their arms, might have been feigning sleep; so, as a matter of precaution we walked round them at a distance. It came to me that this was fool business to have started after the general and I said so. ‘Human nature,’ replied the Scot; ‘we have been trying to avoid the general all morning, now we wished we had him.’ We talked of going back but came to the conclusion that it was as far back[47] as it was forward, and went on to a knoll, where four guns had taken up a position and were blazing away as fast as their gunners could load them.

Of course our independence of General Drude revived as we got to a place of more or less security, and we swung away from him towards the right flank. Choosing a good point from which to watch the engagement, we saluted the captain of a line of Algerians and lay down among the men. Below us, in plain view, not a quarter of a mile away, was the camp of the Moors, about four hundred tents, ragged and black with dirt, some of them old circular army tents, but mostly patched coverings of sacking such as are to be seen all over Morocco. It was to destroy this camp, discovered by the balloon, that the French army had come out, and we had managed to come over the knoll at the moment that the first flames were applied to it. Just beyond the camp the squalid village of Taddert, beneath a cluster[48] of holy tombs, a place of pilgrimage, was already afire.

The Moors at Taddert had evidently been taken by surprise. They left most of their possessions behind in the camp, getting away with only their horses and their guns. A soldier of the Foreign Legion came back driving three undersized donkeys, and carrying several short, pot-like Moorish drums. We spoke to him and he told us that they had taken seven prisoners and had shot them.

The Arabs hung about the hills, keeping constantly on the move to avoid shells. Organisation among them seemed totally lacking and ammunition was evidently scarce. Once in a while a horseman or a group of two or three would come furiously charging down to within a mile of the guns and, turning to retire again, would send a wild shot or two in our direction. Wherever a group of more than three appeared, a shell burst over their heads and scattered their frightened horses, sometimes riderless. The fight was entirely[49] one-sided, yet the French general seemed unwilling to risk a close engagement that might cost the lives of many of his men.

After an hour my companion, though under fire for the first time, became, as he put it, ‘exceedingly bored,’ and lying down on the ground as if for a nap, asked me to wake him ‘if the Moors should come within photographing distance.’ I suggested that he might have a look at them with a pair of glasses and that he might borrow those of a young officer who had just come up.

‘Monsoor,’ he said, rising and saluting the officer, ‘Permettez moi à user votre binoculaires, s’il vous plaît?’

‘You want to look through my glasses?—certainly,’ came the reply. ‘There, you see that shot; it is meant for those Moroccans converging on the sky-line. There, it explodes. It got four of them. It was well aimed. These are splendid guns we have. No other country has such guns. I should say many of the Moors are killed to-day.[50] Not less than three hundred. What is that? Give me my things! Pardon, it is only les Goumiers. They look like Moroccans but of course we must not shoot them!’

The energetic Scot interrupted. ‘I should like to see your men fire a volley so that I might get a picture; my paper wants scenes of the fighting about Casablanca.’

The general passed within a few yards, and, ignoring us, went back to the ambulance brigade to see a wounded man of the Foreign Legion. We followed him and took his photograph as he shook hands with the trooper on the litter.

‘Rotten,’ said the Scot. ‘They’ll think in London that I got Drude to pose; the wounded chap hadn’t a bloodstain on him and he smoked a cigarette.’

We had not long to wait, however, before[51] an example of real misery came to our view. A Goumier covered with blood, riding a staggering wounded horse, brought in a Moor without a stitch of clothes, tied by a red sash to his saddle. Captor, captive, and horse fell to the ground almost together. The Goumier had been shot in the chest, and expired while his fellow horsemen relieved him of his purple cloak and his turban and gave him water. The Moor (who had been taken in the fire at Taddert) was a mass of burns from head to foot. On one hand nothing remained but stumps of fingers, and loose charred flesh hung down from his legs. Well might the French have shot this creature; but they bound up his wounds.

At one o’clock the Arab camp was a mass of smouldering rags, while Taddert blazed from every corner. The day’s work was done. Long parallel lines of men marching single file in open order trailed over the stony ground back towards the white walled city.

On the next excursion with the French I happened to see the shooting of six prisoners. We set out from camp as usual at early morning and moved up the coast for a distance of eight miles, with the object of examining a well which in former dry seasons supplied Casablanca with water and was now no doubt supplying the Arabs round about. By marching in close formation and keeping always down in the slopes between hills we managed to get to the well and to swing a troop of Goumiers round it without being noticed by a party of thirteen Moors, of whom only three were properly mounted.

The unlucky thirteen had no earthly[53] chance. The Goumiers swept down upon them, killing seven, and taking prisoners the remaining six. As I was marching with the artillery at the time, I missed this little engagement, and my first knowledge of it was when the prisoners trailed by me on foot: six tall, gaunt, brown men, bare-legged, and three of them bare-headed, none clad in more than a dirty cotton shirt that dragged to his knees. They moved in quick, frightened steps, keeping close to one another and obeying their captors implicitly. Allah had deserted them and their souls were as water. The Goumiers, fellow Mohammedans and devout—I have seen them pray—followed on tight-reined ponies, riding erect in high desert saddles, their coloured kaftans thrown back from their sword-arms—brown men these too, with small black eyes and huge noses. French soldiers of the Foreign Legion drove three undersized asses, carrying immense pack-saddles of straw and sacking meant to pad their skinny backs and to keep[54] a rider’s feet from trailing ground. They were too small to be worth halter or bridle, and the soldiers prodded them on with short, pointed sticks, that brought to my mind Stevenson’s ‘Travels with a Donkey.’ One of the Frenchmen brought along a gun, a long-barrelled Arab flintlock, an antiquated thing safer to face than to fire. Besides this, I was told, one of the prisoners had carried a bayonet fastened with a hemp string to the end of a stick; the others seem to have been unarmed. They were indeed a poor bag.

Without the least idea that such prisoners would be shot, I did not follow to their summary trial, but moved, instead, over to a spring, where some artillerists were watering their horses, while a dozen sporting tortoises stirred the mud. The gunners had bread and water, while I had none. Bread and water are heavy on campaign, and a few cigarettes I had found were good barter. My cigarettes were distributed and we were just beginning our breakfast, when a man standing[55] up called our attention to the Goumiers coming our way again with the Moors. They were walking in the same order, the prisoners first in a close group, moving quickly on foot, not venturing to look back, the Goumiers, probably twenty, riding steady on hard bits.

‘Pour les tuer,’ said a soldier, smiling; ‘Pour les tuer,’ repeated the others, looking at me to see if I smiled.

A hundred yards beyond us were a clump of dwarfed trees and some patches of dry grass, like an oasis among the rolling, almost barren, hills; and for this spot the Moors were headed. Mechanically I went on eating, undecided whether to follow, for I did not want to see the thing at close range. I thought the Moors would be lined up in the usual fashion, their sentence delivered, and a moment given them for prayer. But suddenly, while their backs were turned, just as they set foot upon the dry grass, quickly a[56] dozen shots rang out almost in a volley, then came a straggling fire of single shots. The single shots were from a pistol, as an officer passed among the dying men and put a bullet into the brain of each.

A young Englishman, the Reuter correspondent, rode over to me from the other side and asked what I thought. It seemed to me, I said, rather brutal that they were not told they were to die.

‘I don’t know,’ said the Englishman. ‘I should say that was considerate. But the thing isn’t nice; it isn’t necessary.’

The Goumiers set fire to the grass about the bodies, and soon the smoke and smell, brought over on a light Atlantic breeze, caused us to move away.

Across the dusty, shimmering plains signal fires began to send up columns of smoke, warning the Arabs beyond of our approach. But we were going no further.

There is no censorship of news in[57] England, but the English press often decides what is good for the public to know and what it should suppress. In my opinion the above affair, reported to the London papers by their own correspondents, who were witnesses, should have been published. But the papers either did not publish the despatches, or else, as in the case of the Times and the Telegraph, which I saw, they gave the incident only the briefest notice, and placed it in a more or less obscure position in the paper. This, on the part of the London editors, was no doubt in deference to the British entente with France. The question arises in my mind, however, whether a paper purporting to supply the news has any right to suppress important news that is legitimate.

The shooting of prisoners continued until I left Morocco; and I am of the opinion that it goes on still. The French did not hide the fact; as I have said, any of the officers would tell you that they took no prisoners in[58] arms. The Arabs opposing them, they pointed out, were murderers who had looted Casablanca, attempted to slaughter the European residents, and failing, had turned upon each other to fight not only for plunder but for wives. What would have happened to the European women, the Frenchmen asked, had the consulates not sustained the siege? What happens to French soldiers who are captured? They argued also that drastic methods brought submission more quickly.

When the Shawia tribesmen made their first attacks upon the French at Casablanca they were thoroughly confident of their own prowess and of the protection of Allah. They had often, before the coming of the French, called the attention of Europeans to the fact that salutes of foreign men-of-war entering port were not nearly so loud as the replies from their own antiquated guns—always charged with a double load of powder for the sake of making noise. But they have come to realise now that Christian ships and Christian armies have bigger guns than those with which they salute, and the news that Allah, whatever may be His reason, is[60] not on the side of the noisy guns has spread over a good part of Morocco.

The Arabs now seldom try close quarters with the French, except when surrounded or when the French force is very small and they are numerous; and as I have indicated before, their defence is most ineffective. One morning on a march towards Mediuna I sat for an hour with the Algerians, under the war balloon, watching quietly an absurd attack of the tribesmen. From the crest of a hill, behind which they were lodged, they would ride down furiously to within half a mile of us, and turning to go back at the same mad pace, discharge a gun, without taking aim, at the balloon, their special irritation. It was all picturesque, but like the gallant charge of the brave Bulgarian in ‘Arms and the Man,’ entirely ridiculous. If the Algerians had been firing at the time, not one of them would have got back over their hill.

The reports in the London papers of[61] serious resistance on the part of the Moors are seldom borne out by facts. Most of the despatches, passing through excitable Paris, begin with startling adjectives and end with ‘Six men wounded.’ Here, for instance, are the first and the last paragraphs of the Paris despatch describing the first taking of Settat, which is over forty miles inland and among the homes of the Shawia tribesmen. It is headed:

‘A Sixteen-Hour Fight.

‘At eight a.m. yesterday the French columns opened battle in the Settat Pass. The enemy offered a stubborn resistance, but was finally repulsed, after a fight lasting until midnight. Settat was occupied and Muley Rechid’s camp destroyed.

‘There were several casualties on the French side.... The enemy’s losses were very heavy. The fight has produced a great impression among the tribes.’

The Arab losses under the fire of the[62] French 75-millimètre guns and the fusillade of the Foreign Legion and the Algerians, many of them sharpshooters, are usually heavy where the Arabs attempt a serious resistance. I should say it would average a loss on the part of the Moors of fifty dead to one French soldier wounded. Moreover, when a Moor is badly wounded he dies, for the Moors know nothing of medicine, and the only remedies of which they will avail themselves are bits of paper with prayers upon them, written by shereefs; these they swallow or tie about a wound while praying at the shrine of some departed saint. It has seemed to me a wanton slaughter of these ignorant creatures, but if the French did not mow them down, the fools would say they could not, and would thank some saint for their salvation.

The arms of the Arabs are often of the most ineffective sort, many of them, indeed, made by hand in Morocco. While I was with the French army on one occasion we[63] found on a dead Moor (and it is no wonder he was dead) a modern rifle, of which the barrel had been cut off, evidently with a cold chisel, to the length of a carbine. The muzzle, being bent out of shape and twisted, naturally threw the first charge back into the face of the Moor who fired it. I have seen bayonets tied on sticks, and other equally absurd weapons.

There are in Morocco many Winchester and other modern rifles, apart from those with which the Sultan’s army is equipped. Gun-running has long been a profitable occupation amongst unscrupulous Europeans of the coast towns, the very people for whose protection the French invasion is inspired. A man of my own nationality told me that for years he got for Winchesters that cost him 3l. as much as 6l. and 8l. The authorities, suspecting him on one occasion, put a Jew to ascertain how he got the rifles in. Suspecting the Jew, the American informed him confidentially, ‘as a friend,’ that[64] he brought in the guns in barrels of oil. In a few weeks five barrels of oil and sixteen boxes of provisions arrived at —— in one steamer. The American went down to the custom-house, grinned graciously, and asked for his oil, which the Moors proceeded to examine.

The American asked them to wait till the afternoon, which they consented to do; and after a superficial examination of one of the provision boxes, a load of forty rifles, the butts and barrels in separate boxes, covered with cans of sardines, tea, sugar, etc., went up to the store of the American.

It was more profitable to run in guns that would bring 8l., perhaps more, than to run in 8l. worth of cartridges, and after the Moors had secured modern rifles they found great difficulty in obtaining ammunition, which for its scarcity became very dear. For that reason many of them[65] have given up the European gun and have gone back to the old flintlock, made in Morocco, cheaper and more easily provided with powder and ball.

Ammunition is too expensive for the poverty-stricken Moor to waste much of it on target practice, and when he does indulge in this vain amusement it is always before spectators, servants and men too poor to possess guns; and in order to make an impression on the underlings—for a Moor is vain—he places the target close enough to hit. The Moor seldom shoots at a target more than twenty yards off.

