Kitabı oku: «In the Land of Mosques & Minarets», sayfa 8
CHAPTER XII
SOLDIERS SAVAGE AND CIVILIZED – LÉGIONNAIRES AND SPAHIS
ALGERIA is guarded by an army of 60,000 men. But they keep the peace only, for there is no warfare in Algeria or Tunisia to-day. In the days of the Roman legions less than half that number of men fought for and held all North Africa. France recognizes that the development of a new country depends more upon the military than all else. The Spahis, the Chasseurs d’Afrique, and the Légionnaires have won most of France’s battles in Algeria; and for this reason these great colonial corps are given a high place in the military establishment.
When they have fought they have fought well, and when they have died they have died gloriously. The last “little affair” was in 1903, when a hundred Spahis and horsemen of the Legion were attacked at El-Moungar, near the Moroccan frontier. They fought like lions until reinforcements arrived, and but thirty odd remained alive. Among the Légionnaires who died were a Spanish captain and a German lieutenant, for the Légion Étrangère demands nothing of any who would enlist in its ranks but his name and an affirmative to the question – “Will you fight?” The survivors of this engagement all received the Médaille Coloniale and the Saharan Clasp.
Now a more important move in the military game is being played across the frontier in Morocco itself, and 12,000 of Algeria’s native soldiery is cast for the chief rôle. The soldiers of the Foreign Legion are of all nationalities under the sun. Some of them are scoundrels, no doubt, or were until military discipline made them brace up, but others are as refined as the gentleman and officer of convention.
We met many Italians, Swiss, Germans, and Irishmen, and the Germans were not Alsatians, either, but real Platt-deutsch, from Bremen. In more than one instance they had been drummed out of their own regiment for some disgrace and enlisted anew in France’s Légion Étrangère that they might begin life over again. The real soldier of fortune exists nowhere in so large a proportion as in this corps.
Certain of the French troops in Africa are not usually the flower of the army, often they are disciplinaires sent out from home. At any rate when you see one of them robbing a poor peanut merchant who solicited him to buy dis nois poeur uné sous, you are quite ready to believe he needs disciplining. The Arab under such circumstances gives the tou-tou a tongue-lashing, which for invective could hardly be equalled: “Infamous belly of a snake,” “Canaille,” “Sale yondi, where is your politeness,” “Ouf, I’ll ram another handful down your camel throat and charge you nothing, either – salop de cochon!” The Arab is fast becoming Frenchified, as the above will indicate.
The next minute the seller of cacaoettes– which is a prettier name for peanuts than we have – turns to you calmly and says humbly: “Pardon, Sidi, will you buy some nuts?” And you buy them, ten sous worth, which is enough money in hand to keep him for twenty-four hours, just because he is so good an actor.
The sixty odd thousand regular soldiery in Algeria are virtually military police and civil engineers. The Arab-Berber population are no more likely to revolt, though they did it successfully enough in 1871, when France thought she had them subdued; and so, as a sort of police precaution, France keeps a very active army on the spot. If a nation possesses a vast territory, it must be policed somehow, and this is the French idea of doing it, for in the above number are counted the gendarmerie or national police.
One romantic character stands out plainly in the history of Algeria in these later years, and that is Yusuf, the name of the ideal native soldier who was a prodigious figure of the early nineteenth century. His personality was most strange. Bearer of an Arab name, he was the personification of a chivalrous military heroism consecrated to a country not his own; and France, contrary to her usual procedure, has seemingly neglected his fame and that of his descendants.
It was to Yusuf, in effect, that was due the security of the environs of Algiers from the conquest of 1833 to the extinction of the revolt of 1871. From the first landing of General Bourmont, the deliverer of Algeria, Yusuf was employed in every possible capacity; and the ancient slave of the Turkish ruler and the favourite of the Bey of Tunis became the symbol of law and progress. His sabre was henceforth to be used for Christianity, and not on behalf of paganism and rapine. Yusuf at the head of his Spahis is a noble and imposing figure of the African portrait gallery. He is almost invariably young, splendid of form and fastidious and luxurious in his dress; a superb romantic dream of the Orient, but adaptable and capable of absorbing European ideas.
