Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations and map.
See 55553-h.htm or 55553-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/55553/pg55553-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55553/55553-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/lastfrontierwhi00powe
Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
THE LAST FRONTIER
* * * * * *
_BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL_
THE LAST FRONTIER
GENTLEMEN ROVERS
THE END OF THE TRAIL
FIGHTING IN FLANDERS
THE ROAD TO GLORY
VIVE LA FRANCE!
ITALY AT WAR
_CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS_
* * * * * *
[Illustration: A SANDSTORM PASSING OVER KHARTOUM.
“It approached at the speed of a galloping horse—a great fleecy,
yellowish-brown cloud which looked for all the world like the smoke of
some gigantic conflagration.”]
THE LAST FRONTIER
The White Man's War for Civilisation in Africa
by
E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S.
Late of the American Consular Service in Egypt
With Sixteen Full-Page Illustrations and Map
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1919
Copyright, 1912, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
[Illustration: Publisher's Logo]
To
MY CHEERFUL, UNCOMPLAINING
AND COURAGEOUS COMRADE ON THE
LONG AFRICAN TRAIL
MY WIFE
FOREWORD
The unknown lands are almost all discovered. The work of the explorer
and the pioneer is nearly finished, and ere long their stern and hardy
figures will have passed from the world's stage, never to return. In
the Argentine, in Mexico, and in Alaska store clothes and stiff hats
are replacing corduroys and sombreros; the pack-mule is giving way to
the motor-car. The earth has but one more great prize with which to
lure the avaricious and the adventurous: Africa—mysterious, opulent,
alluring—beckons and calls.
The conditions which exist in Africa to-day closely parallel those
which were to be found, within the memory of many of us, beyond the
Mississippi. In North Africa the French are pushing their railways
across the desert in the face of Arab opposition, just as we pushed
our railways across the desert in the face of Indian opposition forty
years ago. As an El Dorado the Transvaal has taken the place held by
Australia, and California, and the Yukon, in their turn. The grazing
lands of Morocco and the grain lands of Rhodesia will prove formidable
rivals to those of our own West in a much-nearer future than most
of us suppose. French and British well-drillers are giving modern
versions of the miracle of Moses in the Sahara and the Sudan and
converting worthless deserts into rich domains thereby.
The story of the conquest of a continent by these men with levels and
transits, drills and dynamite, ploughs and spades, forms a chronicle
of courage, daring, resource, and tenacity unsurpassed in history.
They are no idlers, these pioneers of the desert, the jungle, and the
veldt; they live with danger and hardship for their daily mates; they
die with their boots on from snake-bite or sleeping-sickness or Somali
spear; and remember, please, they are making new markets and new
playgrounds for you and me. Morocco, Algeria, Tripolitania, Equatoria,
Rhodesia, the Sahara, the Sudan, the Congo, the Rand, and the Zambezi
... with your permission I will take you to them all, and you shall
see, as though with your own eyes, those strange and far-off places
which mark the line of the Last Frontier, where the white-helmeted
pioneers are fighting the battles and solving the problems of
civilisation.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
For assistance in the preparation of this book I am grateful to many
people. To the editors of _Collier's_, _The Outlook_, _The Review
of Reviews_, _The Independent_, _The Metropolitan_, _Travel_, and
_Scribner's_ my thanks are due for their permission to use such
portions of this volume as originally appeared in their magazines in
the form of articles. I also desire to acknowledge my indebtedness
to the Right Hon. James Bryce, O.M., for permission to avail myself
of certain data contained in his admirable work on South Africa; to
Charles K. Field, Esq., editor of _The Sunset Magazine_, for the title
and introductory lines to Chapter V; to the Hon. F. C. Penfield,
former American Diplomatic Agent in Egypt, from whose clear and
comprehensive “Present-Day Egypt” I have drawn portions of my account
of the complex administration of the Nile country; to J. Scott Keltie,
LL.D., F.R.G.S., author of “The Partition of Africa” and editor of
“The Statesman's Year-Book,” for much valuable information obtained
from those volumes; and to Miss Isabel Savory, A. Sylva White, Esq.,
S. H. Leeder, Esq., C. W. Furlong, Esq., and Francis Miltoun, Esq.,
for suggestions derived from their writings on African subjects. To
the American diplomatic and consular officials in Africa, and to
missionaries of many creeds and denominations, I am indebted for
innumerable kindnesses and much valuable information. At consulate
and mission station alike, from Cape Bon to Table Bay, I found the
latch-string always out and an extra chair at the table. I likewise
take this opportunity of expressing my appreciation of the courtesies
shown me by H. H. Abbas Hilmi II, Khedive of Egypt; H. R. H. Prince
George of Greece, former High Commissioner in Crete; H. H. Ali bin
Hamoud bin Mohammed, ex-Sultan of Zanzibar; H. E. the French Minister
of the Colonies; H. E. the Belgian Minister of the Colonies; Sir
Thomas Cullinan of the Premier Diamond Mine, Pretoria; and to the
officers of the Imperial German East Africa Railways; the Beira,
Mashonaland and Rhodesian Railways; and the British South Africa
Company.