Even the Sultan is economical with ammunition. It is never supplied to the Imperial Army—for the reason that soldiers would sell it—except just prior to a fight. It is told in Morocco that when Kaid Maclean began to organise the army of Abdul Aziz he was informed that he might dress the soldiers as he pleased—up to his time they were a rabble crew without uniforms—but[66] that he need not teach them to shoot. Nor have they since been taught to shoot.

I am of opinion that the French army under General d’Amade, soon to number 12,000 or 13,000 men, could penetrate to any corner of Morocco with facility, maintaining at the same time unassailable communication with their base. A body of the Foreign Legion three hundred strong could cut their way across Morocco. With 60,000 men the French can occupy, hold, and effectively police—as policing goes in North Africa—the entire petty empire. Such an army in time could make the roads safe for Arabs and Berbers as well as for Europeans, punishing severely, as the French have learned to do, any tribe that dares continue its marauding practices and any brigand who essays to capture Europeans; and as for the rest, the safety of life and property within the towns and among members of the same tribes, the instinct of self-preservation[67] among the Moors themselves is sufficient. There is no danger for the French in Morocco.

Nevertheless, their task is not an easy one. Conservatism at home and fear of some foreign protest has kept them from penetrating the country, as they must, in order to subdue it. So far they have made their power felt but locally, and though they have slain wantonly thousands of Moors, their position to-day is to all practical purposes the same as it was after the first engagements about Casablanca. For four months General Drude held Casablanca, with tribes defeated but unconquered all about him. With the new year General Drude retired and General d’Amade took his place, and the district of operations was extended inland for a distance of fifty miles. But beyond that there are again many untaught tribes ranging over a vast territory.

If the French, from fear of Germany, do not intend to occupy all Morocco I can see[68] for them no alternative but to recognise Mulai el Hafid, who as Sultan of the interior is inspiring the tribesmen to war. Hafid’s position, though criminal from our point of view, is undeniably strong.

On proclaiming himself sultan, he sought to win the support of the country by promising a Government like that of former sultans, one that cut off heads, quelled rebellions, and kept the tribes united and effective against the Christians. This was the message that his criers spread throughout the land; and the people, told that the French had come as conquerors, gave their allegiance to him who promised to save them. Hafid’s attitude towards the European Powers was by no means so defiant as he professed to his people. Emissaries were sent from Marakesh to London and Berlin to plead for recognition, but were received officially at neither capital. He then tried threats, and at last, in January, declared the Jehad, or Holy War. But that he really contemplated[69] provoking a serious anti-Christian, or even anti-French, uprising could hardly be conceived of so intelligent a man; and hard after the news of this came an assuring message—unsolicited, of course—to the Legations at Tangier that his object was only to unite the people in his cause against his brother. Later, when one of his m’hallas took part in a battle against the French he sent apologies to them.

The Moors, the country over, have heard of the disasters to the Shawia tribes, at any rate, of the fighting. Knowing the hopelessness of combating the French successfully, the towns of the coast are willing to leave their future in the diplomatic hands of Abdul Aziz, in spite of their distaste for him and his submission to the Christians. Those of the interior, however, many of whom have never seen a European, have a horror of the French such as we should have of Turks, and they will probably fight an invasion with all their feeble force.

[70]Because of the harsh yet feeble policy of the French, the trouble in Morocco, picturesque and having many comic opera elements, will drag on its bloody course yet many months.

The French Army is an interesting institution at this moment, when it is known that the Navy of France ranks only as that of a second-class Power and it is thought her military organisation is little better. I am not in a position to make comparisons, knowing little of the great armies of Europe, nor is the detachment of troops in Morocco, numbering at this writing hardly 8,000 men, a sufficient proportion of the army of France to allow one to form much of an opinion. But some observations that were of interest to me may also interest others.

The French forces in Morocco represent[72] the best that the colonies of France produce in the way of fighting men. European as well as African troops are from the stations of Algeria, a colony near enough to France to partake of her civilisation yet sufficiently far away to escape conservatism and the so-called modern movements with which the home country is afflicted. If there are weaklings, socialists, and anarchists among the troops they are in the Foreign Legion, absorbed and suppressed by the ‘gentlemen rankers.’ The Army is made up of many elements. Besides ordinary Algerians, it includes Arabs from the Sahara and negroes who came originally perhaps as slaves from the Soudan; besides Frenchmen, there are in the famous Foreign Legion—that corps that asks no questions—Germans, Bulgarians, Italians, Russians, and even a few Englishmen. The main body of the Army is composed of Algerians proper, Mohammedans, who speak, or at least understand, French. They are officered by Frenchmen,[73] who wear the same uniforms as their men: the red fezzes and the baggy white bloomers in the case of infantry, the red Zouave uniform and boots in the cavalry. These Algerians, of course, are regular soldiers, subjected to ordinary military discipline, but there are too the Goumiers, or Goums, of the desert, employed in irregular corps for scout duty and as cavalry, and they, I understand, are exempt from camp regulations and restrictions except such as are imposed by their own leaders. And in the last month similar troops have been organised from the tribesmen of the conquered Shawia districts near to Casablanca.

Algerians and Goumiers, Europeans and Africans, camp all together in the same ground, their respective cantonments separated only by company ‘streets.’ The various commands march side by side and co-operate as if they were all of one nationality, a thing which to me, as an American, knowing that such conditions[74] could not obtain in an American army, speaks wonders for the French democracy.

A good deal of small gambling goes on in the French camps, or rather just outside them; but this seems to be the army’s only considerable vice. Drunkenness and disorder seem to be exceedingly rare. I cannot imagine a more abstemious body of men. Of course conditions in the campaign in which the French are now engaged are all favourable to discipline; there is the stimulus of an active enemy, and yet the men are never overworked, except on occasional long marches, when they are inspired and encouraged to test their endurance.

The marching power of the French infantryman is extraordinary. Carrying two days’ rations and a portion of a ‘dog tent’ (which fits to a companion’s portion), he will ‘slog’ nearly fifty miles in a day and a night. I remember one tremendous march. The army left camp one morning at three o’clock, cavalry, artillery, a hospital staff, Tirailleurs[75] and Légionnaires, about 3,000 men, and marched out fifteen miles to a m’halla, or Moorish camp, beyond Mediuna. For more than two hours they fought the Arabs, finally destroying the camp; and then returned, reaching Casablanca shortly before five o’clock in the afternoon. I did not accompany the army on this occasion, but went out to meet it coming back, curious to see how the men would appear. The Algerians showed distress the least, hardly a dozen of them taking the assistance of their comrades, and many, though covered with dust, so little affected by fatigue that they could jest with me about my fresh appearance. When their officers, about a mile out, gave orders to halt, then to form in fours to march into camp in order, they were equal to the part. But the Foreign Legion obeyed only the first command, that to halt, and it was a significant look they returned for the command of the youthful officer who passed down the line on a strong horse.

[76]A still longer march was made by a larger force of this same army in January, after General d’Amade had taken command. Pushing into the interior from Casablanca to Settat, they covered forty-eight miles in twenty-five hours, marching almost entirely through rough country without roads, or at best by roads that were little more than camel tracks. Proceeding at three miles an hour, the infantry must have done sixteen hours’ actual walking. Moreover, on arriving at Settat the army immediately engaged the m’halla of Mulai Rachid. Good marching is a prized tradition with the French, and in this one thing, if in nothing else, the army of France excels.

It has been stated by men who have some knowledge of Moslems, that the French in Morocco are liable to start that long-threatened avalanche, the general rising of Pan-Islam. The first Mohammedans to join the Moors in the Holy War, it is said, will be the Algerians. But my own knowledge[77] of Moslem countries leads me to argue otherwise. Since the French have been in Morocco, now more than six months, there have been less than a hundred desertions from the ranks of the Algerians; while a significant fact on the other side is the enlistment in the French ranks, in the manner of Goumiers, of Shawia tribesmen who have been defeated by them.

It has been from the Foreign Legion that desertions are frequent. Taking their leave overnight, the deserters, generally three or four together, make their way straight into the Arab country, usually to the north, with a view to reaching Rabat. In almost every case the deserters are Germans, and the Moors permit them to pass, for they understand that German Nasrani and French Nasrani hate each other as cordially as do Arab Moslems and Berber Moslems. Nevertheless, even though the deserters are Germans, it is asking too much of the Moor to spare them their packs as well as their[78] lives. I have seen one man come into Rabat dressed only in a shirt, another, followed by many Arab boys, wearing a loin-cloth and a helmet.

The French consul at Rabat makes no effort to apprehend these men; but they are usually taken into custody by the German consul and sent back to their own country in German ships, to serve unexpired terms in the army they deserted in the first place.

To see Morocco from another side—for we had looked upon the country so far only from behind French guns—we started up the coast on a little ‘Scorpion’ steamer, billed to stop at Rabat. But this unfriendly city is not to be approached every day in the year, even by so small a craft as ours, with its captain from Gibraltar knowing all the Moorish ports. A heavy sea, threatening to roll on against the shores for many days, decided the skipper to postpone his stop and to push on north to Tangier; and we, though sleeping on the open deck, agreed to the change of destination, for we had seen all too little of ‘the Eye of Morocco.’

[80]Tangier is a city outside, so to speak, of this mediæval country. It seems like a show place left for the tourist, always persistent though satisfied with a glimpse. Men from within the country come out to this fair to trade, and others, while following still their ancient dress and customs, are content to reside here; yet it is no longer, they will tell you, truly Morocco. There is no mella where the Jews must keep themselves; Spaniards and outcasts from other Mediterranean countries have come to stay here permanently and may quarter where they please, and there is a great hotel by the water, with little houses in front where Christians, men and women, go to take off their strange headgear and some of their clothes, then to rush into the waves. Truly Tangier is defiled. Franciscan monks clang noisy bells, drowning the voice of the muezzin on the Grand Mosque; the hated telegraph runs into the city from under the sea; an infidel—a Frenchman, of them all—sits the day long in the custom-house and takes one-half the money; and no true Moslem may say anything to all of this.

[81]Still there are compensations. The Christian may build big ships and guns that shoot straighter than do Moslem guns, but he is not so wise. He works all day like an animal, and when he gets much money he comes to Tangier with it, and true believers, who live in cool gardens and smoke hasheesh, make him pay five times for everything he buys. He is mad, the Nazarene.

Seated at a modern French or Spanish table at a café on the Soko Chico, the Christian is beset by youthful bootblacks and donkey drivers; and older Moors in better dress come up to tell in whispers of the charms of a Moorish dance—‘genuine Moroccan, a Moorish lady, a beautiful Moorish lady’—that can be seen at a quiet place for ten pesetas Spanish. One of them, confident of catching us, presents a[82] testimonial; and with difficulty we reserve our smile at its contents:

‘Mohammed Ben Tarah, worthy descendant of the Prophet, is a first-class guide to shops which pay him a commission on what you buy. He will take you also to see a Moorish dance, thoroughly indecent, well imitated, for all I know, by a fat Jewish woman. He has an exaggerated idea of his superficial knowledge of the English language, and as a prevaricator of the truth he worthily upholds the reputation of his race.’ (Signed.)

The Soko Chico of Tangier, though an unwholesome place, is thoroughly interesting. About the width of the Strand and half the length of Downing Street—that is, in American, half a block long-it is large enough, as spaces go in Morocco, to be called a market and to be used as such. From early morn until midnight the ‘Little Sok’ is crowded with petty merchants, whose stock of edibles, brought on platters or in little handcarts,[83] could be bought for a Spanish dollar. Mightily they shout their wares, five hundred ‘hawkers’ in a space of half as many feet. The noise is terrific. The cry of horsemen for passage, the brawl of endless arguments, the clatter of small coins in the hands of money-changers, and the strains of the band at the ‘Grand Café,’ struggling to make audible selections from an opera; all these together create an infernal din. The Soko Chico, where the post-offices of the Powers alternate with European cafés, is, of all Morocco, the place where East and West come into closest touch. The Arab woman, veiled, sits cross-legged in the centre of the road, selling to Moslems bread of semolina, and the foreign consul, seated at a café table, sips his glass of absinthe. Occasionally a horseman with long, bushed hair, goes by towards the kasbah, followed a moment later by the English colonel, who lives on the Marshan and wears a helmet. A score of tourists gather at the café tables in the afternoon, and as many couriers, with[84] brown, knotty, big-veined legs, always bare, squat against the walls of the various foreign post-offices, resting till the last moment before beginning their long, perilous, all-night runs. Jews who dress in gaberdines listen to Jews in European clothes, telling them about America.

