In Barbary

Half a hundred miles southwestward from Oran, set in the middle of a fertile plain which is traversed by the Mekerra and overshadowed by the escarpments of Mount Tessala, is Sidi-bel-Abbès. You will pronounce it as though it were spelled Sidi-bella-bess, with the accent on the second part, if you please. This fortified garrison town is France’s watch-dog, which guards the west, for it occupies a strategic position of great importance on the railway from Oran to Colomb-Béchar and within striking distance both of Morocco and of the desert. The town is surrounded by a moat and by a tremendous bastioned and crenelated wall pierced by four gates, named after Oran, Daia, Mascara, and Tlemcen respectively. Starting from the gates, two broad streets, shaded by plane-trees, traverse the town from east to west and from north to south, the latter thoroughfare forming a dividing line between the civil and the military quarters.

When we arrived, late in the afternoon, an excellent military band was playing in the Place Sadi Carnot, and just beyond, through the bars of great iron gates, we could see a huge three-story building of ocher-tinted plaster rising from beyond a vast parade-ground. At first glance it seemed as though the population of the place was wholly military, so crowded were the streets and squares with loitering soldiery—some in the dust-brown khaki of the tirailleurs, others swaggering along in the scarlet cloaks and enormous trousers of the spahi cavalry, but by far the greater number wearing quaint-looking képis with broad flat leather vizors, and rather slovenly-fitting but immaculately neat white uniforms with scarlet fourragères festooned from their left shoulders and broad blue sashes bound about their middles. Then I suddenly remembered that I had seen this uniform before—in Morocco and Madagascar, in the Sudan and Syria and far-off Indo-China. Yes, and on a score of European battle-fields, all the way from the North Sea to the Dardanelles, during the Great War. How could I have forgotten that Sidi-bel-Abbès is the headquarters and recruit depot of the Ier régiment étranger, one of the four regiments of that celebrated corps, composed of adventurous spirits of many nationalities, known as the Foreign Legion, perhaps the most famous military body, as it is certainly the most romantic and picturesque, in the world?

La Légion Etrangère! The very name is a trumpet-call which stirs the hearts and makes the feet of the young men restless. Ouida, in “Under Two Flags,” has drawn an imaginative but somewhat exaggerated picture of the experiences of a gentleman adventurer in the Legion during the early days of the occupation, but it has remained for Percival Christopher Wren, in “Beau Geste,” to portray the life of a légionnaire with a pen equally facile and colorful and far more convincing. Nor have most of us forgotten the gusto with which, as boys at school, we were wont to declaim the opening lines of “Bingen on the Rhine”:

The Foreign Legion is popularly believed to be made up of broken men who, impelled by misfortune, misdeeds, unrequited love, or any of the other mishaps of life, have left their own countries—sometimes quite suddenly, between two days, and for their countries’ good—and who have enlisted in the Legion in order to find forgetfulness in action, or to place themselves beyond the reach of the law, or because they did not know what else to do with their lives. They come from all the European nations, from the Levant, and even representatives of the two Americas may be found within their ranks, and there are among them men of gentle birth, upbringing, and education; but I imagine that a very large proportion of them are simply penniless and friendless men who see in the Legion an opportunity of keeping body and soul together and a possibility, however slim, of rising to a commission by some desperate deed of derring-do.

The Légion Etrangère is the most rigidly disciplined, the hardest worked, and the most miserably paid body of soldiery in the world. Upon enlistment a recruit can give whatever name he chooses and no questions will be asked, for the Legion is not interested in the antecedents of its bleus and makes no effort to ascertain their history or to penetrate such noms-de-guerre as they may choose to assume. The term of enlistment is for five years, for service in Algeria or in any other of the French possessions, and the pay is a sou a day, which, when the franc stood at par, meant that a légionnaire received the princely remuneration of eighteen dollars a year for his services to a grateful country. A légionnaire can reënlist at the end of five years, and again at the end of ten, while those who have spent fifteen years with the colors are eligible for a pension, which varies according to rank, though there are not many who live to receive it. A foreigner, on completion of five years’ service, is entitled to naturalization as a French citizen.