Authors, artists, and princes have attempted to idealize Yusuf, but the task was futile. Louis-Philippe, Louis Bonaparte, Alexandre Dumas, Gautier, Horace Vernet, Delacroix, and Bugeaud have sung his praises afar; but he remains to-day the unspoiled, faithful servant of a government and faith as foreign to his own as the red Indian is to the Parisian.
Homage! Frenchmen and Algerians, and all others who know and love the land which smiles so bravely under the African sun, to Yusuf the warrior, the diplomat, and chien fidèle!
The Spahis, or native soldiery, made up from the Yusufs of all Algeria, are in great repute with their European officers, whatever the bureaucrats of the Boulevard Saint Germain may think. To the former he has:
“La main toujours ouverte,
Le sabre toujours tiré,
Une seule parole,”
and he is obedient to his superiors. This is a good formula upon which to mould a soldier.
The Spahis and Turcos of Algeria fought for France, too, on the mainland, in that unhappy and unnecessary “woman’s war” with Germany in 1871. The Germans protested against the employment of these “savages;” but the precept was England’s when she enlisted the red man against the North American colonist in 1776, and then, too, she hired Hessians for the job (who were Germans) and according to the traditionary tales concerning those mercenaries, they came about as near being “savages” as anything which ever walked on two feet.
The “Chanson du Spahi” is a classic in the land. It recounts in dulcet French phrase the whole life of one of these noble native soldiery enlisted in the ranks of the French army organization.
It is a veritable Odyssey, commencing with: —
“J’é’tais jeune, le cadet dans la tente de mon père.
Le cadet de ses fils beaux comme des lions,”
and ending with: —
“Qui pleurera sur la tombe du soldat orphelin.”
The Spahi’s costume is fearfully and wonderfully made. It is gorgeous beyond that of any other soldiery; and yet it is most suitable for campaigning after the Spahi fashion. The waving burnous, the haïk, the broidered vest, the turban wound with camel’s-hair, red boots, and much gold braid make the Spahi dazzling to behold.
When it comes to the accoutrements of his horse the same thing is true. His saddle is a veritable seat, not a mere pad, and weighs ten times as much as a European saddle, his stirrups alone weighing as much. Instead of a single blanket, the Spahi trooper has a half a dozen variegated saddle-cloths, very spectacular, if not useful.
The barracks of the native soldiers in Algeria are bare, but with European fitments of iron bedsteads, etc. The religion of the Mussulman does not demand, nor indeed permit pictures or images of his God; and so, any substitute for the ikons of the Russian, and the crucifixes of the French soldier are absent.
In Algeria, besides the Spahis and the tirailleurs, each so picturesque whenever grouped with the North African landscape, there is a special field force of men from the south, pure Arab types, men of the desert, and scouts of the very first rank. All these military types are what is defined as native voluntary soldiery, the indigène not being subject to military conscription. Perhaps they are the better soldiers for this, since they adopt it voluntarily as a profession, but a discussion of the subject is not one of sufficient moment to take space here.
Each tribe of the south – whose civil administration, be it recalled, is in the hands of the native Sheik and the Cadi – is bound to furnish, at the need of the French government, whether for service within the limits of Algeria or out of it, a group of a certain proportionate size of able-bodied fighting men. These voluntary fighters of the open country, known as goums, are versed in many of the wiles of warfare of which the garrison-trained soldier is ignorant; and, upon a simple requisition, the chief of a tribe is bound to furnish his quota of these plainsmen. It is a duty owed to the French government for the protection and lawful status which it gives each individual tribe and its members; and this soldiery is not only voluntary, but serves, without salary, drawing only munitions of war and nourishment from the public war-chest, and furnishing even its own horses and guns.
The goum is a picturesque and original type of soldier. He rides a stocky Arabian horse, gaily caparisoned with a gaudy parti-coloured harness and saddle-cloth, and sits in a high-backed saddle, as if on a throne. His costume is fascinating, if crude, in the flowing lines of his burnous, his boots of bright red or yellow leather, and his great high-crowned straw hat, like no other form of head-gear on earth except the Mexican’s sombrero. He is proud of his occupation, and would rather fight than eat, at least one judges that this is the case in that he fights for France without pay.