But there is another Sok, the Outer Sok, beyond the walls, where the camels and the story-tellers come, and this is no hybrid place, but ‘real Morocco,’ and as fine a Sok as any town but Fez or Marakesh can show. Here, across a great open space that rises gradually from the outer walls, are stretched rows upon rows of ragged tents as high as one’s shoulder, and before them sit their keepers: Arab barbers ready to shave a head from ear to ear or leave a tuft of hair; unveiled Berber women, generally tattooed, selling grapes and prickly pears, or as they call them, Christian figs; Soudanese, sometimes freemen, trading or holding ponies for hire; women from the Soudan, generally[85] pock-marked and mostly slaves, squatting among their masters’ vegetables; Riff men who have come perhaps from forty miles away to sell a load of charcoal worth two francs; pretty little half-veiled girls, with one earring, selling bread broken into half and quarter loaves; soldiers feeling the weight of each small piece and asking for half a dozen seeds of pomegranate as an extra inducement to buy; minstrels and snake-charmers and bards; water-carriers tinkling bells; blind beggars with their doleful chants—‘Allah, Allah-la’; camel-drivers; saints. At dark the big Sok goes to bed with the camels and the donkeys and the sheep; man and beast bed down together; and it is an eerie place to pick one’s way through when the night is dark. From choice we lived, when in Tangier, across the big Sok, at the Hôtel Cavilla, and sometimes of an evening, after dinner, would descend the slope, passing through the gates, down the narrow, cobbled streets, to the Soko Chico, with its flaring[86] cafés, to sit perhaps and watch a Moorish kaid pit his skill at chess against a German champion. It was the business of Kaid Driss, commander of artillery, to be in readiness at this central square to go to any gate which Raisuli or another hostile leader might suddenly attack; and so this splendid Moor, a well-liked gentleman, spent the weary hours until midnight at this, the Moors’ favourite game. Around the corners, under dank arches, slept his troops, covered even to their noses, their guns, too, underneath their white jelebas. Except the Kaid himself there seemed to be no other Moorish soldier stirring after nine, or at the latest, ten o’clock, and if we should delay our stay within the walls beyond this hour, nothing but a Spanish or other coin more valuable than a Moorish piece would quiet the complaining brave who pulled himself together to unbar the gates for us to pass.

It is not only, however, when the sun is down that the Moor sleeps; he sleeps by[87] day, as he tells you his religion teaches, and rolled in woollen cloth lies anywhere that slumber overtakes him, in the sands upon the beach, on the roadway under gates—what difference does it make, the earth is sweet and a hard bed is best! Why work like the Christian to spend like a fool?

One day I saw a fisherman without a turban, sitting on a rock, beside him a sleeping bundle of homespun haik. They were a pretty pair, and with my kodak I proceeded out to where they were, going cautiously, intending to get a picture, from behind, of the shaved head and its single trailing scalp-lock. But the fisherman discovered me and hurriedly lifted the hood of his jeleba, muttering something. The sound waked the sleeping bundle, which moved itself a moment, then poked out a likewise shaven head and a youthful face thinly covered with sprouting beard. ‘You English man?’ said the head.

[88]‘Dat’s better; more richer. Open you mouth and show dis chap you got gold teeth.’

‘A bearded woman,’ I suggested; at which he laughed and explained (still lying on his back) that he had been to Earl’s Court once, in a show, that he had had no beard then, being but sixteen, and because he wore what seemed to Londoners to be a feminine attire they all thought he was a woman.

The Arab quarter of Tangier is entirely Moorish. The kasbah or citadel, high above the water of the Straits, has its own walls, as is customary, and within these, though the architecture may not be so fine as that at Fez, there is yet no Christian and no Christian way; it is thoroughly Moorish. The tourist may enter without a guide and poke his way through the heavy arches and the stair-like streets. He may go into the square where the Basha governing the[89] district, like the Sultan at the capital, receives delegations and hears the messages of tribesmen in trouble; but the infidel, even though he be a foreign minister, may not enter mosque or fort or arsenal, or any other place except the residence of the kaid who is in command.

He may look in, however, at the door of the prison and even talk to victims crowded within, but there is much grumbling and no doubt some cursing if he goes away forgetting to distribute francs among the dozen jailers whose ‘graft’—to use an expressive American term—is to make a living in this way from Europeans. There is one man in prison here who speaks a little English and tells you that he has been in jail for more than ten long years and will be there for ever, for he has no money and his friends are far up country. He was imprisoned, so he says, because a rival told the Basha that he had smuggled arms from Spain. Now smuggling arms is a trade that meets, in[90] ports where consuls do not interfere, with speedy execution. Not many years ago this punishment was meted out to some offenders even in Tangier. There is a graphic story of one such killing told in a book by an Italian, De Amicis, published many years ago:

‘An Englishman, Mr. Drummond Hay, coming out one morning at one of the gates of Tangier, saw a company of soldiers dragging along two prisoners with their arms bound to their sides. One was a mountain man from the Riff, formerly a gardener to a European resident at Tangier; the other, a young fellow, tall, and with an open and attractive countenance. The Englishman asked the officer in command what crime these two unfortunate men had committed.

‘“The Sultan,” was the answer—“may God prolong his life!—has ordered their heads to be cut off, because they have been engaged in contraband trade on the coast of the Riff with infidel Spaniards.”

[91]‘“It is very severe punishment for such a fault,” observed the Englishman; “and if it is to serve as a warning and example to the inhabitants of Tangier, why are they not allowed to witness the execution?” (The gates of the city had been closed, and Mr. Drummond Hay had caused one to be opened for him by giving money to the guard.)

‘“Do not argue with me, Nazarene,” responded the officer; “I have received an order and must obey.”

‘The decapitation was to take place in the Hebrew slaughterhouse. A Moor of vulgar and hideous aspect was there awaiting the condemned. He had in his hand a small knife about six inches long. He was a stranger in the city, and had offered himself as executioner because the Mohammedan butchers of Tangier, who usually fill that office, had all taken refuge in a mosque.

‘An altercation now broke out between the soldiers and the executioner about the[92] reward promised for the decapitation of the two poor creatures, who stood by and listened to the dispute over the blood-money. The executioner insisted, declaring that he had been promised twenty francs a head, and must have forty for the two. The officer at last agreed, but with a very ill grace. Then the butcher seized one of the condemned men, already half dead with terror, threw him on the ground, kneeled on his chest, and put the knife into his throat. The Englishman turned away his face. He heard the sounds of the violent struggle. The executioner cried out: “Give me another knife; mine does not cut!” Another knife was brought, and the head separated from the body. The soldiers cried in a faint voice: “God prolong the life of our lord and master!” but many of them were stupefied.

‘Then came the other victim, the handsome and amiable-looking young man. Again they wrangled over his blood. The officer, denying his promise, declared that he would[93] give but twenty francs for both heads. The butcher was forced to yield. The condemned man asked that his hands might be unbound. Being loosed, he took his cloak and gave it to the soldier who had unbound him, saying: “Accept this; we shall meet in a better world.” He threw his turban to another, who had been looking at him with compassion; and stepping to the place where lay the bloody corpse of his companion, he said in a clear, firm voice: “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His prophet!” Then, taking off his belt, he gave it to the executioner, saying: “Take it; but for the love of God cut my head off more quickly than you did my brother’s.” He stretched himself upon the earth, in the blood, and the executioner kneeled upon his chest....

‘A few minutes after, two bleeding heads were held up by the soldiers. Then the gates of the city were opened and there came forth a crowd of boys who pursued the executioner with stones for three miles, when[94] he fell fainting to the ground covered with wounds. The next day it was known that he had been shot by a relation of one of the victims.... The authorities of Tangier apparently did not trouble themselves about the matter, since the assassin came back into the city and remained unmolested. After having been exposed three days the heads were sent to the Sultan, in order that his Imperial Majesty might recognise the promptitude with which his orders had been fulfilled.’

Since this incident of thirty years ago Tangier has changed. No longer may a man be flogged in public in the Sok; no longer may the slave be sold at auction; no longer may the heads of the Sultan’s enemies hang upon the gates; for the place is dominated now by foreign ministers. Though still in name within the empire of the Sultan, it is defiled for ever, gone over to the Christian.

Two years ago Tangier and the surrounding districts were governed by one Mulai Hamid ben Raisul, better known as Raisuli, a villainous blackguard who was finally deposed through the interference of the foreign legations. To-day this same Raisuli enjoys the interest on £15,000 (£5,000 having been given him in cash) and the protection ordinarily accorded to a British subject; and these favours are his because he deprived of liberty for seven months Kaid Sir Harry Maclean, a British subject in the employ of the Sultan Abdul Aziz. According to the terms of the ransom, which permit Raisuli, if he conducts himself in honourable fashion, to[96] receive the sum invested for him at the end of three years, it is probable that the world will hear no more of him in his popular rôle; and, therefore, it might be interesting—also because of the light the story will throw on the ways of the Moorish Government and of diplomacy at Tangier—to sum up the exploits of this notorious brigand.

Raisuli, as his title Mulai implies, is a Shereef or descendant of the Prophet, and partly for that distinction, aside from personal power, he holds a certain influence over the K’mass and other tribes about Tangier. Being a shrewder villain than the others of his race who aspire to govern districts, he adopted early in his career other methods than that which is the custom—of purchasing positions from the Maghzen. The system of buying a governorship, to hold it only till some other Moor bought it over the head of the first and sent him to prison, did not appeal to Raisuli. The mountains of the Riff were impregnable against the feeble[97] forces of the Sultan, and for a rifle and a little not-too-dangerous fighting all his tribesfolk could be got to serve him as their leader. So Raisuli started out for power—a thing the Moor loves—in a manner new to Morocco.

It was in 1903 that he captured his first European, the Times correspondent, W. B. Harris, who, speaking Arabic, negotiated his own surrender, and within three weeks left the mountains of the Riff on the release of a number of Raisuli’s men from Moorish prisons. For a year thereafter there prevailed intense fear in the suburbs, outside the walls of Tangier, where the better class of Europeans live. Raisuli had many followers, and the Maghzen was powerless against him, while raids about Tangier and robberies were of almost nightly occurrence. Yet some of the Europeans, those who felt a sentimental interest in the independence of Morocco and wanted to see the good old Moorish ways survive, seemed ready to[98] welcome ‘the really strong man who was coming to the fore.’ It fell to the lot of an American of Greek descent, a Mr. Perdicaris, to receive the next pressing invitation to the interior. Raisuli and a band of followers entered the Perdicaris home one evening, and after breaking up many things, packing off others, and maltreating his wife, they escorted the American himself to their mountain fastnesses. As is the usual way of Western governments in these matters—I do not intend to suggest another method—the State Department at Washington demanded from the Sultan the release of the captive, pressing the demand with the visit of a warship. The Maghzen, seeing no other way, met Raisuli’s terms, again releasing many tribesmen, and paying the brigand £11,000, besides establishing him as governor of Tangier.

Of course in this capacity the ‘strong man’ superseded the European Legations in control of the town. The old order of things[99] began to revive. Moors were beaten on the market-place; Moslems again insulted Europeans and jostled them in the streets; and soon, the Legations feared, heads would hang again upon the city gates. So an appeal went up to the Sultan that Raisuli be displaced, and Abdul Aziz, though he had evidently pledged himself to Raisuli, readily agreed to the demands of the European representatives. But the wary governor, getting wind of a plot, escaped to the mountains before the arrival of the Sultan’s emissaries; and though troops followed him, burned and pillaged his home and carried off his women, the fugitive himself escaped to renew armed hostilities against the Maghzen soldiers.

Unable to defeat the brigand at arms, after many months Abdul Aziz decided to employ diplomacy, and Kaid Maclean, old and wise in the ways of the Moors and trusted by those who knew him, undertook for the Sultan to convey new pledges to[100] Raisuli and to guarantee them with the word of a Britisher. But the brigand wanted something more substantial, and though he had given his word of honour—his ïamen—that he would not molest the Kaid, the old Scotsman was made prisoner when he arrived; for Kaid Maclean went to meet Raisuli with only half-a-dozen men, hoping to inspire him with trust and to win his confidence.

After demanding, I am told, £120,000 (together with the release from prison of many tribesmen and the return of his women), the brigand finally agreed to accept the sum of £20,000 and the protection of a British subject. This last, which was proposed by the British Government, brings Raisuli of course under the jurisdiction of the Consular Court, and, to fetch him from the mountains in case he should be wanted, £15,000 of the £20,000 ransom is deposited to his credit in a bank, subject to his good behaviour. But I am not sure that the British Government did[101] an all-wise thing. Foreign protection is greatly sought after by the Moors. In the case of others who enjoy it the power is used to plunder their fellows, and Raisuli may be expected to employ his strength and his new position in some cunning way. The Moorish authorities, always anxious to avoid encounters with the consulates and legations, generally allow protected subjects to do what they please. Raisuli may now exploit his fellow-countrymen with certain safety, or he may direct the profitable business of gun-running—at which he has already had considerable experience, like many other protégés and foreign residents—and no one is likely to protest.

Luck with me seems to run in spells. Once on a campaign in the Balkans I had the good fortune to be on hand at everything; massacre, assassination, nor dynamite attack could escape me; I was always on the spot or just at a safe distance off. In Morocco things went consistently the other way. Beginning with the Casablanca affair when I was in America, everything of a newspaper value happened while I was somewhere else. The day the Sultan entered Rabat after his long march from the interior, I sailed past the town unable to land. Now I was to be taken to Laraiche, when a month before I had failed to get there to meet the two score European refugees coming down from Fez.

[103]We took passage—Weare and I—on the same little steamer by which we had come to Tangier, bound now down the Atlantic coast, again intending to stop at Rabat, ‘weather permitting.’ There was not a breath of air; the sea was ‘like a painted ocean’; every prospect favoured. But our captain, the Scorpion villain, hugged the coast with a purpose, and as might have been expected the ship was signalled at Laraiche. We had to stop and pick up freight, which proved to be some forty crates of eggs billed for England. Old memories of unhappy breakfasts revived, and, our sympathies going out to fellow Christians back in London, we argued with the captain that it was not fair to take aboard these perishable edibles till he should return from Mogador. But the captain smiled, putting a stubby finger to his twisted nose, and explained that though eggs were eggs, the wind might be blowing from the west when the ship passed back. But though my ill-fortune in Morocco was enough[104] to ruin the reputation of a Bennet Burleigh, there were always compensations, and on this occasion we were recompensed with a sight of the most fascinating port along the Moorish coast.