But, once the engagement volontaire has been signed, the recruit belongs to the Legion, body and soul, until his term of enlistment is completed. For a condemned murderer to escape from the death-house at Sing-Sing were scarcely more difficult than for a legionary to make good his escape. Neither wealth, nor political pull, nor social influence, not the pleadings of his relatives nor the intercession of his ambassador can effect his discharge. Homesickness, the deadly monotony of life in garrison towns and desert outposts, the systematic brutality of the non-commissioned officers—all these have led légionnaires to make desperate attempts to escape, but those who have succeeded in evading the long arm of French military law are pitifully few. Sometimes the emaciated fugitives are dragged back at the end of a rope tied to the saddle-bow of an Arab police goumier to face a term of servitude in the bataillons d’Afrique, the terrible convict corps of the French army; but more often their mutilated bodies are found in the desert, where they have perished from starvation, sunstroke, or Touareg spear.

Though the officers of the Legion are as fine as any in the French service, the non-coms, who enjoy a measure of despotic authority inconceivable in the American and British armies, are nearly always harsh and tyrannical and in some cases brutal beyond belief. The légionnaires have little time for idling. They are worked like galley-slaves from five in the morning until five in the afternoon, and though they are permitted a few hours of relaxation at nightfall, their evenings are usually occupied in cleaning their kit and accoutrements in preparation for the morrow. The route-marches to which they are subjected, under an African sun and over burning sands, loaded with the excessively heavy equipment of a legionary, which includes half of a shelter-tent, fire-wood, a blanket, an overcoat, a spare uniform, emergency rations, and in the pouches a hundred rounds of ammunition, are of appalling length, frequently averaging thirty miles a day. Small wonder that throughout the French army the Legion is known as the cavalerie à pied!

The mess of the Legion is the most cosmopolitan gathering on earth. At the long bare boards are seated men who between them speak half the languages of the world and represent every grade of society; men who have spent their lives amid the slums of great cities and others who have been accustomed to all that goes with evening-dress; men who have worn the shoulder-straps of the Prussian Guard and of the Household Cavalry, who have raised their glasses to the toasts of “Hoch der Kaiser!” and “The King, God bless him!” Here are men who have plunged on the wrong horse, who have been short in their mess-accounts, have been jilted by the girl they loved, have signed to a check a name that was not their own, or have held one ace too many. Some of them have known the inside of Schönbrunn and the Winter Palace, some the inside of Moabit and Dartmoor. Families and friends are waiting and watching for some of them; detectives are waiting and watching for others. Here too are professional soldiers—Germans, Poles, Russians, Belgians, Italians, Greeks, even Turks—to whom the end of the Great War meant the loss of their livelihoods.

In all those distant corners of the world where France is engaged in “little wars,” the Legion holds the place of honor—and of death!—on the line of battle. The tunics of its veterans bear ribbons showing that they have fought all the way from Tongking to Timbuktu, from the Niger to the Yser. During the Great War the legionaries, having no votes, were time after time sacrificed in last stands and forlorn hopes in order to save their enfranchised and, therefore, politically influential fellows of the home army. The appalling sacrifices which they thus made on the altar of their adopted country were rewarded by authorization to wear the scarlet fourragère of the Legion of Honor, the Legion being one of the very few units of the French Army to win this coveted distinction. Yet, despite its hardships and perils, or perhaps because of them, it is a real military school and offers the good soldier frequent chances of promotion, decoration, and glory. Some of the most famous soldiers of France have found their marshals’ batons in the knapsacks of the Legion, and most of the officers of the Legion have begun their careers in its ranks. I have in mind the case of one légionnaire, an undergraduate at Harvard, who enlisted in the Legion at the outbreak of the Great War and rose to a lieutenancy. After the Armistice the French government sent him back to Harvard to complete his education at its expense, with the promise that upon his graduation he could choose between retiring with a pension or accepting a captain’s commission.

The story of the French occupation of North Africa is largely the story of the Legion. During the last hundred years the legionaries have not only fought the Turks, the Arabs, the Kabyles, and the Moors, the Touaregs of the Sahara and the Berbers of the Riff, but throughout Algeria and Morocco they have built roads and railways, strung telegraph-wires, helped in the construction of towns, established outposts, sunk wells in the oases, drained, tilled, and planted agricultural districts, and policed a region twice the size of France. To the legionary might aptly be applied the lines of Kipling:

When history grants it the justice of perspective, France’s reclamation of North Africa will be recognized as one of the most remarkable achievements of our time, and that achievement has been very largely due to the patience, energy, and courage displayed by the soldiers of the Foreign Legion. So, as I stood on the parade-ground at Sidi-bel-Abbès and watched the bronzed battalions swing past at a quick-step to the lilting music of the Legion’s splendid band, I thought what a commentary it was on civilization that so large a share of the great task of redeeming the Dark Continent from blood, bondage, and barbarism—a task to which saints and martyrs, cardinals and emperors, great statesmen and great captains have devoted their lives—should have been borne by these friendless men, these soldiers of misfortune, for whom society has no use and whom it has abandoned to their fate.