E. A. P.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD vii
AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT ix
CHAPTER
I. THE THIRD EMPIRE 1
II. THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 27
III. SIRENS OF THE SANDS 56
IV. THE ITALIAN “WHITE MAN'S BURDEN” 80
V. THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 108
VI. IN ZANZIBAR 143
VII. THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 165
VIII. “ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!” 190
IX. THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 205
X. THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 223
XI. THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 248
INDEX 287
ILLUSTRATIONS
A Sandstorm Passing Over Khartoum _Frontispiece_
“Through Dim Bazaars where Turbaned Shopkeepers Squat
Patiently in their Doorways” 17
The Troglodyte Town of Medenine, Southern Tunisia 26
Some Sirens of the Sands 58
Jewish Women in the Cemetery of Tunis 70
An Arab Bride Going to Her Husband 79
Sunrise on the Great Sands 87
Work and Play in Black Man's Africa 110
The Saviour of the Sudan and Some of Those he Saved 118
Strange People from Innermost Africa 129
The Gateway to East Africa 146
Arab Women of Zanzibar 156
The Hand of the War Lord in German Africa 187
Railroading Through a Jungle 188
More Work for the Pioneer 219
The Prison Place of a Great Emperor 268
Map of Africa, Showing Railways and Spheres
of Influence _At end of volume_
THE LAST FRONTIER
CHAPTER I
THE THIRD EMPIRE
We have witnessed one of the most remarkable episodes in the history
of the world. In less than a generation we have seen the French
dream of an African empire stretching without interruption from the
Mediterranean to the Congo literally fulfilled. French imperialism did
not end, as the historians would have you believe, on that September
day in 1870 when the third Napoleon lost his liberty and his throne
at Sedan. The echoes of the Commune had scarcely died away before the
French empire-builders were again at work, in Africa, in Asia, in
Oceanica, founding on every seaboard of the world a new and greater
France. In the two-score years that have elapsed since France's _année
terrible_ her neglected and scattered colonies have been expanded into
a third empire—an empire oversea. She has had her revenge for the loss
of Alsace-Lorraine by forestalling Teutonic colonial ambition in every
quarter of the globe: in China, in Australasia, in Equatoria, and in
Morocco the advance of the German _vorlopers_ has been halted by the
harsh “_Qui vive?_” of the French videttes.
Though thirty centuries have elapsed since Phœnicia first began to
nibble at the continent, it was not until 1884 that the mad rush began
which ended in Africa's being apportioned among themselves by half a
dozen European nations with as little scruple as a gang of boys would
divide a stolen pie. This stealing of a continent, lock, stock, and
barrel, is one of the most astounding performances in history. France
emerged from the scramble with a larger slice of territory than any
other power, a territory which she has so steadily and systematically
expanded and consolidated that to-day her sphere of influence extends
over _forty-five per cent of the land area and twenty-four per cent of
the population of Africa_.
So silently, swiftly, and unobtrusively have the French
empire-builders worked that even those of us who pride ourselves
on keeping abreast of the march of civilisation are fairly amazed
when we trace on the map the distances to which they have pushed
the Republic's African frontiers. Did you happen to know that the
fugitive from justice who turns the nose of his camel southward from
Algiers must ride as far as from Milwaukee to the City of Mexico
before he can pass beyond the shadow of the tricolour and the arm of
the French law? Were you aware that if you start from the easternmost
boundary of the French Sudan you will have to cover a distance equal
to that from Buffalo to San Francisco before you can hear the Atlantic
rollers booming against the break-water at Dakar? It is, indeed, not
the slightest exaggeration to say that French influence is to-day
predominant over all that expanse of the Dark Continent lying west of
the Nile basin and north of the Congo—a territory one and a half times
the size of the United States—thus forming the only continuous empire
in Africa, with ports on every seaboard of the continent.
With the exception of the negro republic of Liberia (on whose
frontiers, by the way, France is steadily and systematically
encroaching), the little patches of British and Spanish possessions
on the West Coast, and the German colonies of Kamerun and Togoland,
France has unostentatiously brought under her control that enormous
tract of African soil which stretches from the banks of the Congo to
the shores of the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the
Valley of the Nile. Algeria has been French for three-quarters of a
century, being regarded, indeed, as a part of France and not a colony
at all. Though the Bey of Tunis still holds perfunctory audiences in
his Palace of the Bardo, it is from the French Residency that the
protectorate is really ruled. Though Tripolitania has passed under
Italian dominion, it is French and not Italian influence which is
recognised by the unsubjugated tribesmen of the hinterland. And now,
after years of intrigue and machinations, which twice have brought her
to the brink of war, France, by one of the most remarkable diplomatic
victories of our time, has won the last of the world's great
territorial prizes and has set the capstone on her colonial edifice by
adding the empire of Morocco—under the guise of a protectorate—to her
oversea domain.
