Though France’s active rôle in the Riff was brought to an end in the spring of 1926 by the submission of the Riffian chieftain, Abd-el-Krim, the events which have been occurring in that portion of Morocco during recent years are of such deep political significance, and so thickly sown with the seeds of future trouble, as to require more than perfunctory mention.

Spain’s interests in northern Morocco are of long standing. Her first foothold on the African mainland was secured at Melilla, seven score miles to the east of Gibraltar, which she seized from the Moors two years before Columbus set sail for the west. In 1580, upon the subjugation of Portugal by Philip II, Spain obtained possession of Ceuta, the immensely strong fortress city which crowns the rocky promontory marking the eastern end of the Strait of Gibraltar, the two great rocks being known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules. Larache, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, was held by the Spaniards throughout the greater part of the seventeenth century. (Incidentally, tradition identifies Larache—El Araish, the natives call it—with the Garden of the Hesperides, ’Arasi being the Arabic for “pleasure-gardens,” and the “golden apples” being perhaps the oranges for which the place has long been famous.) In 1860, Spain seized Tetuan, an important town near the mouth of the Wadi Martil, forty miles southeast of Tangier. Between Tetuan and Melilla a Spanish fortress crowns one of the islands, occupied in 1673, in the fine semicircular Bay of Alhucemas, which forms the seaward end of one of the most beautiful valleys in the Riff, and within recent years the Spaniards have also appropriated the group of dry and barren islands known as the Zaffarines, or Saffron Islands, off the eastern extremity of the Spanish zone, by the seizure of which the French were cleverly forestalled. Most of these Spanish holdings are utterly worthless, Ceuta and Melilla alone being worthy of consideration.

As the years passed considerable numbers of Spaniards, not of the best sort, settled themselves along this littoral, where they have drifted into a semi-Oriental habit of mind and body, living more like natives than like Europeans. Yet they claim Spanish protection, either as subjects or protégés, and it is the existence of this utterly worthless element on Moroccan soil, plus certain mining concessions which Spaniards have obtained from local chiefs, which have provided the government at Madrid with a pretext for intervening in Morocco.

But, despite her alleged “interests,” despite the fact that she has held Melilla for upward of four centuries, Spain has never succeeded in pushing her effective rule more than a few miles in from the coast, for, looming like a purple storm-cloud above the narrow strip of littoral, rise the mighty mountains of the Riff. During the last century Spain made repeated attempts to conquer this savage region, and to impose her rule on its warlike and independence-loving inhabitants, but always without success. In 1922, however, the Spaniards made a real effort to occupy effectively the zone which had been allotted to them, an army of fifty thousand men being sent to Morocco for the purpose.

To resist the invaders there now arose in the Riff a very remarkable man, a tribal chieftain by the name of Abd-el-Krim. Incensed by the cruelty, corruption, injustice, and glaring inefficiency which had characterized Spanish rule along the coast, he raised the standard of revolt and called upon the people of the Riff to drive the Spaniards out of the country altogether. Though Spain replied by pouring troops across the Straits by the tens of thousands, her military record in Morocco for the next three years was one of almost uninterrupted defeat, retreat, disaster, and shame. Not only did a mere handful of Riffi succeed in resisting all the forces that the government at Madrid could bring against them, but they steadily drove the invaders toward the sea, until, by the summer of 1925, the Spaniards occupied only a few of the coast towns and fortresses, clinging to these only with the aid of their fleet.

That Abd-el-Krim was more than justified in his revolt no fair-minded person who is conversant with the facts can truthfully deny, for the Spaniards had been guilty in Morocco of exactly the same cruelties and excesses which had caused them to be driven out of South America at the beginning of the nineteenth century and out of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines at its close. Had Abd-el-Krim been content to confine his operations to the Spanish zone, Spain might be without a foot of Moroccan territory, and he might be sultan of the Riff to-day.

But, elated by his comparatively easy successes over the Spaniards, he proceeded to turn his attention toward the south, where the French had pushed their outposts into the fertile valley of the Ouergha, a region on which the Riffian leader depended for his supplies. Whether the French were responsible for precipitating the conflict which ensued by entering the Riff, or whether the Riffi first invaded territory under French protection, is open to some question. In any event, the spring of 1924 found the warriors of Abd-el-Krim formed in two lines of battle, one facing the Spaniards on the north, the other confronting the French on the south. For many months the tide of battle ran in favor of the Riffi, for the Spaniards were discouraged by disasters at the front and by political disorders at home; while the French, who had vastly underestimated the strength of their enemy, were slow in bringing up sufficient men and guns.

Although, by the summer of 1925, the French and Spaniards had in the field between them a force which probably exceeded half a million men, under forty generals, two marshals of France, Lyautey and Pétain, and the Spanish dictator, Primo de Rivera, the outcome of the campaign, which had all but bankrupted Spain and was said to be costing France a million dollars a day, was by no means certain. In fact, so eager was France for encouragement, if not for reinforcement, that she accepted the services of a group of young American aviators who during the Great War had served with distinction in the Lafayette Escadrille. As the laws of France do not permit the enlistment of foreigners in any branch of her army save the Foreign Legion, the difficulty was solved by forming the American volunteers into a unit known as the Shereefian Air Guard and having them take service under the sultan of Morocco, against whose authority, as nominal sovereign of the whole empire, the Riffi were technically in rebellion. That these young Americans, in their thirst for excitement and adventure, should have seen fit to take service under an African ruler is surprising enough, but that they should have bombed and raked with machine-gun fire the defenseless villages of a people with whom they had no quarrel, a people who were fighting for independence, is incomprehensible to those who had been the first to applaud their achievements in the air during the Great War. They claimed to be fighting for France, yet France, with one of the most powerful air forces in the world, did not need them. In effect, then, they were fighting to perpetuate the rule in the Riff of Spain, a country whom the preceding generation of Americans had driven from her last foothold in the New World because her tyranny and cruelty stank in the nostrils of decent men.