As the ship moves into the river cautiously, to avoid the bar, you ride beneath the walls and many domes of a great white castle, silent, to all appearances deserted, and overgrown with cactus bushes. Below—for the castle stands high upon a rock—is an ancient fortress, also white, which the ship passes so close that it is possible, even in the twilight, to make out upon the muzzles of the one-time Spanish guns designs of snakes and wreaths of flowers; and looking over the parapet you may see the old-time mortars made in shapes like squatting gnomes. From the ship that night we watched the moon rise and the phosphorescence play upon the water, and the splendid Oriental castle took on a fairy-like enchantment.

In the morning the little city appeared[105] unlike other Moorish towns; where they are mostly grey or white, with here and there a green-tiled mosque, Laraiche affects all manner of colour. Among the white and blue houses there may be green or orange, yellow or brown or red, and likewise the inhabitants, curiously, go in for gaily coloured cloaks. On one side of the river this brilliant city rose from the ancient walls; on the other a cluster of sand dunes sloped back to the hills a mile or more away, and behind them, far in the distance, towered the Red Mountain, which Raisuli has made famous. Great lighters, things like Noah’s arks, rowed by fifteen, sometimes twenty, turbaned men, pushed off from the little quay to bring our cargo, and smaller craft began to cross the river to ferry over country people and their animals, along with one or two poor, fagged-out letter carriers, who had come afoot from Tangier, forty miles, overnight. By one of the smaller boats which came alongside we went ashore, to remain three days awaiting a[106] further belated shipment of grain that came by camel train from the interior. We went to the only hotel, kept of course by a Spaniard, though designed specially to attract the British tourists of the Forwood line. The walls of the tiny, wood-partitioned rooms (spacious Moorish halls cut to cubicles) are papered like children’s playrooms, with pictures from old Graphics and other London weeklies, planned no doubt to amuse the visitor when it rains, for on such occasions the streets of Laraiche are veritable rapids. The room which I occupied hung over the city walls and looked down on the banks of the river, dry at low tide. Being waked early one morning by some hideous sounds and muffled voices, we peered cautiously out of the window and in the dim light discerned a crowd of black-gowned Jews not twenty feet below, killing a cow. This bank at low tide is the slaughterhouse, where a dead beast of some kind lay continually. Fortunately the rising waters carried off the few[107] remains that Jews and Moslems left; and fortunately, too, the place was not used also as the boneyard, where animals that have died of natural causes are dragged and heaped uncovered. Such a spot there is outside the walls of every Moorish town.

Laraiche is off the great trade routes, and the district round about is unproductive. For these reasons its poor inhabitants, unable to own guns and riding horses, are peaceable and submissive. The town as well as the surrounding country is safe for any Christian, and even insults for him are few. We went with our ragged old guide, who bore the fitting name of Sidi Mohammed, up through the Kasbah, as fine a ruin of Moorish architecture as I have seen, and out through a long tunnel to the quaint old market-place, broad and white, flanked on each side by long, low rows of colonnades, the ends, through which the trains of camels come, sustained by several arches, none the same, opening in various directions. Certainly[108] the Moors who built this town were architects and artists too. But the poverty and the degradation of the place! The houses, dark and wretched; the tea-shops foul and small and crowded much like opium dens; the people lean and miserable and cramped with hungry stomachs, dirty and diseased. Though clad in rags of brightest colours, the average human being is marked over with pox or something worse, and his head is scaly, the hair growing only in blotches. Children follow you, with paper patches, the prayers of some mad saint, tied about their running, bloodshot eyes; old men hobble by, one lean leg covered with sores, the other swollen huge with elephantiasis, both bare and horrible. Laraiche is beautiful and awful.

We saw a funeral here, and I thought we Christians could learn something from these Moors. In this sad country a man is hardly dead before they bury him. As soon as the grave can be dug the corpse is taken on the shoulders of friends, and quickly, to the music[109] of a weird chant, borne to the grave. Without a flood of agony and an aftermath of long-extended mourning, the body is consigned to earth, and the soul that has departed, to the tender mercy of almighty God. An unmarked sandstone is erected; and if a relative wore a cloak of green or red before the parting, green or red is his colour still.

The day we left Laraiche a heavy breeze blew from the sea, white-capped rollers broke upon the shore, and we knew that Rabat was not to be reached. We passed on to Casablanca, where, the harbour being better, we were able to land. Now after all these disappointments we were resolved to get to Rabat at any cost. If it were necessary, we would go by land and run the gauntlet of the Shawia tribes, professing to be Germans deserting from the Foreign Legion; but the French consul saved us this. From him we obtained permission to go back by torpedo-boat and to be transhipped, so to speak, to the cruiser Gueydon, where we might stay as[110] long as was necessary, as the ship was permanently anchored off Rabat. In two days after boarding the Gueydon the Atlantic calmed, and we left, bidding adieu to our French hosts, to cross the bar of the Bu Regreg in a twenty-oared Moorish boat.

At the time that the Krupp Company were mounting heavy-calibre guns at Rabat other German contractors proposed to cut the bar of the Bu Regreg and open the port to foreign trade. But the people of both Rabat and Sali protested, saying that this would let in more Nasrani and that the half-dozen already there, who bought their rugs and sold them goods from Manchester and Hamburg, were quite enough. Up to the time the French gunboats appeared—preceded by the news of their effective work at Casablanca—the arrival of twenty Europeans at Rabat would have given rise to much murmuring and no doubt to a good many[112] threats. Now, however, more than double that number of Frenchmen alone had come to the town. From Tangier had come the Minister of France and all his staff, accompanied by a score of soldiers and marines; and from Casablanca had followed a troop of correspondents, French and English. Yet the hapless Moors, stirred as they had never been before, were required to give them right of way.

‘Balak! Balak!’ went the cry of the Maghzen soldier, leading the Christians through the crowded, narrow streets, and meekly, usually without a protest, the natives stood aside. Most of the people did not understand. Had not the Prophet said that they should hate the Christians? Yet now their lord, Mulai Abdul Aziz, Slave of the Beloved, sat upon his terrace—so rumour vowed—sat with some Frenchmen and listened towards Ziada to the cannon of some other Frenchmen as they slaughtered faithful Moslems! At Rabat, besides the townsfolk,[113] there were refugees from Casablanca; there were tribesmen still in arms; there were saints who had followed the Sultan from Fez; there were madmen who are sacred, and impostors who pretended to be mad; there were soldiers trained to every crime; in short, there were men from every corner of the variegated empire, any one of whom would gladly have laid down his life to slay a Christian had the Sultan so commanded. Yet months have passed and they have kept the peace, though Frenchmen still slay Moors within the sound of Rabat’s walls.

A Shawia tribesman who spoke a little English, a tall young man with dark skin, and an ear torn by an earring at the lobe, met us at the landing and extended his hand. He took upon himself to help us with our luggage, and we let him show us the way to the French hotel lately opened. Of course this man was anxious to serve us as guide and interpreter, and we were glad to have[114] him. Driss Wult el Kaid was his name, Driss, son of the Kaid. He had worked for Englishmen at Casablanca, and from his accent we could tell they had been ‘gentlemen.’ No ‘h’s’ did he shift from place to place, while his pronunciation of such words as ‘here’ and ‘there’ were always drawled out ‘hyar’ and ‘thar.’ ‘Now, now,’ he would say with a twisting inflection, for all the world like an Oxford man wishing to express the ordinary negative ‘no.’ It was humorous. English of this sort, to the mind of a mere American, associates itself with aristocracy, while the face of a mulatto goes only with the under-race of the States. It was difficult, in consequence, to reconcile the two. But Driss soon demonstrated that he was worthy to speak the language of the upper man. The manners and the dignity of a ruling race were his heritage; and proud he was, though his bearing towards the poorest beggar never appeared condescending. A gentleman was Driss. ‘Me fader,’[115] he told us in fantastic Moro-English, ‘me fader he was one-time gov’nor Ziada.’

‘Me fader,’ Driss explained, looking sorrowful, ‘he paid ten thousan’ dollar Hassani for (to be) gov’nor; two year more late ’nother man pay ten thousan’ dollar more, and he ’come gov’nor; me fader got no more money, so go prison.’ This was the old story, the same wherever Mohammedans govern; one man buys the right to rule and rob a province; over his head another buys it, to be succeeded by a third, and so on.

We told Driss that this could not happen if the French ruled the country; it could not happen, we said, in Algeria.

‘I know, I know,’ said Driss. ‘Me fader he write (wrote) in a book about Algeria, and he teach me to read. Tell me, Mr. Moore, is it true a man can give his money to ’nother man and get a piece of paper, then[116] go back long time after and get his money back?’

I told Driss that there were such institutions as banks, which even the Sultan could not rob; and he believed, but seemed to wonder all the more what manner of men Christians were. ‘It is fiendish; no wonder they defeat us; they work together inhumanly,’ he seemed to say; ‘indeed you cannot know our God!’

Good old Driss; both Weare and I became very fond of him. In a day he spoke of himself as our friend, and I believe we could have trusted him in hard emergencies. He was brave and not unduly cautious, though occasionally, when we would stop in a road and gather a crowd, he would say imperatively: ‘Come away, Mr. Weare and Mr. Moore; some fanatic may be in that crowd and stick you with his dagger. Come on, come on!—I’m your friend; I don’t want see you dead.’

Driss had vanities. He told us his age,[117] twenty-three, and told us in the same breath that few Moors knew exactly how old they were. He said his wife—who was only twenty—could read and write a little, informing us at the same time that very few women could read. He told us that his wife was almost white. Driss was ashamed of his own colour, and when a French correspondent asked in his presence if he was a slave, the poor boy coloured and dropped his head. He had certainly been born of a slave.

Still there was nothing humble about Driss. Among his people he was exceptional and he enjoyed the distinction. He was a Ziada man; he could read and write; he could make more money than his fellows—and he hoped some day to acquire European protection; he was fine-looking, tall, strong, and without disease.

Driss was a thoroughly clean fellow. He never touched bread without washing his hands, a custom prevailing among some Moslems but not general with the Moors.[118] This with him seemed only a matter of habit and desire of decency, for he was not particularly devout in his religion.

‘But you think,’ we said, ‘that all Nasrani are unclean.’ At first Driss denied this, out of consideration for us, but on being pressed he admitted that it was the feeling of the ignorant of his race that, like pigs, all Christians were filthy in person as well as soul.

We discussed with him the great moral vice of Mohammedan countries, and he admitted that it was prevalent in Morocco no less than, as we told him, it prevailed farther east, and that it affected all classes. He told me that it was the custom of the wealthy father of the better class of Moors, in order to protect his sons, to make them each a present of a slave girl as they attain the age of fifteen or sixteen. Of course, from the Mohammedan point of view, there is nothing immoral in this; indeed the mothers of sons often advocate it.

[119]It was the fasting month of Ramadan at the time of our sojourn at Rabat, and no one could eat except at night. Every evening at six o’clock a white-cloaked gunner came out of the Kasbah walls and rammed into his antique cannon a load of powder sufficient, it would seem, to raise the dead of the cemetery in which it was discharged. For two reasons—that it was the cemetery and that the Ramadan gun was here—this was the gathering-place of all Moslems. Often we, too, went up to see the crowd and to watch with the gunner and the other Moors for the signal. All eyes were turned, not towards the Atlantic to see old Sol set, but inland, towards the town, where towered above the low houses a great white minaret, whence the Muezzin watched the sun and signalled with a banner of white. At the blast of the cannon a great shout went up from the hundred small boys gathered about; and, with the slope of the hill to lend them speed, everybody went[120] hurrying into the town, the skirts of those who ran fluttering a yard behind them. In a minute came the boom from the gun of the m’halla, the city of tents, on the hills visible beyond the town walls. When we passed down the streets to our supper five minutes later, everybody was swallowing great gulps of hererah, Ramadan soup, breaking the long day’s fast. The little cafés, dingy and deserted during the day, were now brilliant and crowded, the keeper himself eating with one hand while he served with the other; and the roadway was studded with little groups of men who had squatted where they stood half-an-hour before the setting of the sun, and, spoon in hand, waited for the gun to boom.

Christians and Mohammedans treat their religions with a curious difference: where the one is generally ashamed of reverence and never flaunts his faith, the other is afraid not to make a considerable show of his. Not a Moor would dare to eat or even[121] touch a drop of water in the sight of another during Ramadan; though under our window overlooking the river it was the custom of an old beggar to come daily at noon, to roll himself into a ball on the ground as if sleeping, and under the cover of his ragged jeleba make his lunch. Had he been caught at this he would probably have been stoned out of town.