On the West Coast the tricolour floats over the colonies of Senegal,
French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Senegal-Niger, and
Mauritania (the last named a newly organised colony formed from
portions of the Moroccan hinterland), the combined area of these
possessions alone being about equal to that of European Russia.
From the Congo northward to the confines of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
stretches the great colony of French Equatorial Africa—formerly known
as the French Congo—the acquirement of which by Savorgnan de Brazza,
counterchecked the ambitious plans of Stanley and his patron, King
Leopold, thus forming one of the most dramatic incidents in the
scramble for Africa. Though potentially the most valuable of the
French West African possessions, being enormously rich in both jungle
and mineral products, notably rubber, ivory, and copper, France has
taken surprisingly little interest in this colony's development, and,
as a result, it has been permitted to fall into a state of almost
pitiful neglect. There are two causes for the backwardness of French
Equatorial Africa: first, its atrocious climate, the whole territory
being a breeding-ground for small-pox, blood diseases, tropical
fevers in their most virulent forms, and, worst of all, the terrible
sleeping-sickness; second, the almost total lack of easy means of
communication, the back door through the Belgian Congo being the only
direct means of access to the greater part of the colony, which was
virtually cut in half by the broad area lying between the southern
boundary of Kamerun and the equator and extending eastward from the
coast to the Ubangi River, which France ceded to Germany in 1911 as
a _quid pro quo_ for being permitted a free hand in Morocco, and
which has been renamed “New Kamerun.” Though the economic development
of this region must prove, under any circumstances, a difficult,
dangerous, and discouraging task, it can be accomplished if the
government will divert its attention from its projects in North Africa
long enough to make Libreville a decent port, to provide adequate
steamer services on the great rivers that intersect the colony, and to
link up those rivers with each other and with the coast by a system of
railways.
Lying on the northern frontier of French Equatorial Africa, and
separating it from the Sahara, is the great Central African state of
Kanem, with its organised native government, its important commerce,
and its considerably developed civilisation, which was completely
subjugated by France in 1903, Wadai, its powerful neighbour to the
east, accepting a French protectorate in the same year. In the centre
of this ring of colonies lie the million and a half square miles of
the French Sahara, which the experiments of the French engineers have
proved to be as capable of irrigation and cultivation as the one-time
deserts of our own Southwest. Off the other side of the continent
is the great colony of Madagascar, the second largest island in the
world, in itself considerably larger than the mother country; while
the French Somali Coast forms the sole gateway to Abyssinia and
divides with the British colony of Aden the control of the southern
entrance to the Red Sea. Everything considered, history can show few
parallels to this marvellous colonial expansion, begun while France
was still suffering from the effects of the disastrous Prussian War,
and quietly carried on under the very eyes of greedy and jealous
neighbours.
The territorial ambitions of most countries have been blazoned to
the world by many wars. It took England two disastrous campaigns to
win South Africa and two more to conquer the Sudan; Russia learned
the same lesson in Manchuria at even a more terrible cost; while
Italy's insecure foothold on the Red Sea shore was purchased by the
annihilation of an army. Where other nations have won their colonial
possessions by arms, France has won hers by adroitness. Always her
policy has been one of pacific penetration. Trace the history of her
African expansion and you will find no Majuba Hill, no Omdurman, no
Adowa, no Modder River. Time and time again the accomplishments of her
small and unheralded expeditions have proved that more territory can
be won by beads and brass wire than by rifles and machine-guns.
Not long ago I asked the governor-general of Algeria what he
considered the most important factors in the remarkable spread
of French influence and civilisation in North Africa, and he
answered, “Public schools, the American phonograph, and the American
sewing-machine.” The most casual traveller cannot but be impressed by
the thoroughness with which France has gone into the schoolmaster
business in her African dominions. She believes that the best way to
civilise native races is by training their minds, and she does not
leave so important a work to the missionaries, either. In Algiers
there is a government university with nearly two thousand students
and a faculty of one hundred professors, while in more than eighteen
hundred secondary, primary, and infant schools the youth of Algeria,
irrespective of whether they believe in Christ, in Abraham, or in
Mohammed, are being taught how to become decent and patriotic citizens
of France. In Tunisia alone there are something over fifteen hundred
educational institutions; all down the fever-stricken West Coast,
under the palm-thatched roofs of Madagascar and the crackling tin ones
of Equatoria, millions of dusky youngsters are being taught by Gallic
schoolmasters that _p-a-t-r-i-e_ spells “France,” and the meaning
of “_Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité_.” To these patient, plodding,
persevering men, whether they wear the white linen of the civil
service or the sombre cassocks of the religious orders, I lift my hat
in respect and admiration, for they are the real pioneers of progress.