By the late winter of 1926 France and Spain, by a lavish expenditure of their resources, had enveloped the Riff in a wall of steel, employing every device of scientific warfare against the embattled tribesmen. Even the Riffi recognized that further resistance was futile; the tribal chieftains, either bought up by French and Spanish gold or to save their skins, began to fall away from Abd-el-Krim, and before spring had turned to summer that gallant fighter came riding astride a mule into the French lines. The authority of his Shereefian Majesty the Prince of True Believers had been upheld; the tyranny of Spain in the Riff had been perpetuated; and France had won what the newspapers of Paris proclaimed une victoire glorieuse. But I imagine that those who viewed it, as I did, at close range and through glasses unclouded by rancor or propaganda, thought it a rather sorry triumph.

Could France acquire the Riff from Spain—as there is no question that she would like to do—and extend over that region the just and beneficent rule which she has given to her own protectorate in Morocco, there is no doubt that it would be the best thing for every one concerned, the Riffi themselves included. And there is good reason to believe that at one period of the conflict, when the gloom of discouragement and threatened bankruptcy hung like a cloud over Spain, some such solution was under serious consideration by the Madrid government. But it was here that England stepped in. To France’s present position in Morocco Great Britain has no objection; indeed, she made it possible through the pacts she signed in London and at Algeciras. But to a French Morocco which came down to the shores of the Mediterranean, particularly to a French Morocco which included the great fortress at Ceuta, the statesmen of Downing Street have the most unalterable objections. Ceuta, as you will see by glancing at the map, is vis-à-vis to Gibraltar. And Gibraltar, because of recent developments in warfare—particularly the airplane, the submarine, poison gas, and long-range guns—is no longer so impregnable as the British War Office and the Prudential Insurance Company would like the world to suppose. Situated on a peninsula, with Spain at its back, it is cut off from reinforcements save by sea, and it lacks, moreover, a suitable terrain for the effective use of airplanes. Ceuta, which is naturally even stronger than the Rock, and which could be made absolutely impregnable by military engineers, is on the mainland, with all of Africa from which to draw supplies and reinforcements, and it possesses the other military facilities which its great British rival lacks. In the hands of Spain, a second-rate power with few colonial ambitions and no navy worthy of the name, Ceuta is not the slightest menace to Britain. But let it pass into the possession of France, let it be fortified and armed by French engineers, let strategic railways be brought up to its back door and its harbor converted into a hornets’ nest of submarines ... well, as the English will tell you, that is quite a different matter. England has no objection to French colonial schemes in Africa so long as they do not conflict with her own. But her possession of Gibraltar and the Canal has made her mistress of the Mediterranean—and mistress of the Mediterranean she intends to remain.

The fall of Abd-el-Krim—now an exile in the island of Réunion—gave birth to the hope, if not the belief, that Morocco would no longer remain a potential menace to the peace of Europe; but during the summer of 1926 there thrust himself upon the stage of North African affairs a new and highly disturbing figure in the person of the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. Now the fact must not be lost sight of that Italy has never forgiven France for forestalling her in Tunisia, with its eighty thousand Italian inhabitants, nor for the fashion in which Italy has been systematically ignored in the settlement of questions pertaining to Northwest Africa. That Italy now purposes seriously to challenge French dominance of the Mediterranean there can be but little doubt, for in the air she is immensely stronger than her rival, she is very nearly as strong upon the sea, and though she is weaker in land forces, she is in better financial condition, and she has, moreover, recently strengthened her position by effecting with Spain an understanding which, in the opinion of competent observers, is not far removed from an offensive and defensive alliance.

France could probably successfully defy Italy alone; Spain alone would not be a very serious menace to her; but, with an unreconciled Germany on her flank, it is to be doubted whether she is in a position to challenge the two together, for their combined fleets could probably destroy her lines of communication in the Mediterranean and cut her off from her sources of man-power and food supply in North Africa. The government at Paris is perfectly aware, moreover, that in the event of such a conflict France could look for no aid from Great Britain, whose interests in the Mediterranean are confined to insuring the security of her sea-road to the East.

Just how Italy will set about realizing her African ambitions remains a matter for anxious speculation, though she has inserted an entering wedge by demanding a reopening of the highly delicate Tangier question, which, as every one conversant with Mediterranean politics knows, is loaded with high explosive. Whether Mussolini’s plans for colonial expansion, which he has emphasized over and over again in his public addresses, will lead to armed conflict with France is extremely doubtful; but he occupies a very strong position, not dissimilar to that occupied by the kaiser at the time of the Algeciras Conference, and he is a past master at the game of bluff. Certain it is that Il Duce intends, by hook or crook, to wring from France some sort of territorial concessions, to obtain for his rejuvenated Italy a place in the African sun. So, though it has been assumed by the more sanguine that the dove of peace has settled permanently on the soil of Morocco, it may prove to be only a bird of passage.