Far to the west, beyond Sidi-bel-Abbès and barely two score miles from the frontier of Morocco, the holy city of Tlemcen looks down from the slopes of the Lella Setta Hills toward the shimmering Mediterranean, twenty-five hundred feet below and thirty miles away. Once a seat of empire and of learning, a place of such sanctity that it drew pilgrims from the uttermost corners of the Moslem world, it has sunk to the status of a third-rate provincial town, its inhabitants more concerned with cereals than ideals, more engrossed in the exportation of esparto grass and olive-oil than in the dissemination of religion and knowledge.

Pomaria, the Roman town which once occupied a site near the present city, was so named from the profusion of fruit-orchards in the neighborhood, and these still exist, the whole country-side being in the spring a sea of snowy blossoms. But here, as elsewhere, the invading Vandals justified the modern implication of their name by ruining the Roman town, and the Arabs destroyed what little the Vandals left. For the next six or seven hundred years the history of Tlemcen is little more than a recital of the various Berber dynasties by whom it was ruled and who gave to the city which they rebuilt its present name.

Tlemcen reached the peak of its fame and prosperity in the thirteenth century under the Abd-el-Wahid sultans, a dynasty of Zenata Berbers which ruled the greater part of what is now Algeria and claimed descent from Goliath, king of the Philistines. At this period the city boasted 125,000 inhabitants, a thriving trade, a brilliant court, and a powerful army. The Berber rulers encouraged the settlement of Christians and Jews, as many as five thousand of the former dwelling peacefully in the city, and the sultan Yarmorasen had a Christian body-guard. Here died, in 1494, Boabdil, the last king of Granada, while fighting for his kinsman, the sultan of Fez. But the roaring trade which the Tlemcenites carried on with Pisa, Genoa, Catalonia, and Provence was wrested from them upon the Spanish conquest of Oran, to which Tlemcen became tributary for a time. Early in the sixteenth century the town was held for a few months by the corsair chieftain Arouj Barbarossa, who, with his usual ferocity, sought to wipe out the ruling dynasty by causing twenty-two of the Zenata princes to be drowned in the sahrij, or pool, which was built by the Moors for naval exhibitions. But Arouj met his end in a skirmish with the Spaniards near Oujda and a few years later the town was captured by Salah Reis, pasha of Algiers, and under Turkish rule it rapidly declined in importance. In 1835 the Algerian leader, Abd-el-Kader, sought to reëstablish the ancient empire of Tlemcen, and, though he was forced to evacuate it upon the advance of General Clausel, it was restored to him by the Treaty of Tafna in 1837. Upon the renewal of the war in 1842, however, it was reoccupied by the French, and there they have remained ever since. Under their rule the Meshuar, or citadel, formerly the palace of the sultans of Tlemcen, was turned into barracks for the troops; the glorious mosque of Abul Hassan became a museum; the inevitable system of boulevards was constructed; and the city was encircled by a wall, for the three ancient lines of fortification had been in great part destroyed. On a little knoll, a short distance to the west of the town, the Transat has built a small but charming hotel in the Indian bungalow style, where, particularly in the spring, when the fruit-trees are in blossom, one can spend a few days most delightfully.

Though not so extensive, the Moorish monuments of Tlemcen rank in architectural merit with those of Granada, both having been built, it should be remembered, by the Almoravide and the Almohade sultans. Of the sixty-four mosques which existed in the city at the time of the French conquest, a number have disappeared or fallen into decay. Of those that remain the most important is the Great Mosque, the Djamaa-el-Kebir, which was not the creation of a single person, but grew, like so many of the Gothic cathedrals, during the reigns of several rulers. The greater part of the present structure, including the magnificent minaret, was erected by Yarmorasen, the great Berber monarch who reigned in Tlemcen in the sixth century after the Hegira, which, as every one knows, took place in the year 622 of the Christian era. The minaret, upward of a hundred feet in height, is adorned with marble columns and incased in superb mosaics; in the center of the alabaster-paved inner court stands a fountain of Algerian onyx, where the pious perform their ablutions before going in to prayer; and the arches of the interior, which is richly decorated in the arabesque style, is supported by a forest of columns—seventy-two in all, to save you counting them. The beautiful proportions of the arches and columns, the mellow colorings of the ancient tiles, and the dim religious light make the Djamaa-el-Kebir one of the most impressive places of worship in the world.