If I had my way, the scarlet ribbon of the Legion would be in the
button-hole of every one of them. We too may claim a share in this
work of civilisation, for I have seen a band of savage Arab raiders,
their fierce hawk-faces lighted up by the dung-fed camp-fire, held
spellbound by the strains of a Yankee phonograph; and I have seen the
garments of a tribal chieftain of Central Africa being fashioned on an
American sewing-machine.
“When the English occupy a country,” runs a saying which they have
in Africa, “the first thing they build is a custom-house; the first
thing the Germans build is a barracks; but the first thing the French
build is a railway.” Nothing, indeed, is more significant of the
civilising work done by the French in these almost unknown lands than
the means of communication, there being in operation to-day in French
Africa six thousand miles of railway, twenty-five thousand miles of
telegraph, and ten thousand miles of telephone. Think of being able to
buy a return ticket from Paris to Timbuktu; of telegraphing Christmas
greetings to your family in Tarrytown or Back Bay or Bryn Mawr from
the shores of Lake Tchad; or of sitting in the American consulate
at Tamatave and chatting with a friend in Antanarivo, three hundred
miles away. Why, only the other day the Sultan of Morocco, at Fez,
sent birthday congratulations to the President of France, at Paris, by
wireless.
To-day one can travel on an admirably ballasted road-bed, in an
electric-lighted sleeping-car, with hot and cold running water in your
compartment, and with a dining-car ahead, along that entire stretch
of the Barbary Coast lying between the Moroccan and Tripolitanian
frontiers, which, within the memory of our fathers, was the most
notorious pirate stronghold in the world. A strategic line has
been built six hundred miles southward from the coast city of Oran
to Colomb-Bechar, in the Sahara, with Timbuktu as its eventual
destination, and, now that the long-standing Moroccan controversy
has been settled for good and all, another railway is already being
pushed forward from Ujda, on the Algerian-Moroccan border, and in
another year or two the shriek of the locomotive will be heard under
the walls of Fez the Forbidden. From Constantine, in Algeria, another
line of rails is crawling southward via Biskra into the Sahara, with
Lake Tchad as its objective, thus opening up to European commerce the
great protected states of Kanem and Wadai. From Dakar, on the coast
of Senegal, a combined rail and river service is in operation to the
Great Bend of the Niger, so that one can now go to the mysterious
city of Timbuktu by train and river steamer, in considerable comfort
and under the protection of the French flag all the way. In Dahomey,
within the memory of all of us a notorious cannibal kingdom, a railway
is under construction to Nikki, four hundred miles into the steaming
jungle; from Konakry, the capital of French Guinea, a line has just
been opened to Kourassa, three hundred and fifty miles from anywhere;
while even the fever-stricken, voodoo-worshipping Ivory Coast boasts
two hundred miles or so of well-built line with its rail-head already
half-way from the coast to Jimini. From Tamatave, the chief seaport
of Madagascar, you can go by rail to the capital, Antanarivo, three
hundred miles up into the mountains, and, if you wish to continue
across the island, government motor-cars will run you down, over roads
that would make the Glidden tourists envious, to Majunga, on the other
side. From Djibouti, the capital of the French Somali Coast, another
railway has been pushed as far up-country as Diré-Dawah, in Menelik's
dominions (fare sixty dollars for the round trip of two hundred and
fifty miles), thus diverting the lucrative trade of Abyssinia from the
British Sudan to the French marts in Somaliland.
France has more good harbours on the coasts of Africa than all the
other nations put together. Algiers, with one of the finest roadsteads
in the world, is now the most important coaling-station in the
Mediterranean and a port of call for nearly all of the lines plying
between America and the Near East; by the construction of a great
ship-canal the French engineers have made Tunis directly accessible
to ocean-going vessels, thus restoring the maritime importance of
Carthage to her successor; with Tangier under French control, a naval
base will doubtless eventually be constructed there which will rival
Toulon and will divide with Gibraltar the control of the entrance
to the Mediterranean. With its entire western portion dominated by
the great French ports of Villefranche, Toulon, Ajaccio, Marseilles,
Oran, Algiers, and Bizerta, the Mediterranean is well on the road to
becoming, as Napoleon once prophesied, a French lake.