One day during Ramadan we were taken by a Jewish merchant, a British subject, to the house of a wealthy Moor with whom he traded in goods from Manchester. The house was down a turning off the street of arches, and the turning came to an end at the Moor’s door, a massive oaken door with the heads of huge rivets showing every six or seven inches. It was the width of the narrow street, about six feet, and the height of one’s shoulder. We approached quietly and knocked lightly, for our friend told us that the Moor did not care for his neighbours to see us entering his house.[122] The entrance, which was at one corner of the square house, led into the courtyard, of which the ornate walls were spotlessly white-washed, the floor was of green tiles, and the roof, as is usual, of glass. The reception room, the length of one side of the house, though but twelve feet wide, had low divans all round the walls, leaving but a long, narrow aisle the length of the room, to the right and to the left of the arched entrance. Rising in tiers at each end were broader divans, to appear as beds one beyond another, though their luxurious and expensive upholstering, covered with the richest of native silks, were evidently never displaced by use. About the room, in cases above the divans, were many little ornaments, noticeably tall silver sprinklers filled with rose-water and other perfumes; but most curious to us were the innumerable clocks, most of them cheap things, all set at different hours in order that their bells should not drown each other’s melodious clangs.

[123]Two little slave girls, who giggled at us all the while, brought in a samovar much after the Russian pattern, and silver boxes of broken cone sugar and of European biscuits. Our host made tea in the native fashion, brewed with quantities of sugar and flavoured heavily with mint; green tea, of course. He filled our cups again and again, though he would take nothing, till we too wished we respected Ramadan, for we were told by our Jewish friend that it would be impolite to drink less than five or six cups. Along with this refreshment the silver sprinklers were passed us by the giggling little blacks, that we might sprinkle our clothes, and no doubt they thought we needed perfuming, though they did not hold their noses, as other Europeans have told me they often do when close to Nazarenes. Perhaps their master had instructed them in good behaviour, for he was indeed a gentleman, and he had travelled on one occasion to London and to Paris. It was at this point, when the Moor, with[124] immaculate fingers, sprinkled his own long white robes, that one could appreciate their feeling that we are filthy people. We wear the same outer garments for months, and they are never washed; indeed, we wear dark colours that the dirt may not show; here we had entered upon this gentleman’s precious carpets with our muddy boots, where a sockless Moor would shift his slippers. And they have habits too which make for bodily cleanliness, habits which they know we have not, as, for instance, that of shaving the hair from every part of the body but the face. Our conversation was chiefly on comparisons of customs, our host noticing that we shaved our faces, the Moors their heads, and we remarking—for he was too polite—that we kept on our shoes when we entered a house, whereas the Moors wore their fezzes or their turbans. He said that he had beheld in London the extraordinary sight of a pair of ordinary Moorish slippers set upon a table as an ornament; and he[125] had seen also the woman sultan, Queen Victoria.

At Ramadan there are generally continual street festivities during the eating hours of the night; but the gloom cast over the country by the presence of the French kept these now to a minimum. There was not even, in spite of the Sultan’s presence any powder play, a thing which I was particularly anxious to witness, to learn for myself to what degree the Moors are hard upon their animals. I know that Moslems are seldom deliberately cruel; but I know, too, that the vanity of the Moor makes him ride with a cruel bit and a pointed spur that could reach the vitals of a horse, and both of these, I have heard, they employ in a vicious manner in their famous, dashing powder play. But most of their cruelty is only from neglect, laziness, and ignorance. Camels wear their shoulders and their necks through to the bone—the sight is a common one—because their masters do not trouble to pad their[126] packs properly; two men will ride an undersized donkey already overloaded with a pack; and, as is the way among all Moslems, an animal when it comes to die may suffer for weeks or months, yet will not be killed because ‘Allah gave life, and Allah alone may take it away.’ Still there is the Moorish sect of Aisawa, that in a mad stampede tears a sheep to pieces in the streets and eats it still palpitating.

There were some interesting Englishmen at Rabat, notably the Times correspondent, W. B. Harris, who has travelled with several Sultans of Morocco, and lived some time as a Moor in order that he might learn their ways and penetrate to the farthest reaches of the country forbidden to the Christian. There was also Mr. Allan Maclean, likewise an authority on Morocco, now busy with the Maghzen to arrange for the release of certain prisoners, which Raisuli exacted as one of the stipulations of Kaid Maclean’s release. There was then the British Consul, George[127] Neroutsos, an old friend of the Sultan and a man whom he often consults on matters of European policy.

With some of the Englishmen we took long rides around the town, passing several times through the m’halla, where we were never welcome; the camp of Abdul Aziz was in sympathy with Mulai Hafid. We saw the soldiers who were sent to fight Hafid and joined his ranks with all their arms. Gradually we saw the army dwindle away until there could have been no more than four thousand men between the discredited Sultan and his hostile brother, whose following of tribesmen was reported to number variously from twenty to sixty thousand men. Had the army of the French not stood between them and fought the Hafid m’hallas, Rabat would surely have fallen and Abdul Aziz would now be a royal prisoner safe in the keeping of his brother. For want of money to pay the troops Abdul Aziz was forced to pawn his jewels; and at[128] last, by a royal decree, he made good ‘a hundred sacks’ of silver coins that had been confiscated as counterfeit. It was because of a threatened revolt of the troops for want of pay that the Spaniards in February occupied the port of Mar Chica.

Across the river from Rabat and across a stretch of sand half-a-mile wide, a low line of white battlements, showing but a single gate, keeps the famous city of Salli, the headquarters of the Moroccan pirates, who in their day made themselves feared as far as the shores of England. Every one remembers that it was to Salli Robinson Crusoe was taken and held in slavery for many months, finally escaping in a small boat belonging to his Moorish master. For years the corsairs were the scourge of Christian merchantmen, and up to two centuries ago they plied their trade, which was deemed honourable among the Moors and carried with it the title[130] ‘Amir-el-Bahr,’ Lord of the Sea, from which has come the English word Admiral. It has been but a few years since Salli could be visited by Europeans, and the inhabitants boast to-day that not a Christian lives within their sacred walls. They do not know that the Times correspondent—of whom I have spoken often already—once stayed amongst them for some time; they remember only a thin, studious, devout Moslem, who knew the Koran and the history of Islam as they did not, and had travelled to all the holy places. Harris told me that greater hospitality and truer courtesy could have been shown him nowhere than among the descendants of the Salli Rovers. But the deference, I may add, was to the Moorish garb he wore; to the man who wears the clothes of an infidel, and, reversing their custom, shaves his face and lets the hair grow on his head, there is little common decency accorded.

Our man would not go with us alone to Salli, though since leaving Casablanca he[131] and his wife had taken refuge there with the lady’s parents. To obtain an escort he took us down to the custom-house where the Basha of Salli came every day to watch the imports. We arrived at the landing just as the Basha got out of his ferry, a soldier following him and also a servant carrying his dinner in a plate slung in a napkin. The governor was a stately Moor of middle age, pock-marked of course, but clean and intelligent-looking, and we addressed him as a gentleman, to have our bow but slightly acknowledged. To Driss, who spoke to him, he intimated that because of the feeling of the people at this moment he would rather not be seen talking with Europeans. The Basha then entered the custom-house, and by means of Driss as messenger conducted negotiations with us, still standing on the landing-place. The negotiations were extensive of course, and after half-an-hour, receiving and replying to various unimportant questions—Were we anxious to see Salli[132] to-day? Would not to-morrow do as well? Had we any reason for going there?—each of which was delivered singly, at last a soldier came and said that he would go with us but we must wait till he went and fetched another. This is the way when one is not welcome.

Finally permitted to cross the river, we ploughed through the sands and passed the boneyard outside the walls to the narrow gate, where we waited again till yet another soldier came; and in this order, one man in front and two behind us, we entered upon the sacred cobbled streets, now not too crowded, for it was Ramadan, when folk are active most at evening and before the sun is high. In the quarter of good homes, through which we passed first, only little children in the care of youthful slave girls seemed to be abroad; and it is hard to say which we most alarmed. There was in every instance first a surprised start, then a quiet flurry. Little girls in long dresses, wearing but one long earring and distinguishable[133] from boys only by having two patches of hair on their otherwise shaven heads, would shift their slippers, grab them up in their hands, and go tearing off, their cloaks flying, to disappear into a broad, low, arched doorway, and down the steps behind. The black girls, older, snatched the babies they were tending, covered their faces, and shuffled off to call the women. As we passed, the single uncovered eye of many women, white and black, lined the door held an inch ajar, and once, at our glance, one of the women growing modest slammed the heavy thing and—we judged from the yell—caught the nose of one of her sisters. Sometimes they came and peered over from their low-walled roofs, pointing us out to their children, the first infidels perhaps many of them had seen; and on these occasions we always watched, for the streets were sometimes but a yard wide and we were easy marks had any of them spat.

There can be no mistake about the[134] records of history, which state that thousands of Christian slaves, many of them British, were sold on the great white market at Salli. The faces of many of the people to-day are distinctly European. Here there seemed to me to be less mixture of black blood than in the other towns, many of the people being as white as Europeans. We saw among the children a boy of five or six years who would not have looked unnatural in Ireland, and later, in the mella we came across a little girl with golden hair. At this last we puzzled our brains—for our inquiries brought no explanation—finally surmising that some rich Jew, a hundred years ago, had bought her ancestor.

In the centre of the town is a cone-shaped hill crowded with white, square houses of the best class, which range themselves round a mosque and minaret upon the summit. The massive tower, inlaid with tiles of many colours, once served as beacon for the pirates, though now, like all the[135] Moorish coast, it sheds no light for Christian ships. When we asked to see the great mosque, our soldiers made excuses and would have led us another way, but we adopted the method of turning at the corners that we chose, leaving the man in the lead to double back from the way he would set. Of course he always protested, but from experience with other escorts we knew that to see what is to be seen in Mohammedan countries one must lead the way oneself, and the greater the protest of the guard the more one can be certain that one is on the proper track. The soldiers were anxious to take us promptly to the mella, where we might stay, they said, as long as we pleased; but first we searched out the mosque and later the market-place. The Sok here is in itself by no means so imposing as at Laraiche or even at Rabat, and there are to be seen no characters that are not also at the open ports; but here there gather Moors and Arabs and Berbers of an intenser religious[136] ardour, who follow closer the customs of the ages past and whose very faces show their greater hatred of the Nazarene.

The people of Salli—largely for their intolerance of Christians and their glorious rover ancestry—hold a social position second only to that of the people of Fez and the holy city of Ouzzan, and they are wealthier as a rule than the inhabitants of other towns; and these are reasons that holy men and maimed creatures flock here to beg. But at the time of our visit the presence of the Sultan at Rabat had drawn all wanderers, beggars, saints, minstrels, and itinerant tradesmen, across the river, and on the Sok of Salli there was but one poor bard to stop his story at sight of our unholy apparition. He stopped and refused to go on, and the people murmuring began to move off, while our soldiers urged us to pass on with them.

The walls of the mella were but a few hundred yards away, and there we repaired at last, where crowds who followed us were[137] beaten back only to prevent annoyance. We could stop and speak with the Jews and enter their synagogues and even their houses, and they would pose for photographs, though many of them now saw a camera for the first time. Having taken refuge here from the Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth century the Jews of Morocco might be expected to harbour prejudices against the Christian world, but, strangely, nowhere, not in the heart of the closed country, are they at all fanatic.

A drove of boys and men, with women trailing on behind, followed us as we left their walled reservation, and would have come beyond but for the Moorish keeper of their gate, who raised his stick and shouting drove them back. It is the law at night that all Jews must be inside the mella when the gates are closed at seven or eight o’clock; and this good rule is for their safety, that they may not suffer robbery and abuse. The Jews of Morocco, oppressed and often robbed, pay[138] the country’s fighting men for their protection; in Moorish towns they pay the basha, in the country they pay the kaid or other chief of the strongest neighbouring tribe. They are protected too by the Government, because they are thrifty and can be made to pay, under pressure, heavy taxes.

We were up on the Kasbah, the high rocky citadel that rises nearly two hundred feet straight above the notorious bar of the Bu Regreg, taking in a splendid view of the river’s winding course together with the city of Salli. When a caravan of unusual size twisted out of Salli’s double gate and came across the sands to the water’s edge, where a score of ferry boats nosed the bank, their owners began jumping about like madmen, frantic for the promised trade that could not escape them. On market days at Rabat there are always camel trains and pack trains of mules and horses crossing these sands of Salli to and from the barges that ferry them[140] over the river for a farthing a man and two farthings a camel, but they seldom come in trains of more than twenty. This winding white company, detached in groups of sometimes four, sometimes forty, stretched from the wall to the water’s edge, a distance of half a mile; it spread out on the shore, and still kept coming from the gate. Neither Weare nor I had heard that the Sultan’s harem would arrive this day, and we had to reproach our faithful Driss Wult el Kaid, to whom we had given standing orders to move round among his countrymen and let us know when things of interest were happening.

‘Plenty time, Mr. Moore,’ said Driss, holding up his brown hands and chuckling. ‘There are many, many; more ’an three hundred, and many soldiers, and many Soudanese,’ by which last Driss meant slaves. There was indeed plenty of time; it took the company all that day and part of the next to cross by the slow, heavy barges, carrying twenty people and half-a-dozen[141] animals at each load, and rowed generally by two men, sometimes by only one.