The goums are a sort of savage soldiery, if you like to think of them as such, but they are not guerillas. Their efficacy in various little wars has been tried and tried again; and, recently, in Morocco, the first successful raids into the open country of the fanatical Moroccans were only made possible by the lances of a column of goums which only the day before had landed at Casablanca from the steamer from Oran. Regular soldiery has to get acclimated when fighting in a new and untried country, but the goum of the Sud-Algerien got down to business immediately in Morocco and gave the French a firm grasp on things, whilst the regular troops, also imported from the plains of Algeria, were getting used to the mountains, and the garrison troops of Tizi-Ouzou were trying to adapt themselves to the mode of life necessary for good health in a seaport town. The ways of most War Departments in moving troops about from one strategic point to another have ever been erratic, and that of the French is no exception. The goum of Algeria saved the day for France in Algeria, and perhaps by the time these lines are printed will have added another gem to the colonial diadem of France. If not so soon, why later on.
There is a current story in military circles in Algeria concerning the gift of an Arab chief to a French general commanding a division. It was not gold or jewels or goods of any kind, but a simple, secret admonition: “Never trust an Arab – not even me.” With variations this may be true enough, but the average traveller among these now loyal French citizens will have no cause to regret any little confidences he may commit to a friendly Arab or Berber; though, of the two, the latter being certainly the more faithful.
The railway, the telegraph, and the military have developed Algeria to what it is to-day. The Arab originally did not love the French, indeed he had no cause to, for they came and overran his country and put down abuses which he did not wish to have put down; but he has become philosophical, and has recognized that the iron horse forms a better means of transport than his mules and camels for the stuffs and goods of his trade and barter. He is commercial enough to want to do more business and make more money, so he tolerates the French; and, since his first experiences with the new order of things, he has prospered beyond his wildest dreams. That has civilized and subdued the Arab in French Africa. It would subdue any savage.
The fantasia is the classic diversion and showing-off pace of Algeria’s Spahi cavalry. No great function, local or otherwise, is complete without a fantasia, and here the Spahi is at his uncontrolled best. He rides dashingly around the field of the manœuvres, slashing with his sword at a leathern dummy of a man or a wooden ball on the top of a post, or with his stocky carbine shoots from the saddle, leaps hurdles, or throws his firearm high in the air and catches it again on its fall. All the time his charger is rushing about wildly and without method. The whole is a veritable military orgie of target-shooting, steeplechasing, marching and countermarching, and all with as picturesque a personnel and costuming as a circus.
It is mimic savage warfare uncontrolled, and far more real and warlike than the goose-step evolutions of European armies. The fantasia is a spontaneous, every-man-on-his-own sort of an affair. The smell of gunpowder is in the air, and no Wild West or Cossack horseman ever gave half so vivid an example of agility as does a Spahi or a goum on his African jour de fête.
CHAPTER XIII
FROM ORAN TO THE MOROCCO FRONTIER
THE western gateway to French Africa is through Oran, which, with its 88,000 inhabitants, is the second city of Algeria. Its chief attraction for the tourist who has seen, or is about to see, the rest of the country is its magnificent site and the recollection of the momentous history of its past.
The most striking characteristic of its life and manners is the manifest Spanish influence which is over all, a relic of days gone by. Even the chief city gate, the Porte d’Espagne, still bears the ornamental escutcheons of the old Madrillenian governors; and, three kilometres distant from the centre of the town, are the celebrated “Bains de la Reine,” a remembrance of the epoch when Jeanne, “La Folle,” daughter of Ferdinand the Catholic and Isabella, the mother of Charles V, took the baths there in state, “in company with a brilliant cortège of knights and ladies.” Bathing was more of a public ceremony then than now, evidently.
One aspect of the life at Oran which one does not remark elsewhere is the numbers of Moroccans who slowly amble up and down, doing nothing, and living apparently in some mysterious fashion. The Moroccan of to-day is the typical Berber of our imagination, swarthy, lithe, and scraggy-bearded. He is not lovely to look upon, but he is picturesque.
One of the chief sights to be noted in the markets of Oran is the fruit market; and the principal article of commerce is the grenadine, a historic and classic fruit, and the one the most in favour with the Arab or Berber of simple tastes. It is not without reason that he chooses this delicious fruit; for it is food and drink in one. D’Annunzio called the grenadine an “écrin en cuir vermeil, surmonté de la couronne d’un roi donateur,” and the description is faithful and poetic enough for any man. The Arab toubibs, or doctors, believe it to be an efficacious remedy for all ills, and that its seed originally descended from the skies, a gift from Heaven to struggling humanity. It is certainly very beneficent as a remedy for tropical fevers.