But, though good harbours are taken rather as a matter of course
in the Mediterranean, one hardly expects to find them on the
reef-bordered West Coast, which is pounded by a ceaseless and
merciless surf. At all of the British, German, Spanish, and Portuguese
ports in West Africa, save one, you are lowered from the steamer's
heaving deck into a dancing surf-boat by means of a contrivance
called the “mammy chair,” and are taken ashore by a score of ebony
giants who ply their trident-shaped paddles madly in their desperate
efforts to prevent your being capsized. Alternately scorched by the
sun and soaked by the waves, you are landed, about three times out
of four, on a beach as hot as though of molten brass. The fourth
time, however, your Kroo boys are not quite quick enough to escape
the crest of one of those mighty combers—and you can thank your lucky
stars if you get ashore at all. This is the method by which every
passenger and every bale of merchandise is landed on the West Coast
and it is very dangerous and unpleasant and costly. But when you come
to the French port of Dakar, instead of being dangled between sea and
sky in a bo's'n's chair and dropped sprawling into the bottom of a
pitching surf-boat, and being paddled frantically ashore by a crew of
perspiring negroes, you lounge in a cane chair on an awning-covered
deck while your vessel steams grandly in, straight alongside a
concrete wharf which would do credit to the Hudson River, and a steam
crane dips down into the hold and lifts the cargo out, a dozen tons
at a time, and loads it on a waiting train to be transported into the
heart of Africa, and as you lean over the rail, marvelling at the
modernity and efficiency which characterise everything in sight, you
wonder if you are really in the Dark Continent, or if you are back in
America again.
But if the French harbours are amazingly good, the French vessels
which drop anchor in them are, for the most part, amazingly bad.
The _Messageries Maritimes_, a highly subsidised line which has a
virtual monopoly of the French colonial passenger trade, and which
is notorious for its we-don't-care-whether-you-like-it-or-not
attitude, has the worst vessels that I know, bar none, and charges
the most exorbitant fares. If you wish to visit the Somali Coast, or
Madagascar, or Réunion, you will have to take this line, because there
is no other, but elsewhere along the coasts of Africa you will do well
to follow my advice and travel under the British or the German flag.
The struggle of the French colonial army to maintain law and order
along the vast reaches of France's African frontiers forms one of
the most thrilling and romantic chapters in the history of colonial
expansion. Theirs has been a work of tact, rather than of force, for,
where England, Germany, Italy, and Belgium have used the iron hand in
dealing with the natives, France, more farsighted, has seen the wisdom
of hiding it within the velvet glove. Always she has conciliated the
Moslem. She has safeguarded the privacy of his mosques and harems; she
has encouraged by government subsidies his schools and universities;
instead of desecrating the tombs of his holy men, she has whitewashed
them; the burnooses of the great tribal and religious chieftains
are brilliant with French decorations; the native _mollahs_ and
_cadis_ are utilised as local magistrates in all except the gravest
cases or those involving a European. To attempt to govern a country
without those, or against those, to whom it belonged, is a blunder
of which France has never been guilty. It has been the consistent
policy of other European nations, on the contrary, neither to trust
the natives nor to treat them with any degree of consideration.
Hence the ominous unrest in India; hence the ever louder murmur of
“Egypt for the Egyptians”! hence the refusal of the natives of German
East Africa to work on German-owned plantations and their wholesale
emigration from that colony; hence the fact that no Italian official
in Eritrea or Benadir dares venture outside the town walls unarmed and
unescorted, nor will in Tripolitania for many years to come. I have
been assured repeatedly by North African sheikhs that, should France
become involved in a European war, her native soldiery would volunteer
almost to a man. That England is far from certain how her Egyptian and
Sudanese troops would behave in such a contingency is best proved by
the formidable British garrisons which she deems it wise to maintain
in the land of the Valley of the Nile.
I am but reflecting the opinions of many highly placed and intimately
informed European officials in North Africa when I assert that
Germany's repeated interference with the French programme in Morocco
was due as much to military as to political reasons, the Germans using
this means to hinder the expansion of that mysterious _force noire_
which has long been a bugaboo to the War Office authorities in Berlin.
Whether this was the true reason or not for Germany's attitude in the
Moroccan business, no one knows better than the German general staff
that, in the event of war, the Republic would be able to advance a
great black army to the banks of the Rhine in thirty days—and that she
would not be deterred by the scruples which prevented her utilising
her African soldiery in 1870. It has been repeatedly urged, indeed,
that the numerical inferiority of the annual French conscription, as
compared with that of Germany, be made up for by drafting a corps of
black troops drawn from French West Africa into the continental army.
France has already recruited very close to twenty thousand native
troops—which is the strength of an army corps—in her West African
possessions alone, and as any scheme for drafting it into Algeria,
so as to enable the French troops stationed there to be available
elsewhere, would instantly arouse the Arab population to revolt, it is
highly probable that this African army corps would, in case of war, be
employed on the European continent. Though France's African army does
not at present number much over fifty thousand men—all well drilled,
highly disciplined, and modernly armed—the French drill-sergeants in
Africa are not idle and have limitless resources to draw from. The
population of the negro states under French protection runs into many
millions, and would easily yield twenty per cent of fighting men,
while the acquisition of Morocco has added the Berbers, that strange,
warlike, Caucasian race, to the Republic's fighting line. Nothing
pleases the African as an occupation more than soldiering, his native
physique, courage, and endurance making him, with amazingly little
training, a first-class fighting man. It is no great wonder, then,
that Germany looks askance at the formidable army which her rival is
building up so quietly but so steadily on the other side of the Middle
Sea.