We descended from the Kasbah and made our way down the street of shops, the Sok or market street, as it is called, and out through the Water Port to the rock-studded sands upon which the caravan was landing. It was an extraordinary sight. The tide was out, and the water, which at high tide laps the greenish walls, now left a sloping shore of twenty yards. The boats when loaded would push up the river close to the other shore, then taking the current off a prominent point, swing over in an arc to the Rabat side. Empty, they would go back the same way by an inner arc. On our side they ran aground generally between two rocks, when the black, bare-legged eunuchs, dropping their slippers, would elevate their skirts by taking up a reef at the belts, and jump into the water to take the women to dry land on their stalwart backs. Only in rare instances did much of the woman’s face show—and[142] then she was a pretty woman and young; those old or pock-marked were always careful to cover, even to the extent of hiding one eye. Nevertheless the wives of the Sultan as they got upon the backs of his slaves gathered their sulhams up about their knees, displaying part of a leg, in almost every case unstockinged, and always dangling a heelless slipper of red native leather. In Morocco, as I have indicated before, the costumes of men and those of women are practically the same except for fullness and, in the case of nether-garments, colour. The short trousers of a man, for instance, are generally brown and his slippers never anything (when new) but yellow.

The Sultan’s wives with few exceptions were covered in white sulhams; round their heads were bands of blue ribbon knotted at the back, fixing their hoods and veils for riding. While the slaves brought up the luggage, working with a will like men conducting their own business, the women held[143] the mules and horses, covered with wads of blanket, all of Ottoman red, and mounted with high red Arab saddles. The women were usually subdued and to all appearances modest, though all of them would let their black eyes look upon the infidels longer than would the modest maid of a race that goes unveiled. But of course we were a sight to them not of every day. Now and then a lady whose robe was of better quality than most, seemed distressed about some jewel case or special piece of luggage, and worried her servant, who argued back in a manner of authority. It was evident the slaves had charge each of a particular lady for whom he was responsible.

As soon as these blacks had gathered their party and belongings all together, they loaded the tents and trunks two to a mule, and lifted the women into the high red saddles, always ridden astride; then, picking up their guns, they started on to the palace, leading the animals through the ancient gate[144] and across the crowded town, shouting ‘Balak! Balak!’ Make way, make way! Once they had begun to move, the eunuchs paid no attention to any man, not deigning even to reply to the dog of a boatman who often followed them some hundred paces cursing them for having paid too little, sometimes nothing at all, when much was expected for ferrying the Lai-ell of the Sultan.

The caravan had been a long time on the road from Fez. Travelling only part of the day and camping early, it had taken a fortnight to come a distance little more than 150 miles. The Sultan had brought with him twenty of his favourites, trailing them across country rapidly, when he had hurried to this strategic place at the news that Mulai Hafid had been proclaimed Sultan at his southern capital and would probably race him to Rabat.

But why Abdul Aziz brought with him any of his wives is a question. Perhaps they had more to do with it than had he;[145] and perhaps it was for political reasons. At any rate (I have it from the Englishman quoted before) his harem bores him; to the songs and dances of all his beauties he much prefers the conversation of a single European who can tell him how a field gun works, what it is that makes the French—or any other—war balloon rise, and explain to him the pictures in the French and English weeklies to which he subscribes. He has here a motor-boat, which he keeps high and dry in a room in the palace, and the German engineer who makes its wheel go round is a frequent companion.

It is said in Morocco that while other Sultans visited their wives all in turn, showing favouritism to none, the present youthful High Shereef has cut off all but half a score, and never sees the mass of them except en masse. And it is said, too—among the many current stories regarding his European tendencies—that for these ten ladies he has spent thousands of pounds on Paris gowns[146] and Paris hats to dress them in and see what European women look like. It naturally suggests itself that the poor fellow is hopelessly puzzled, and on a point that would of course catch his scientific mind: while the women of Paris are apparently built in two parts and pivoted together, those of his own dominions are constructed the other way. According to the ideas of the Orient the waist should be the place of largest circumference.

The principal cause of the Moorish revolution, which threatens to terminate the reign of Abdul Aziz, was his tendency—up to a few months ago—to defy the religious prejudices which a long line of terrible predecessors had carefully nurtured in his people. The incident of the mosque of Mulai Idris at Fez was his culminating offence. To the uttermost corners of the Empire went the news that the young Sultan had defiled the most holy tomb of the country through causing to be taken by force from its sacred protection and murdered one of the Faithful who had slain a Christian dog. To the punishing wrath of the dishonoured saint[148] and of the Almighty has been put down every calamity that has since befallen either the Sultan or the Empire; and the Moors will tell you that by this act has come the ruin of Morocco. It was in dramatic fashion that the feeling Driss, our man, stopped abruptly in the street when I mentioned the affair. We were nearing a picturesque little mosque with a leaning palm towering above it, and good old Driss was urging me to turn away and not to pass it—because he was a friend of mine and did not want me stoned. ‘Driss,’ said I, ‘they would not dare; the Sultan is here and they know that even a mosque won’t save them if they harm a European now.’ Driss stopped short and turned upon me. ‘You know that, Mr. Moore,’ he said with emphasis, ‘that about the Mulai Idris! That was the finish of Morocco!’

While with such breaches of the Moslem law Abdul Aziz has roused among the people a superstitious fear of consequences, he has[149] also, by lesser defiances of recognised Moorish customs, sorely aggravated them. His many European toys—the billiard table, the costly photographic apparatus, the several bicycles, and the extravagant displays of fireworks—while harmless enough, were regarded by the Moors with no good grace. But worst of all these trivial things was, to the Moors, the young man’s evident lack of dignity. At times he would ride out alone and with Christians (who were his favourite companions), whereas the Sultans before him were hardly known to appear in public without the shade of the authoritative red umbrella.

An Englishman who knows Abdul Aziz and has for years advised him, tells me of a ride they took together accompanied only by their private servants, when the Court was formerly at Rabat, five years ago. The Sultan left the palace grounds with the hood of his jeleba drawn well down over his face, his servant likewise thoroughly covered in the garment that levels all Moors, men and[150] women, to the same ghost-like appearance. Sultan and man met the Englishman outside the town walls at the ruins of Shella, a secluded place grown over with cactus bushes, and rode with him on into the country fifteen miles or more. On the way back they encountered a storm of rain, and drenched to the skin, their horses floundering in the slipping clay, they drew up at the back walls of the palace and tried to get an entrance by a gate always barred.

So the Englishman’s servant climbed the wall, dropped on the other side, and made his way to the palace, where he was promptly arrested and flogged for a lying thief, no one taking the trouble to go to see if his tale was true. After the Sultan and the Englishman had waited for some time, they rode round[151] to another gate and entered. Then the unfortunate servant of the Christian was set free and given five dollars Hassani to heal his welted skin.

But things have changed. On the present visit of the Sultan to Rabat he no longer rides out except in great State; and this he does (on the advice partly of that particular Englishman of the wall adventure) every Friday regularly.

In September, while Abdul Aziz was on the road from Fez, hastening to anticipate his brother in getting to this, the war capital of Morocco (where, as the Moors say, the Sultan might listen with both ears, to the North and to the South), public criers from the rival camp of Mulai Hafid declared that Abdul Aziz was coming to the coast to be baptized a Christian under the guns of the infidel men-of-war. But this lie was easy to refute without the humiliation of a deliberate contradiction. Though at Fez it has always been the custom of the Sultan to worship at[152] a private mosque within the grounds of his palace, it is likewise the custom for him at Rabat to go with a great fanfare and all his household and the Maghzen through lines of troops as long as he can muster, to a great public mosque in the open fields between the town’s outer and inner walls.

It was with a party of Europeans, mostly English correspondents, that I went to see the first Selamlik here. In the party there was W. B. Harris of the Times, and Wm. Maxwell of the Mail, as well as Allan Maclean, the brother of the Kaid. We had as an escort two soldiers from the British Consulate, without whom we could not have moved. The soldiers led the way shouting ‘Balak! balak!’ as we rode through the narrow crowded streets. But in all the throng no other Europeans were to be seen, until some way out we met at a cross-road and mingled for a moment with the delegation of French officials and correspondents, bound also for the great show.

[153]Passing the Bab-el-Had, the Gate of Heads (fortunately not decorated at this time), the road led through grassy fields to a height from which is visible the whole palace enclosure. We could see, over the high white walls, the two lines of stacked muskets sweeping away in a long, opening arc from the narrow gate beside the mosque to the numerous doors of the low white-washed palace. Behind the guns the soldiers sat, generally in groups on the grass, only a few having life enough to play at any game. Considerably in the background were groups of women, garbed consistently in white, and heavily veiled.

Our soldiers, always glad to spur a horse, climbed through a break in the cactus that lined the road and led a hard canter down the slight, grassy slope, straight for one of the smaller gates. Two sentries seated on either side, perceiving us, rose nervously, retired and swung the doors in our faces, the rusty bars grating into place as we[154] drew up. Our soldiers shouted, but got no answer, and we rode round to the Bab by the mosque, which could not be closed. As we drew up here a sentinel with arbitrary power let in two negro boys, clad each in a ragged shirt, riding together on a single dwarfed donkey not tall enough to keep their long, black, dangling legs out of the dust. But we could not pass—no; there was no use arguing, we could not pass. Slaves went in and beggars; the man was anxious, and shoved them in—but no; we, we were not French!

While our soldiers argued, the Frenchmen came up and passed in; then the guard, seeing we looked much like them, changed his mind and permitted us, too, to enter.

For some distance we passed between the lines of stacked guns, attracting the curious gaze of everybody, especially the women, who rose and came nearer the soldiers. One youth, a mulatto, got up and took a gun from a stack, and pretending to[155] shove a cartridge into it, aimed directly at my head. The incident was, as one of the Englishmen suggested, somewhat boring.

Within a hundred yards of the palace we got behind the line and took up our stand. We had not long to wait. Shortly after the sun began to decline a twanging blast from a brassy cornet brought the field to its feet.

There was no hurry or scurry—there seldom is in Mohammedan countries. The soldiers took their guns, not with any order but without clashing; the women and children came up close; tribesmen, mounted, drew up behind. The Sultan’s band, in white, belted dresses, with knee skirts, bare legs, yellow slippers, and red fezzes, began to play a slow, impressive march—‘God save the King!’ with strange Oriental variations. It would not have been well if the Moors had known, and our soldier, for one, was amazed when we told him, that the band played the Christian Sultan’s hymn.

[156]The mongrel soldiers, black and brown and white, slaves and freemen, presented arms uncertainly, as best they knew how; the white-robed women ‘coo-eed’ loud and shrill. A line of spear-bearers, all old men, passed at a short jog-trot; following them came six Arab horses, not very fine, but exceedingly fat, and richly caparisoned, led by skirted grooms; then the Sultan, immediately preceded and followed by private servants, likewise in white, except for their chief, a coal-black negro dressed in richest red. Beside the Sultan, who was robed in white and rode a white horse, walked on one side the bearer of the red parasol, and on the other a tall dark Arab who flicked a long scarf to keep flies off his Imperial Majesty. In and out of the ranks, disturbing whom he chose, ran a mad man, bellowing hideously, foaming at the mouth. This, on the part of Abdul Aziz, was indeed humouring the prejudices of the people.

It is generally put down to the weakness of Abdul Aziz that Morocco has come to its present pass, and there is no doubt that had the youthful Sultan possessed a little more of firmness he would not have come now to be a mere dependent of the French. But Morocco has long been doomed. Even in the days of the former Sultan, who ruled the Moors as they understood and gave them a government the likes of which they say they wish they had to-day, the tribes were constantly at war with one another and with him. Continual rebellions in Morocco proper left Mulai Hassan no time to subdue the Berber tribes to the south, nominally his[158] subjects; and when in his age he set upon a long-projected pilgrimage to the birthplace of his dynasty, Tafilet, he could venture across the Atlas mountains only after emissaries had begged or bought from the Berbers the right of way.

The tragic death of Mulai Hassan while on the march, and the manner in which the throne was saved to Abdul Aziz, his favourite son, made graphic reading in the summer of 1894; and they will serve to-day to illustrate the sad, chaotic state of the whole poor Moorish empire. The old Sultan was not well when he returned from Tafilet, but serious disorders throughout the country allowed him to rest at Marakesh, his southern capital, only a few months. Proposing to move on to Rabat, thence to Fez, punishing lawless and rebellious tribes that had risen while he was away, he set out from Marakesh with an army composed of many hostile elements, conscripts kept together largely by their awe of him and hope of loot. They[159] came to but the first rebellious district, that of the Tedla tribes, when Mulai Hassan fell seriously ill and was unable to go on. But after several days the news was spread one morning that he had sufficiently recovered and would proceed. Only the viziers and a few slaves—who held their tongues to save their heads—knew that Mulai Hassan was dead.

For a day the body, seated within the royal palanquin, was borne along in state, preceded as usual by many banners, the line of spear-bearers, and the six led horses, and flanked by the bearer of the parasol and the black who flicks the silken scarf. Though speed was imperative the usual halts were made that no suspicion should arise. In the morning at ten o’clock, the Sultan’s usual breakfast time, the army stopped, a tent was pitched, and into it the palanquin was carried. Food was cooked and green tea brewed and taken in, to be brought out again as if they had been tasted. At night the royal band played[160] before the Sultan’s vast enclosure. But the secret was not to be kept long in a climate like that of Morocco in summer; and lest the corpse should tell its own tale, at the end of a long day’s march, as the army pitched its camp in the evening, the news went out, spreading like a wave through the company, that the Sultan was dead, and that Abdul Aziz was the Sultan, having been the choice of his father.