Close by is the mosque of Abul Hassan, built in 1298 and now transformed into a museum. The exterior has been materially altered by the French, who have so covered it with modern tiles as to suggest a hotel bath-room; but the interior, which has two series of arches resting on alabaster columns and a ceiling which bears traces of polychromatic paintings, is charming. The building’s greatest glory, however, is the mihrab, the holy of holies, the recessed shrine which indicates the direction of Mecca, and toward which, consequently, the worshipers turn in prayer. Floored with glazed and lustrous tiles of great antiquity, gloriously rich colorings and its walls decorated in stucco-work of arabesque designs as delicate as the finest lace, and roofed with a painted and gilt stalactite vault of amazing intricacy, it has been described as the finest example of Mohammedan art in existence, and it very probably is. The surpassing beauty and endless variety of the conventional patterns which are employed in the decoration of Mohammedan places of worship is due, it should be remembered, to the fact that the representation of nature in any form is absolutely forbidden by the Koran, a restriction which applies not only to depictions of the human figure, and to animals or birds, but even to plants and foliage of all kinds. The only exceptions to this rule are the highly conventionalized representations of lions in the courts of the Alhambra and over the gateways of Cairo and Jerusalem. I might add, parenthetically, that the mihrab, in a more or less conventionalized form, appears in the patterns of nearly all Oriental prayer-rugs, which are spread upon the ground so that the apex of the design points meticulously toward Mecca.

The status of Tlemcen as a holy city, which still draws pilgrims not only from North Africa but from all parts of the Moslem world, is due to its association with the highly venerated Moorish saint, Sidi Bou Medine, who was born at Seville in 1126, wandered through the Mediterranean lands effecting cures and performing reputed miracles, was summoned to Tlemcen to stand trial on a charge of heresy, and died within sight of its gates, expressing with his last breath the wish that he be buried there. So his faithful followers laid him to rest on a lovely hillside near the little hamlet of El Eubbad, a mile outside the city, and beside the koubba which covers his grave they raised a mosque of incomparable beauty, one of the finest specimens of Moorish architecture in the whole world of Islam. Its columns are of many-colored marbles, and stucco lace-work so delicate that it might have been made under a magnifying-glass covers the arches which spring upward to the roof. The lofty portals are incased with ancient Moorish tiles of the lost luster, and the cedar-wood doors, covered with an intricately interlaced pattern in bronze, are said to rival those designed by Ghiberti for the Baptistery in Florence.

A mile and a half to the west of Tlemcen, without the gate which looks toward Fez, are the extremely picturesque ruins of Mansoura, a mushroom city of amazing beauty, solidity, and grandeur, which was built almost overnight by the Emir Abou Yakoub, sultan of Fez, while engaged in the siege of Tlemcen. The siege lasted eight years, and the sultan, who was of a luxury-loving disposition, turned his camp into a walled city covering two hundred and fifty acres, complete with the palaces, mosques, baths, barracks, and other buildings of an imperial residence. He named it El Mansoura, “the victorious,” but in this he was somewhat premature, for he was eventually compelled to raise the siege, though Tlemcen was taken some years later by his successor, Ali V, the Black Sultan, whereupon Mansoura was abandoned for good and all. Besides the forty-foot walls, and the massive towers, and the minaret, which is more than six score feet in height and one of the finest in existence, but little remains of this all-of-a-sudden city which was born on a monarch’s whim. But such portions as are still standing are very beautiful. Mellowed by time and weather to a glorious shade of pinkish brown, they rise in lonely grandeur above the almond-orchards, which, in the springtime, turn the hill-slopes on which Mansoura sits into a sea of blossomed snow.

Before taking our departure from Tlemcen, courtesy and etiquette required me to pay a call on the military governor. I found his residence with some little difficulty—a modest, red brick villa with a Senegalese tirailleur pacing up and down before the gate. My ring was answered by a soldier servant, and I was shown into a comfortable reception-hall, from whose walls hung, to my astonishment, an enormous Harvard banner and the Stars and Stripes. As I was staring at them curiously, wondering how these familiar emblems happened to be so prominently displayed in the quarters of a French officer in this remote Algerian town, the commandant himself entered the room—a trim, alert, slenderly built man, the breast of his sky-blue uniform ablaze with ribbons and in his hand a copy of the “Literary Digest”! Then I recognized him as Colonel Paul Azan, the distinguished French officer, wounded at Verdun, who during the closing years of the World War served as instructor in military science at Harvard.