One will strain his eyes trying to hunt out more than a few of the vestiges of the old Oran of the Spaniards. The French have very nearly wiped them out. It was a great port in the days of the Romans, and between that time and the Spanish occupation it had a long history. The Mohammedans founded a town here a thousand years ago; and, about the time Columbus was sailing around the West Indian island trying to find a new way to the Orient, a Spanish author wrote that Oran had six thousand houses, a hundred and forty mosques, and schools and colleges equal to those of Cordova, Granada and Seville. It was sometime after this that Oran became Spanish, and in turn it reverted to the banished Moors, to become French in 1831.
Oran’s evolution from Spanish to French is interesting. It was once a penal colony of Spain, where from seven to ten thousand wicked unfortunates sweltered under an African sun, laying the foundations of the present fortifications. The memory of this Spanish occupation is everywhere, but it is a memory only and is continually growing more vague. The soldiers of Islam captured Costechica from the Spaniards, and the French came in turn and took it and called it Oran.
Oran, like the rest of the North African coast cities and towns, is polyglot in its people and its architecture. The Orient rubs shoulders with the Far West, and the mingling is more astonishing and picturesque than delightful. A red fez, an alpaca coat, and white duck trousers is a bizarre effect, so is a bowler hat and a burnous. Joseph’s coat of many colours was not more gaudy than that of many a Berber or Arab one sees to-day in Oran. The Sultans of other days have given way to an army Commandant, who, if he is a more practical person, is usually a less artistic one, and his influence is reflected in all his surroundings.
The two religious monuments of Oran are celebrated throughout all Algeria. The cathedral of St. Louis is a stronghold of the Christian church and an imposing, if not a very elegant, structure; whilst the Grande Mosquée, with the most remarkable and quaint octagonal minaret in all Algeria, was built by a former pacha of Algiers with the money coming from the sale of Christian slaves. These two edifices well illustrate two opposing points of view, but they are both religious monuments.
If you can stand a mountain climb from Oran, go up the slope of Mount Mourdjadja, and have what a German authority has discovered to be the most impressive view in the world. The distance is but a few kilometres and the means of communication is shanks’ mare. Majorca and Almeria on the coast of Spain may, it is said, be seen on a fine day. We have our doubts! The climb is the classic, conventional thing to do, however, if time permits.
Oran, like Algiers, Bona, and Philippeville, has become Europeanized, Frenchified. Four-fifths of its population is native, but ask a Frenchman and he will tell you: “Il n’y a rien d’exotique, c’est Paris.” This shows that the Frenchman frequents the French part of the town, and knows little of the hidden charm which exists on the fringe. He knows the Arab as an inferior menial, or a possible customer for his goods, but he knows nothing of his life, and cares less.
The chief reason for coming to Oran at all is that it is the most convenient starting-point for Tlemcen. Tlemcen, lying well over to the Moroccan frontier, but linked with Oran by railway, is, in its plan and manner of life, the most original city in North Africa, the most captivating, and the least spoiled by modern innovations. It was the Pomaria of the Romans and enjoys to-day the same admirable belt of wooded shade that it did in those far-off days.
Tlemcen under Arab rule was sovereign of all the Moghreb, one of the great capitals of the Khalifs, the rival of Granada, Kairouan, Damascus, Cairo, and Bagdad.
Above its rocky-red substructure the walls and minarets of Tlemcen still pierce the azure sky, but no longer do the Sultans rule its people. A wild, untamed, savage soldiery has given place to French civil and military rule, and everybody is the more happy therefore. The Méchouar, the ancient palace of the Sultans, is an abandoned ruin, and the caserne of the Spahis and the Chasseurs d’Afrique now stand for a superior variety of law and order. The architecture of the Moors is at its very best at Tlemcen, even the fragmentary dilapidated remains in hidden-away corners are often the rival of the gems of the Alhambra itself.
Tlemcen is the most splendid and gracious artists’ paradise in Algeria. A roving Frenchman whom we met at Algiers, and who painted better than he versified, wrote the following for us on the back of his card which he gave us as an introduction to the patron of the Hotel de France at Tlemcen.