In an hour the camp split up into a hundred parties, each distrustful of some other. There was not a tribe but had some blood feud with another, and now the reason for the truce that had held hitherto was gone. Men of the same tribe banded together for defence and marched together at some distance from the others; conscripts from the neighbouring districts, or districts to the south, took their leave; private interests actuated now where awe and fear had held before. Soon the news got to the country, and the tribes through which the m’halla[161] passed began to cut off stragglers, to plunder where they could and drive off animals that strayed.

By forced marches the army at last arrived at Rabat, and those of the tribesmen who cared to halt pitched their camp on the hills outside the walls. Promptly that night the Sultan’s body, accompanied by a single shereef and surrounded by a small contingent of foot-soldiers, was passed into the town through a hole in the wall—a dead man, it is said, never going in through the gates—and was entombed, as is the custom with Sultans, in a mosque. In the morning, when the people bestirred themselves to see the entry of the dead Hassan, they saw instead the new Sultan, then sixteen years of age, led forth on his father’s great white horse, and, shading him, the crimson parasol marking his authority.

The secrecy that had been maintained was not intended only to keep the m’halla intact; primarily the object was to ensure the[162] succession of the youth then at Rabat, the nearest capital. Had the Maghzen been in the proximity of Fez or Marakesh, in spite of the Moorish law that passes on the succession to the Shereef of the dead man’s choice, Abdul Aziz might not have been the Sultan of Morocco. Uncles and rival brothers he had many, and high pretenders of other shereefian families might soon have risen. It was therefore important for the viziers themselves that the succession should come as a coup d’état, and that they should be on hand to support it with as much of the army as they could hold together.

There were, of course, many heads to be cut off, both politically and physically. Mulai Omar (a son of Hassan by a negro slave and therefore half-brother of Abdul Aziz) secured the acknowledgment of Aziz in the great mosques at Fez, where he held the authority of Khalif, but later behaved in a most suspicious manner. A black boy whom he sent to stop the bands from celebrating the[163] accession, being defied, drove his knife into a drum; and for this the hand that did the work was flayed and salted and the fingers bound together closed, until they grew fast to the palm and left the hand for ever a useless stump. Mulai Omar himself was made a royal prisoner, as was his brother Mulai Mohammed, Khalif of the southern capital (who has been released only within the past few weeks in order, it is reported, that he might take command of the army against Hafid, the trusted brother who became Khalif of Marakesh and governed there for many years, until recently, after the affair at Casablanca, when he essayed to become Sultan himself).

In the ranks of the viziers there was also trouble; Sid Akhmed ben Musa, the Hajib or Chamberlain, trusted of Hassan and also of the young Sultan’s mother, who possessed unusual power, became protector of Abdul Aziz; whereupon, for the safety of his own position if not from jealousy, Sid Akhmed[164] caused to be removed from office most of his fellow viziers, filling their places with his own brothers and men who would do his bidding. The dismissal of the fallen viziers was followed by their prompt arrest, and all their property was confiscated, not excepting their concubines and slaves. From a palace second only to that of the Sultan, the Grand Vizier, Haj Amaati (who had plundered the country in the most barbarous fashion and put his money in property, there being no banks), went to prison in a single shirt, and a mongrel beggar swapped caps with him as he was dragged bound through the streets.

Sid Akhmed ruled as dictator, suppressing wayward tribes by vigorous means, as well, probably, as anyone not a Sultan could, until the year 1900, when he died. The young Sultan, then being twenty-two, assumed alone the power of his office, to rule the country in a feeble, half-hearted way, his object, it would seem, more to entertain himself than to improve the condition of his passing empire.[165] Morocco needs a tyrant, for tyranny is the only law it knows; yet Abdul Aziz, raised to believe himself enlightened, and having no taste for brutality, has endeavoured to govern easily.

He was brought up by his mother, a Circassian of evident taste and refinement, much in the manner of a European child. Kept within her sight and shielded from immorality, he grew up pure and most unlike his many brothers. In all Morocco there was no company for him. In mind there was nothing in common between him and any of his household. Even his women, brought as presents from the corners of the country, some from Constantinople, had for him only temporary charm. It was natural that a young man of his temperament and education, trained to abhor the vices and the crimes to which the Moors are given over, should become more interested in Western things, and should seek to reform his country. But Abdul Aziz had been weakened as well as[166] preserved by his training, and when he came to authority it was without the determination and without the courage of his youth and of his race. In no sympathy with his Court or with his countrymen, it was natural for him to surround himself with men with whom he could be intimate, and the retinue that he acquired were Europeans, mostly Englishmen.

European things, which were to him as toys, began to fascinate him, and his purchase of them soon became a scandal in Morocco. Bicycles, motor-cars, cameras, phonographs, wireless telegraphs, and Western animals for his zoo, were ordered by the Sultan on hearing of them. An English billiard table was brought from the coast on a primitive wooden truck built specially, for it was too heavy to bring camel-back and there are no carts in Morocco. The Sultan could not go to Europe, but Europe could come to the Sultan. He heard of fireworks and gave a lavish order, engaging also a ‘master of[167] fireworks’ to conduct displays in his gardens. He bought a camera made of gold and engaged a photographer. Of course the Sultan’s extravagant purchases attracted to Fez many Europeans bent only on exploiting him. Hundreds of thousands he spent on jewels, which when deposited in the Bank of England brought for him a loan of about a tenth the original cost. He bought a motor-boat and kept it high and dry in his palace, though he employed a German engineer to run it. From the Krupp company, at a cost of many millions, he bought two heavy-calibre guns, as unmanageable to the Moors as white elephants to monkeys. Any agent for European arms could get an order from him, and his arsenal became a museum of European guns.

It was easy to swindle the Sultan. An American came to Fez to persuade him to send ‘a Moorish village’ to the Exposition at St Louis. Being unaccredited, the man could get no proper introduction from the[168] American Minister at Tangier, but by a clever ruse he saw the Sultan nevertheless. The American brought with him to Fez a bulldog with false teeth. Through some of his European entourage the Sultan heard of the dog and ordered it to be brought to him; but the dog could not go without its master, who obtained from the Sultan some 40,000l., spending, I am told, perhaps 2,000l. on the Moorish village.

While spending money in this fashion—which might in itself have made Morocco bankrupt—Abdul Aziz took no trouble to collect his taxes. To bring to order a tribe careless about paying them, it is often necessary for the Sultan to lead his forces in person. But Abdul Aziz after one or two campaigns left his army to the command of Ministers; and gradually his troops dwindled away, and, his moral force weakening, gradually, tribe by tribe, almost the entire country discontinued to pay taxes. At last only the garrison towns could be depended on for revenue.

[169]News of his European tendencies spread throughout the land. The influence of Kaid Maclean in the army was known and resented. Photographs of the Sultan had been seen by many of the Faithful. Finally, it was reported that he had become a Christian.

In 1902 a pretender, Bu Hamara, proclaimed himself Sultan, and established his claim to divine appointment by feats of legerdemain. According to a story current among Europeans, one of his ‘tricks,’ in gruesome keeping with the country’s cruelty, was the burying of a live slave with a reed for him to speak and breathe through. Bu Hamara by this means called a voice from the grave, and after he had called it, placed his foot upon the tube. When the grave was opened the slave was found really to be dead.

With Abdul Aziz things went from bad to worse, till, hopelessly bankrupt, with a[170] following of perhaps ten thousand men, mostly volunteers, he came to Rabat in September of last year, roused to this move when his brother Hafid was proclaimed at Marakesh. Since then Fez has also proclaimed Hafid, and the army that came with Aziz has dwindled away, until it numbers now hardly four thousand men. Besides these he has but the petty garrisons, who find it convenient to remain in the barracks of coast towns.

Abdul Aziz, now thirty years of age, is a pale-faced quadroon with a black, immature beard and a thin moustache. He is above medium height and well built, of a healthy though not athletic appearance. His manner in the presence of official visitors is seldom easy; his words are few and constrained. With private guests whom he knows, however, he is gay and often familiar. He speaks gently and slowly, I am told, occasionally placing his hand on one’s shoulder, and all who know him like him. He seems[171] anxious that things shall go well, but he is more a student than a man of action. He is vain of his enlightenment, of which he has a somewhat exalted opinion; and he is jealous of his prerogatives. He tells Europeans who visit him that his brother Hafid (who is almost black), was of course brought up differently from himself, that while possessing some good qualities, he is of course a man of little education, and that his head has been turned to declare himself Sultan. Abdul Aziz says he will not punish Hafid—when the rebellion is put down and he is captured—except to imprison him in some princely palace.

The historic empire of Morocco has to all intents come to an end. Whether the French or a combination of European Powers control hereafter, it remains that the once great empire has passed as an independent State. In name perhaps its independence will survive for many years; the Sultan Abdul Aziz may return to Fez and gain[172] again, with the aid of the French, the loyalty of the interior that is lost to him; and he may—he will, no doubt, he or another Sultan—continue to conduct negotiations with foreign countries. But his control of his own land will be hereafter as of a man on an allowance from the revenues that will go to his creditors, chiefly to France and Spain, and his dealings with other Powers must be for the future in obedience to dictation from those creditors.

As an empire with vassal States, Morocco has passed indeed these many years; as an independent country, it is to-day little more than an unproductive territory peopled sparsely with disunited tribes, acclaiming several Sultans, supporting none, warring hopelessly against invaders. Like Turkey-in-Europe, this backward State on the borders of civilisation has long been doomed. Abdul Aziz made some feeble attempts to graft upon it Western institutions; but the change can be wrought by Western forces only and with modern arms.

Not very many of the European residents of Morocco are fond of the French invaders. Even, in many instances, Frenchmen hate them. They condemn consistently the disorders that the armies of France—the Spanish are not very active—have brought to Morocco; and still more they lament the influx of other Europeans, generally, as they point out, of the worst sort; dishonest speculators, adventurers and ‘dive’ keepers, unfortunately the usual vanguard of Western civilisation. Frenchmen of the old days are wont to sentimentalise about the ‘Moghreb defiled’; Germans have no love for the soldiers of France; Englishmen resent the subordinate[174] position, which for three years they have been required to take.

In Eastern countries where Europeans are few, there is always intense rivalry and much bitter feeling between the races. In Morocco the great jealousy, until the signing of the Anglo-French agreement, was between the British and the French. For many years the agents of France and those of England, consuls as well as diplomatists, merchants, and even simple residents, had struggled against each other for trade, for social prestige, and for greater influence with the Sultan and the Moorish government. When the British Minister would go to Fez, the Frenchman was always prompt on his heels; nor did the former—though perhaps with more show of modesty—ever allow the Minister of France to get to his credit an extra visit or a larger present.

The intimacy between Kaid Maclean and the Sultan grievously annoyed the French, and they accused the Kaid of exploiting Abdul[175] Aziz. On the other hand, though the Kaid was in the employ of the Sultan, he was engaged also to act as agent of the British government at the Maghzen. In loans and contracts the conflict was generally more between the Germans and the French; and on these occasions scandals of rival bribery and of diplomatic influence being brought to bear in the interests of the rival bankers or contractors, as the case might be, were always rife. British Ministers do not often aid the subjects of the King in gathering private contracts, and British interest in Morocco has always been primarily political. British trade with Morocco, actual or potential, was never of any considerable importance—except to the British traders in the towns of the coast, to whom the rivalry of course extended, growing often more acute.

In 1904 all this was changed by a stroke of the pen. England and France came to an understanding, the one waiving claims in Egypt, the other withdrawing politically[176] from Morocco. The following year the German Emperor, who had not been consulted, volunteered an objection to the French scheme for policing certain coast cities and border towns and organising a Morocco State Bank. Intimidating the French—though Great Britain ‘agreed to support them in any attitude they should take,’ which meant, I am convinced, even to the extent of war with Germany—the Kaiser brought about a conference of the Powers, which came to be known by the name of the Spanish town at which it was held. The Algeciras Conference, after deliberating for months, finally in compromise decreed that France should be accompanied by Spain in her scheme, which was definitely limited.

The accord between France and England was a blow to British residents in Morocco. As long as they had been in the land they had held, in the fear and the regard of the Moors, the paramount position, and now that position was handed over to[177] their foremost rivals. They felt that they as Englishmen could not consistently change their attitude at the dictation of their Government at home—nor did they change except for the worse.

Their jealousy has now turned to enmity, which is often intense. In the smaller towns French and British consular agents are not on speaking terms and avoid each other in the streets. Englishmen are friendly with the Germans, upholding the anti-French policy of the German Government and decrying the ‘weakness’ of their own, all the while sympathising with the unfortunate Moor and his disintegrating empire. To the large towns new consuls have been sent out, generally from both France and England, and new Ministers have gone to Tangier, and this makes things easier in diplomatic circles, where the French policy is supported consistently. Otherwise the same old merchants and residents are there, both French and English, with the same old hates.