No small part in the winning of North Africa has been played by the
Foreign Legion—how the name smacks of romance!—that picturesque
company of adventurers, soldiers of fortune, and ne'er-do-weels,
ten thousand strong, most of whom serve under the French flag in
preference to serving in their own prisons. In this notorious corps
the French Government enlists without question any physically fit man
who applies. It asks no questions and expects to be told any number
of lies. It trains them until they are as hard as nails and as tough
as rawhide; it works them as a negro teamster works a Kentucky mule;
it pays them wages which would cause a strike among Chinese coolies;
and, when the necessity arises, it sends them into action with the
assurance that there will be no French widows to be pensioned. So
unenviable is the reputation of the Legionnaires that even the
Algerian desert towns balk at their being stationed in the vicinity,
for nothing from hen-roost to harem is safe from their depredations;
so they are utilised on the most remote frontiers in time of peace and
invariably form the advance guard in time of war. It is commonly said
that when the Legion goes into action its officers take the precaution
of marching in the rear, so as not to be shot in the back, but that
is probably a libel which the regiment does not deserve. Wherever
the musketry is crackling along France's colonial frontiers, there
this Legion of the Damned is to be found, those who wear its uniform
being, for the most part, bearers of notorious or illustrious names
who have chosen to fight under an alien flag because they are either
afraid or ashamed to show themselves under their own.
Several times each year it is customary for the commandants of the
French posts along the edge of the Sahara to organise _fantasias_ in
honour of the Arab sheikhs of the region, who come in to attend them,
followed by great retinues of burnoosed, turbaned, and splendidly
mounted retainers, with the same enthusiasm with which an American
countryside turns out to see the circus. At one of these affairs,
held in southern Algeria, I could not but contrast the marked
attentions paid by the French officials to the native chieftains with
the cavalier and frequently insolent attitude invariably assumed by
British officials toward Egyptians of all ranks, not even excepting
the Khedive. Were a French official to affront one of the great Arab
sheikhs as Lord Kitchener did the Khedive, when he exacted an apology
from his Highness for presuming to criticise the discipline of the
Sudanese troops, he would be fortunate indeed if he escaped summary
dismissal.
At the _fantasia_ in question luxuriously furnished tents had been
erected for the comfort of the native guests; a champagne luncheon
provided the excuse for innumerable protestations of friendship; a
series of races with money prizes was arranged for the visitors'
horses; and, before leaving, the sheikhs were presented with ornate
saddles, gold-mounted rifles, and, in the cases of the more
important chieftains, with crosses of the Legion of Honour. In return
for this they willingly agreed to capture and surrender certain
fugitives from justice who had fled into the desert; to warn the
more lawless of their tribesmen that the plundering of caravans must
cease; to furnish specified quotas of recruits for the native cavalry;
and to send in for sale to the Remount Department a large number of
desert-bred horses. And, which is the most important of all, they go
back to their tented homes in the desert immensely impressed with the
power, the wealth, and the generosity of France.
[Illustration: “THROUGH DIM BAZAARS WHERE TURBANED SHOPKEEPERS SQUAT
PATIENTLY IN THEIR DOORWAYS.”
Here, in the native quarters of the remote towns of the Algerian
hinterland, the disciples of Pan-Islam find eager listeners to their
creed of Africa for the Africans.
_Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra._]
Not content with these periodic manifestations of friendship, the
French Government makes it a point occasionally to invite the native
rulers of the lands under its control to visit France as the guests
of the nation. Escorted by French officers who can talk with them in
their own tongue, these colonial visitors in their outlandish costumes
are shown the delights of Montmartre by night, they are dined by the
President of the Republic at the Élysée, they are given the freedom
of Paris at the Hôtel de Ville, and they finally return to their own
lands the friends and allies of France for the rest of their lives.
“It doesn't cost the government much,” an official of the French
Colonial Office once remarked to me, _à propos_ of a visit then being
paid to Paris by the King of Cambodia, “and it tickles the niggers.”
Straggling down here and there into the desert from some of the
North African coast towns go the trade routes of the caravans, and
it is the protection of these trade routes, traversing, as they do,
a territory half again as large as that of the United States, that
is entrusted to the twelve hundred _méharistes_ composing France's
Saharan forces. By a network of small oasis garrisons and desert
patrols, recruited from the desert tribes and mounted on the tall,
swift-trotting camels known as _méhari_, France has made the Saharan
trade-routes, if not as safe as Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, certainly
very much safer for the lone traveller than lower Clark Street, in
Chicago, or the neighbourhood of the Paris _Halles_. It has long been
the fashion to hold up the Northwest Mounted Police as the model for
all constabulary forces, just as it has been the fashion to extol
the English as the model colonisers, but, taking into consideration
the fewness of their numbers, the vastness of the region which they
control, and the character of its climate and its inhabitants, I give
the blue ribbon to these lean, brown-faced, hard-riding camel-men who
have carried law and order into the furthermost corners of the Great
Sahara.