“Il n’est pas une cité
Qui dispute, sans folie,
A Tlemcen la jolie
La pomme de la beauté
Et qui gracieuse étale
Plus de pompe orientale
Sous un ciel plus enchanté.”
To-day at Tlemcen, more than in any other place in Algeria, one sees vestiges of the Moorish art and civilization of the days before the conquest, sculpturings in wall and gate, and tiny cupolas and minarets of a period greatly anterior to most others of their class. The fragmentary remains of Tlemcen’s sixty mosques existing in the sixteenth century spring into view here and there, at each turning, in bewildering fashion. Tlemcen is in its decadence however, for from a city of 125,000 souls it has dried up to one of 30,000, of which perhaps a tenth part are European.
Tlemcen has many mosques, of which three must be noted as having been “viewed and remarked,” as the antiquarians put it. The Grande Mosquée is the least grand, but it has a fine tower; the smallest mosque, that of Djama l’Hassen, is the most beautiful, and the best example of genuine Moorish architecture and decoration; the Mosque of El Haloui is the most daintily ornamented and most charming. The others dwindle down to ruined nothingness. Out of fifty-seven other minor mosques, most have been converted into cafés, shops, dwellings and sheep-folds, some are in ruins and some have disappeared entirely, but it is these unexpected fragments of a one-time splendour that makes the charm and value of Tlemcen for the artist.
The native life of Tlemcen is another great feature for the stranger, and a caravan of savage-looking creatures from Morocco is no unusual sight on a market day. How the late “disturbances” in Morocco are going to affect the interstate traffic remains to be seen. Probably the interstate part of it will be wiped out, and France will absorb it all, as she ought to do, whatever England and Germany may think. France has made a success in governing Mohammedans; the others have not. Jews, Ethiopians, and Arabs all people Tlemcen. That is what makes it so interesting to-day, and the types seem to be purer than elsewhere.
In the third century Tlemcen underwent a formidable siege at the hand of a Soudanese and his followers. The assailants were as tenacious as the defenders, and many times were obliged to retreat. It was one of the remarkable sieges of history. The would-be invaders built houses to replace their tents which were no protection against the rude climate they were forced to undergo for a protracted period, as did the Spaniards of Santa Fé under the walls of Granada. Less fortunate than Ferdinand and Isabella, the enemies of the Khalifas of Tlemcen were obliged to retreat, abandoning their fortifications on the height, which the besieged, however, disdained to occupy. It is thus that the fortifications of Mansourah have remained unoccupied for six hundred years, an ignoble monument to a campaign that failed.
The countryside roundabout is fresh and thickly grown with a subtropical African flora, but the snows of a rigorous winter – which occasionally rest on the hillsides for weeks at a time – give a weird, contrasting effect hard to reconcile with the topographical and architectural features of the landscape. The sight of Mansourah under a snowy blanket is one of the surprises which one, who twenty-four hours before left the vine-clad hillsides of Médea and the plains of orange groves neighbouring upon Blida, will never forget.
The legend of the Mosque of Mansourah is a classic among the Arabs who inhabit the mountain city of Tlemcen. A negro king of the Soudan, who himself as well as his followers were Mussulmans, invaded the region beyond the Atlas and laid siege to Tlemcen. So long and well-sustained was the siege that the invading army sought to build a mosque in their midst. A sort of competition was held, and the winners were a Jew and an Arab. The Soudanese king was at first embarrassed, and then enlightened by a happy idea which church-building committees might well adopt. He commissioned the Arab to proceed with the construction of the interior of the mosque, the Jew to be responsible for the exterior. A wonderful struggle took place, in which all the arts and ingenuities of the two races were brought to play, and which resulted in one of the most splendid of all Arab mosques.
The warrior king was highly pleased, and, calling the builders before him, said, frankly, that he had no words to express his satisfaction, nor ideas as to how they might be recompensed. The thing dragged for a time, as payment of architects’ bills has ever done; and partisanship so got the influence of the better instincts of the king that, while he gave the faithful Mussulman builder many purses filled with gold, he condemned the “dog of an infidel Jew” to be imprisoned in the upper gallery of the minaret, for having dared to even penetrate the holy edifice. It never occurred to the dusky monarch that the procedure was defiling the shrine still more.