[178]How the Englishman rails against his Government! How he storms at the English Press! How he writes, in passionate language, in his Moghreb al Aksa, the little weekly English paper! I have in mind a thin, wiry little man, past middle age, who wears a helmet and dresses in a brown suit of tweeds. Having plenty of leisure he puts in much of his time writing for London papers; but they will have none of his spirited essays. So he prints them in the Moghreb. They are headed, ‘How Long Will England Close Her Eyes?’ ‘How Long Will the English Press Refuse to Print the Truth?’ ‘How Long Will the Patient Moor Refrain from Massacre?’—and such like. I suggested to him one evening as we sat with several other Europeans at a table at a new French café (it was not thoroughly consistent for the little man to patronise the place) that in all Morocco there were hardly enough Europeans to make a massacre, as massacres go in the East; were there fifty bonâ-fide Britishers in the land?

[179]Fifty or a million, he replied vehemently, they had been sold by the Government at home. What an absurd thing to do, to hold the high hand in Morocco and pass it over to the French for relinquishing some paper claim on Egypt! But what could be expected from a man like the Earl of Lansdowne, himself half French? It was no use pointing out that the British Government on this occasion had sacrificed a few British subjects for what appeared to be the good of the many; that British exports to Morocco had never amounted to more than two millions a year; that the potential value of the country is not promising; that the French are treaty-bound to keep the open door; that the cost to France in money, to say nothing of blood, may never be repaid with revenues or even with trade.

That the French will ever withdraw from Morocco is exceedingly doubtful, and this is a sore grievance to British residents, who long hoped that one day England might[180] control the country. Only a European war, or the serious danger of one that would defeat France, would cause her now to take leave. It is the custom of European Governments, when invading conquerable territory coveted by others, to protest the temporary character of their ‘mission’; and if other proof were needed of the intentions of France the very constant repetitions of the French Government that it will adhere to the Act of Algeciras would tend to rouse suspicion.

But there is reason for the French, indeed necessity for them, to control Morocco. Europe is too near Morocco for the country to be left to anarchy and ignorance and their consequences. Some European Power or Powers must represent Europe there, while the establishment of one other than France would be a constant menace to Algeria and would throw upon France the obligation of devoting to the expense of her colony a greater outlay than it would cost to conquer the Moorish Empire. France must remain[181] in Morocco; and the French—those soldiers and diplomatists whom I have seen and talked with, at any rate—welcome the opportunity that the Shawia tribes have given them, and make the most of it. The assurances of the French Government are of course only diplomatic. Assurances of a temporary occupation were vouchsafed when Tunis was invaded. Nor is it only France that follows this diplomacy.

It is for the reason that events threaten to make permanent a certain French occupation that a few Britishers would like to create a difference between France and Great Britain, to annul the Anglo-French agreement. For, should France be stopped—as she is likely to be without British support—it will mean that no country shall regulate Morocco and that another situation like that of the Turk in Europe will be established, to run on an untold term of years. This is what these partisans would like to bring about, because their hostility to the French,[182] beginning in trade and political rivalry, has become now one of sentimental sympathy with the Moors.

The case for Morocco is put by the Sultan Mulai Hafid himself in an appeal to the Powers of Europe presented to their Ministers at Tangier in February (1908). The argument has the Eastern fault of waiving rather than undermining the case for France, as, in one instance, where it speaks of peace with Europeans in provinces and cities where there are no foreign troops, a peace that obtains in the interior because the few European residents have left, and in the coast towns because of the lesson of Casablanca. In a ‘free rendering’ of the Arabic original, the correspondent of the Morning Post, R. L. N. Johnson, an authority on Morocco and the author of several literary books pertaining to the country, interprets this picturesque document as follows:—

‘In the name of the Most Merciful God, save from whom is neither device nor might.[183] (Here follow the royal seal, the name of the Foreign Minister addressed, and the customary salutations.)

‘On behalf of the people of Morocco, one and all, many of whom are actual sufferers from what has befallen their dwellings, their brethren, and their families, I lay before you my plaint.

‘What has been done to them is an offence against Treaties and common justice. He who demands his right has no pretext for needless, inhuman violence and brutality, nor is such action compatible with dealings between the nations. Nor is there wrong to any (Power) in our nation deposing its Monarch on reasonable grounds. He has proved his incapacity, he has neglected every interest of the State, and he has followed a line of conduct which would not be tolerated by the believers of any faith. I call your attention to the terrible calamity which has afflicted the people of Morocco, relying upon your well-known frank recognition of the truth. Thus you can hardly keep silence on what has happened and is happening in this country. From time immemorial your folk have lived among us, for trade and other purposes, without any object of filching our land, exactly as they would live in other friendly countries, and in the manner laid down in the Madrid Convention, which was[184] framed upon a knowledge of the conditions of life in Morocco.

‘It may be you have heard rumours of a declaration of war (Jehad). That declaration was made solely with the object of calming the exasperation of my people at the wholly unjust invasion of their land and the occupation of their soil. These invaders are to-day preventing our people from carrying on their everyday affairs according to our time-honoured customs. I was desirous of appointing Governors in Shawia who should be responsible to myself for the preservation of order, but obstacles [the French army—F.M.] were placed in my way, and to avoid a conflict which would have led to terrible bloodshed I abstained. My one desire is to restore tranquillity among my people, so as to bring back general welfare.

‘As to the army now occupying the Casablanca district on the pretext of pacifying it and protecting foreigners, this is my duty towards the whole of Morocco—that is to say, to protect both Moslems and Europeans in their lives and property. I ask nothing better than to follow the path of justice, that these troops may evacuate that land and leave it to its lawful owners. They have but to depart and no further trouble need be feared. But assuredly so long as they remain peace is impossible. You have watched this going on[185] for six months. Have you also watched the conditions of the other provinces and cities where no other intervention has taken place? Are not the people, yours and mine, living in peace and harmony? Absolutely nothing has occurred to hurt any person or place, nor, thank God, has any European been molested, despite all that our brethren have suffered. The wiser among the French nation recognise this, without being able to remedy the mischief done. As to those of lesser understanding who declare us to be anti-European, they speak falsely and without a shadow of reason. Our acts speak for themselves, and disprove the lies which have been thrown broadcast over the world. The wise know this, and that the authors of such calumnies are monsters rather than human.

‘As for the dethronement of Mulai Abdul Aziz, this was not only the will of the nation, but was done by the decision of the lawful court of Ulema, who judged him. Surely there is no crime in deposing a Sultan on the just ground that he is unfit to govern. It was done not long ago in Turkey. It has happened among the other Powers.

‘I now ask you to give me a faithful answer, and I will abide by the truth. On what principle of international law can there be armed intervention between a nation and[186] the monarch it has deposed? I wait for your reply in the firm belief that, on careful review of the situation, your answer cannot fail to reflect a bright lustre upon your judgment and justice.

‘In peace. This 24th Haeja, 1325.’

Europeans in Morocco are mostly sympathisers with Mulai Hafid; and their hopes for the success of his Holy War lead them often—no doubt unconsciously—to exaggerate the difficulties of the French and to enlarge upon the numbers of the tribesmen opposing them. Though Hafid declared that his purpose in proclaiming the Jehad was only to unite the tribes in support of him, he has been drawn by this proclamation into war with the French. The forces that have been recruited by his deception have either pressed him or have taken upon themselves to combat the French invasion; and their opposition would seem to make it impossible for the French to recognise Hafid as Sultan. For this would be tantamount to a defeat of the French in the minds of the[187] ignorant Moors. On the other hand Hafid’s position is now exceedingly difficult; for him it is either to fight or to surrender to his brother.

In leaving Morocco it would be picturesque to say with Pierre Loti: ‘Farewell, dark Moghreb, Empire of the Moors, mayst thou remain yet many years immured, impenetrable to the things that are new! Turn thy back upon Europe! Let thy sleep be the sleep of centuries, and so continue thine ancient dream! May Allah preserve to the Sultan his unsubdued territories and his waste places carpeted with flowers, there to do battle as did the Paladins in the old times, there to gather in his rebel heads! May Allah preserve to the Arab race its mystic dreams, its immutability scornful of all things, and its grey rags; may He preserve to the Moorish ruins their shrouds of whitewash, and to the mosques inviolable mystery!’

[188]But for my part there is no sentimental feeling for Morocco. That a government is old is no reason, for me, that it should be maintained. Because the Moors have always ridden horses, I see no reason why they should not ride in carriages or even in trains. In fact, I sympathise with the unfortunate beasts of burden and with the suffering Moors themselves. I was not affected, like the great French writer, more by the beauty and the romance of the country than by the horror and distress; and, instead of his fair sentiment, I say: Let in the French! For the Moghreb I should like to see a little less of crime, a little less of base corruption, a little less of ignorance and needless suffering, a little less of cruelty, a little less of bestial vice. The French can do some little for Morocco, and no other Power can go in. I say, Let in the French!

Yet a last word, to the French: You boast your knowledge of Mohammedans; do you know that the Moors dread you[189] for what they have heard from their fathers you did in the early days in Algeria? Nor have your methods about Casablanca reassured them. You have slain wantonly, even under General Drude. General d’Amade has penetrated the country time after time and accomplished ‘enormous slaughter.’ But for what purpose? This is all unnecessary. It would seem that your object has been to provoke further hostility, that you may have excuse to continue your occupation and to extend it. This is undoubtedly good politics; but rather unfair to the ignorant Moors, don’t you think? And is it good for your soldiers, Algerians or Europeans, to use them in this fashion?

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CHAPTER		PAGE
	Introduction	vii-ix
I.	Out of Gibraltar	1
II.	Nights on a Roof	12
III.	Dead Men and Dogs	30
IV.	With the Foreign Legion	38
V.	No Quarter	52
VI.	The Holy War	59
VII.	Forced Marches	71
VIII.	Tangier	79
IX.	Raisuli Protected by Great Britain	95
X.	Down the Coast	102
XI.	At Rabat	111
XII.	The Pirate City of Salli	129
XIII.	Many Wives	139
XIV.	God Save the Sultan!	147
XV.	Many Sultans	157
XVI.	The British in Morocco	173

A Saint House		Frontispiece

Tangier Through the Kasbah Gate		To face page 10

The French War Balloon	}	” 38
An Algerian Spahi	}	” 38

Arab Prisoners With a White Flag	}	” 60
A Column of the Foreign Legion	}	” 60

On the Citadel, Tangier		” 80

A Riff Tribesman	}	” 96
A Maghzen Soldier	}	” 96

The Castle at Laraiche		” 104

A Camp Outside the Walls of Rabat		” 126

Shawia Tribesmen		” 136

A Few of the Sultan’s Wives		” 144

Chained Neck To Neck: Recruits For the Sultan’s Army	}	” 154
Abdul Aziz Entering His Palace	}	” 154

A Princely Kaid	}	” 162
The Royal Band	}	” 162

Map of Morocco		” 188

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Passing of Morocco

THE PASSING OF MOROCCO

INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
OUT OF GIBRALTAR

CHAPTER II
NIGHTS ON A ROOF

CHAPTER III
DEAD MEN AND DOGS

CHAPTER IV
WITH THE FOREIGN LEGION

CHAPTER V
NO QUARTER

CHAPTER VI
THE HOLY WAR

‘A Sixteen-Hour Fight.

CHAPTER VII
FORCED MARCHES

CHAPTER VIII
TANGIER

CHAPTER IX
RAISULI PROTECTED BY GREAT BRITAIN

CHAPTER X
DOWN THE COAST

CHAPTER XI
AT RABAT

CHAPTER XII
THE PIRATE CITY OF SALLI

CHAPTER XIII
MANY WIVES

CHAPTER XIV
GOD SAVE THE SULTAN!

CHAPTER XV
MANY SULTANS

CHAPTER XVI
THE BRITISH IN MOROCCO

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Passing of Morocco

THE PASSING OF MOROCCO

INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I OUT OF GIBRALTAR

CHAPTER II NIGHTS ON A ROOF

CHAPTER III DEAD MEN AND DOGS

CHAPTER IV WITH THE FOREIGN LEGION

CHAPTER V NO QUARTER

CHAPTER VI THE HOLY WAR

‘A Sixteen-Hour Fight.

CHAPTER VII FORCED MARCHES

CHAPTER VIII TANGIER

CHAPTER IX RAISULI PROTECTED BY GREAT BRITAIN

CHAPTER X DOWN THE COAST

CHAPTER XI AT RABAT

CHAPTER XII THE PIRATE CITY OF SALLI

CHAPTER XIII MANY WIVES

CHAPTER XIV GOD SAVE THE SULTAN!

CHAPTER XV MANY SULTANS

CHAPTER XVI THE BRITISH IN MOROCCO

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

CHAPTER I
OUT OF GIBRALTAR

CHAPTER II
NIGHTS ON A ROOF

CHAPTER III
DEAD MEN AND DOGS

CHAPTER IV
WITH THE FOREIGN LEGION

CHAPTER V
NO QUARTER

CHAPTER VI
THE HOLY WAR

CHAPTER VII
FORCED MARCHES

CHAPTER VIII
TANGIER

CHAPTER IX
RAISULI PROTECTED BY GREAT BRITAIN

CHAPTER X
DOWN THE COAST

CHAPTER XI
AT RABAT

CHAPTER XII
THE PIRATE CITY OF SALLI

CHAPTER XIII
MANY WIVES

CHAPTER XIV
GOD SAVE THE SULTAN!

CHAPTER XV
MANY SULTANS

CHAPTER XVI
THE BRITISH IN MOROCCO