Though comparatively unfertile, the Sahara vastly influences
the surrounding regions, just as the Atlantic Ocean influences
the countries which border on it. Were commerce to be seriously
interrupted upon the Atlantic, financial hardships would inevitably
result in the countries on either side. So it is, then, with the
Sahara, which is, to all intents and purposes, an inland ocean. Ever
since the caravan of the Queen of Sheba brought gifts to King Solomon,
ever since Abraham came riding down from Ur, it has been customary
for the nomad Arab rulers through whose territories the desert trade
routes pass to exact heavy tribute from the caravan sheikhs, the Bilma
trans-Saharan route alone being plundered annually to the tune of ten
million francs until the coming of the French camel police. Many of
these great trade caravans, you will understand, are literally moving
cities, sometimes consisting of as many as twelve thousand camels, to
say nothing of the accompanying horses, donkeys, sheep, and goats.
To outfit such a caravan often takes a year or more, frequently at
a cost of more than one million dollars, the money being subscribed
in varying sums by thousands of merchants and petty traders dwelling
in the region whence it starts. It is obvious, therefore, that the
looting of such a caravan might well spell ruin for the people of a
whole district; and it is by her successful protection of the caravan
routes that France has earned the gratitude of the peoples of all
those regions bordering on the Great Sahara. But the days of the
caravan trade are numbered, for the telegraph wires which already
stretch across the desert from the Mediterranean coast towns to the
French outposts in the Congo, the Senegal, and the Sudan, are but
forerunners to herald the coming of the iron horse.
France's path of colonial expansion in Africa has been remarkably
free from obstructions, for, barring the Algerian campaign of 1830,
and the German-created incidents in Morocco, she has acquired her
vast domain—close on half the total area of the continent—at a
surprisingly low cost in money and lives. The only time, indeed,
when her African ambitions received a serious setback was in 1898,
at Fashoda (now known as Kodok), on the White Nile, when the French
explorer, Major Marchand, yielded to the peremptory demand of Lord
Kitchener and hauled down the tricolour which he had raised at that
remote spot, thus losing to France the whole of the Western Sudan and
the control of the head-waters of the Nile.
There is an interesting bit of secret diplomatic history in this
connection. The story has been told me by both French and British
officials—and there is good reason to believe that it is true—that
the French Government had planned, in case Marchand was able to hold
his position until reinforcements arrived, to divert the waters
of the White Nile, at a point near its junction with the Sobat
River, into the Sahara, an undertaking which, owing to the physical
characteristics of that region, would, so the French engineers
claimed, have been entirely feasible. France would thus have
accomplished the twofold purpose of irrigating her desert territory
and of turning Egypt into a desert by diverting her only supply of
water; for this, remember, was in those bitter, jealous days before
the Anglo-French _entente_. It was, indeed, the intelligence that the
Khalifa proposed, by doing this very thing, to bring Egypt to her
knees that caused the second Sudanese expedition to be pushed forward
so rapidly. (I should add that the idea, once so popular in France, of
turning the Sahara into an inland sea, has been proven impracticable,
if not impossible.) It is safe to say that England's prime reason for
clinging so tenaciously, and at such heavy cost, to the arid tract
known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, is to safeguard Egyptian prosperity
by keeping control of the head-waters of the Nile. To illustrate
how completely the Nile is the barometer of Egyptian prosperity, I
might add that the last time I was in Khartoum the officials of the
Sudanese Irrigation Service complained to me most bitterly that they
were being seriously hampered in their work of desert reclamation by
the restrictions placed upon the quantity of water which they were
permitted to divert from the Nile, a comparatively small diversion
from the upper reaches of the river causing wide-spread distress among
the Egyptian agriculturists a thousand miles down-stream.
Because the map-makers from time beyond reckoning have seen fit to
paint the northern half of the African continent a speckled yellow,
most of us have been accustomed to look upon this region as an arid,
sun-baked, worthless desert. But French explorers, French engineers,
and French scientists have proved that it is very far from being
worthless or past reclamation. M. Henri Schirmer, the latest and most
careful student of its problems, says: “The sterility of the Sahara is
due neither to the form of the land nor to its nature. The alluvium of
sand, chalk, and gypsum which covers the Algerian Sahara constitutes
equally the soil of the most fertile plains in the world. What causes
the misery of one and the wealth of the other is the absence or the
presence of water.” Now, an extensive series of experiments has
proven that the Sahara, like the Great American Desert, has an ample
supply of underground water, which in many cases has been reached at
a depth of only forty feet. There is, incidentally, hardly a desert
where the experiment has been tried, whether in Asia, Africa, or
America, where water has not been found within two thousand feet of
the surface. Though usually not sufficient for agriculture, enough
has generally been found to afford a supply for cattle, railroads,
and mines. Three striking examples of what can be accomplished by
scientific well-drilling in arid lands are the great wells of the
Salton Desert, the flowing wells at Benson, Arizona, and a supply of
seven hundred thousand gallons of water a day from the deep wells on
the mesa at El Paso, each of these supplies of water being obtained
from localities which were superficially hopelessly dry.