“Escape if you can,” the Jew was told, as he was conducted to his prison. He did escape, after a fashion, so says the legend; for he made himself a pair of wings out of reeds and silks and cords; and, just as the blood-red sun plumped down behind the mountains of the Atlas, he launched himself in air. Like most flying-machine experimenters before and since, however, the daring innovator came forthwith to grief, falling precipitately at the base of the structure and smashing his skull.
He died almost instantly, but before he expired he uttered a final imprecation; the earth trembled, the thunder rolled, and the lightning blasted the minaret, which fell, as it may be seen to-day, lying almost en bloc, at full length, on the ground.
The same legend has its counterpart, with variations, in other lands, but it is as likely to be true of the Mosque of Mansourah as of the Cathedral of Orgis in Roumania, or at Cologne, in Crete or in Scandinavia. Legend was spread broadcast, even in the dark ages, by a system of “wireless” which has not yet been improved upon.
Beyond Tlemcen the nearest Algerian settlement of size to the Moroccan frontier is Lalla-Marnia, twenty-four kilometres only from the centre of the late insurrection at Oudjda, now occupied by the French. The name of this advanced post comes from that of a sainted woman buried in a tiny kouba near the military camp. The place was always a strategic point, and formed the military frontier post of a band of Syrian invaders, who gave it originally the name of Numerus Syrorum.
Lalla-Marnia and Oudjda, one on Algerian soil and the other in Moroccan territory, separated by twenty-five kilometres of sandy roadway, bear each other a sisterly resemblance. The fêtes of Lalla-Marnia, with fantasias and horse-races and a savage feasting of the natives, are followed by their counterpart at Oudjda a week later. Needless to say the fêtes are as yet unspoiled by non-contemporary interpolations.
North from Lalla-Marnia is the little townlet of Nédroma, whose clannish inhabitants are one and all descended from the Moors of Andalusia. The type here is the purest in North
Africa, and the custom which binds them together, presumably as a totem or prevention against marrying with outsiders, is most curious. Each head of a family guards preciously the key of the paternal house in Spain, the same with which his ancestors locked their doors when they fled at the time of the expulsion of their race from the peninsula. Every one of the Moors of Nédroma expects some day, when the great bell sounds the tocsin of revenge, to return and take up life anew in Andalusia.
Away to the south of Tlemcen, or from Perrégaux, if one follows the railway, runs the road to far Sahara of the Sud-Oranais. Ain-Séfra, Beni-Ounif and Figuig are not even names known to the average outsider, albeit they have already achieved a certain prominence among geographers. Here the habitants, their manner of living, and their architecture take on a complexion quite different from anything known among the tribes of the north. All is blended with a savage crudeness which is alike exotic and picturesque. The Moorish mosques of the north give way to a severe Arab manner of building which is formidable and massive in outline and grim throughout. Mud, baked mud of a dingy red, packed together with straw and propped and bolstered here and there with the trunks of the palm-tree, are the chief characteristics of the Saharan Arab’s place of worship and of his dwelling as well. The contrasting descent from the beauties of the Mauresque variety is astonishing.
Throughout the Sud-Oranais civilization of the European brand is fast spreading; the railway and the telegraph have reached Figuig and beyond, and absinthe – of a particularly forceful brew – can be had in the cafés, also Swedish matches (made in Belgium) and clay pipes (from Holland). Not long since all was a desert waste, but the “Légionnaires,” that mixed crew of nation-builders propagated by the French military authorities, went down into the interior and traced roads and built fortifications until this anonymous work came to be succeeded by that of merchants and traders of all creeds.
One finds the “kif” shops at every little village en route, often where he will not even find a “café maure.” Frequently in the towns these dens are relegated to a site without the walls, but they huddle as closely to the centre of affairs as the authorities will allow.
Architecturally and artistically they are but vile, unlovely holes, lighted usually by a single œil hanging from the middle rafters. Most likely this œil is a fifty-cent barn lantern, made after the real Connecticut pattern, probably in Belgium or Germany. The oil that it burns is not even American; the “Standard” here in the Mediterranean is often Russian – put up in American tins. However, now that King Leopold of Belgium has gone into partnership with “Standard” representatives in the rubber business of the Congo, it’s only fair to suppose there may be a Rockefeller interest in the Russian oil trade.