He pressed me into a great leather chair, offered me an excellent cigar, and proceeded to bombard me with questions, phrased in Back-Bay English, as to conditions and happenings in the United States. Here we were, gossiping like two friends of long standing of things four thousand miles away, our conversation constantly interspersed with allusions to Commonwealth Avenue, Copley Plaza, or College Yard, while the bayonet of the Senegalese sentry’s rifle constantly passed and repassed the window, and, beyond the olive-groves and almond-orchards of Mansoura, the distant Moroccan mountains rose in purple majesty against the African sky.

Azan, it developed, was at the moment occupied with the equipment and despatch of troops to reinforce the French armies mobilized along the borders of the Riff, where, if the reports of the French Intelligence Service were to be believed, the harkas of Abd-el-Krim were preparing for war. In fact, a column was leaving for the west by road that very day. It was composed, so Azan informed me, of complements of tirailleurs, spahis, chasseurs d’Afrique, infanterie coloniale, and a battalion of the Foreign Legion.

“Are there any Americans in the régiment étranger at present?” I inquired.

“Just now,” replied the commandant, “we have only one of your countrymen. But his is a most interesting case. Let me tell you about him. He comes from somewhere in your Middle West, and I gather that his parents are absurdly rich. In any event, they spoiled him by giving him far more money than was good for him. Shortly after graduation—he attended one of the big Eastern universities—he married a girl of excellent family and they went to Paris on their wedding trip.

“A few days after their arrival in la ville lumière he ran across a party of college friends. They decided that they must celebrate their reunion by making a night of it. They went to Montmartre. Having come from America, which is very dry, they decided to make Paris very wet. They succeeded so well that day was breaking when our young friend returned to his hotel completely—what do you call it?—soused. His bride of a week was waiting up for him. She was a young woman of strong character and not afraid to speak her mind.

“‘If that’s what you think about me,’ the husband said when her reproaches ceased for want of breath, ‘I won’t inflict myself on you any longer.’

“He was very proud and haughty, being still quite drunk, you see. So he marched out of the room and out of the hotel. And she was too proud and hurt to call him back; perhaps she didn’t take his threat very seriously. In the street he accosted the first agent de police he met and demanded the way to the nearest recruiting station. The gendarme, being a patriotic fellow and seeing in our husky young American fine material for the French army, bundled him into a taxi and told the chauffeur to drive him to the Bureau de Recrutement of the Légion Etrangère in the Rue St. Dominique. Our recruiting officers, particularly in Paris, are accustomed to strange applicants, and, as our young friend had no difficulty in passing the physical examination, he was promptly enlisted.

“A week later he arrived at the recruit depot of the Legion at Sidi-bel-Abbès, not far from here. He was still wearing his evening-clothes, though the shirt-front that had once been so immaculate was rumpled and grimy, and his clothes appeared to have been slept in, as they had. In short, he looked considerably the worse for wear. But a bath, a shave, a close hair-cut, a baggy white uniform with a broad blue sash ... and, behold, he was a full-fledged légionnaire!

“That was nearly a year ago,” continued the colonel. “Our gay young romantic still has a trifle over four years to serve. Regularly, the first of every month, he receives a letter from his wife, assuring him that she will be waiting for him when his term of service is completed, and inclosing a small sum for wine, tobacco, and similar luxuries. It is a hard life in the Legion, particularly for a man who has been spoiled by luxury, but his officers tell me that he is standing up well under it—‘making good,’ as you say in the States. When we are through with him I think it is safe to say that he will be a better man, a better citizen, and a better husband.”

Two days later, near Oujda, we overtook the régiment étranger on its way to the fighting in the Riff—a dusty column of iron-hard, sun-bronzed men, loaded like beasts of burden, their long overcoats buttoned back from their knees, their forage-caps pulled low over their eyes against the blinding sun-glare. As we passed they were roaring out the marching-song which the Legion sings only when it is bound for battle. I wondered if my young compatriot, of whom Azan had spoken, was among these adopted sons of Madame de la République.