It should be borne in mind, in any discussion of North Africa, that
until the early '80's the Great American Desert was as primitive,
waterless, and sparsely settled a region as the Sahara. Its scattered
inhabitants practised irrigation and agriculture very much as the
people of southern Algeria and Tunisia do to-day, and, like them, they
constructed buildings of unburnt brick and stone. Though the Indian
was able to find a meagre sustenance upon the American desert, just
as the Arab does upon the African, it was of a kind upon which the
white man could not well exist. The unconquered Apaches plundered
wagon-trains and mail-coaches just as the Tuareg occasionally plunders
the Saharan trade caravans to-day, and the only white men were the
soldiers at scattered and lonely posts or desperadoes flying from the
law. There is, indeed, a striking similarity between the conditions
which prevail to-day along France's African borders and those which
existed within the memories of most of us upon our own frontier.
Then the railways came to the American West, just as they are coming
to North Africa to-day, and the desert was awakened from its lethargy
of centuries by the shriek of the locomotive. The first railroads
to be constructed were designed primarily as highways between the
Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards, with hardly a thought of revenue
from the desert itself. But hard on the heels of the railway-builders
followed the miners and the cattlemen, so that to-day the iron highway
across the desert is bordered by prosperous cities and villages, by
mines and oil-derricks and ranches and white farm-houses with green
blinds, this one-time arid region, which the wiseheads of thirty years
ago pronounced worthless, now yielding a wealth twice as much per
capita as that of any other portion of the United States.
What has already been accomplished in the American desert, French
brains, French energy, and French machinery are fast accomplishing
in the Sahara. Thanks to the recent invention, by a non-commissioned
officer of France's African forces, of a six-wheeled motor-sledge
driven by a light but powerful aeroplane engine, the problem of rapid
communication in these desert regions, which have hitherto been
impassable to any kind of animal or mechanical traction, has been
solved. As the new vehicle has proved itself capable of maintaining
a speed over sand dunes of twenty miles an hour, it promises to be
of invaluable assistance to the French in their work of opening up
the waste places. Not only have French expeditions explored and
charted the whole of the unknown regions, but they have thoroughly
investigated the commercial possibilities of the immense territories
which have recently come under their control. These investigations
have shown that the Sahara is very far from being the sandy plain,
flat as a billiard-table, which the pictures and descriptions in our
school geographies led us to believe, and which the reports of those
superficial travellers who had only journeyed into the desert as far
as Biskra, in Algeria, or Ghadames, in Tripolitania, confirmed, but
is, on the contrary, of a remarkably varied surface, here rising into
plateaus like those of Tibesti and Ahaggar, there crossed by chains of
large and fertile oases, and again broken into mountain ranges, with
peaks eight thousand feet high, greater than the Alleghanies and very
nearly as great as the Sierra Nevadas.
An oasis, by the way, does not necessarily consist, as the reading
public seems to believe, of a clump of palm-trees beside a brackish
well, many of them being great stretches of well-watered and
cultivated soil, sometimes many square miles in extent, and rich
in fig, pomegranate, orange, apricot, and olive trees. The oasis
of Kaouer, for example, with its one hundred thousand date-palms,
furnishes subsistence for the inhabitants of a score of straggling
villages, with their camels, flocks, and herds. There are said to be
four million date-palms in the oases of the Algerian Sahara alone, and
to cut down one of them is considered as much of a crime as arson is
in a great city, for its fruit is a sufficient food, from its leaves
a shelter can be made which will keep out sun and wind and rain, and
its shade protects life and cultivation. Many date plantations and
even vineyards have flourished for several years past in southernmost
Algeria by means of water from below the surface, while the chief of
the French geodetic survey recently announced that a tract in the very
heart of the Sahara, nine degrees in longitude by twelve degrees in
latitude, is already sufficiently watered for the raising of grain.
The reports of these expeditions and commissions bear with painstaking
thoroughness on the productivity of the soil, the suitability of
the climate, the existence and accessibility of forest wealth, the
presence and probable extent of mineral veins, and on transportation
by road, rail, and river over all that huge territory which comprises
France's African empire.
The story of French success in the exploration, the civilisation,
the administration, and the exploitation of Africa is one of the
wonder-tales of history. That she has relied on the resources of
science rather than on those of militarism makes her achievement
the more remarkable, for where England's possessions have largely
been gained by punitive expeditions, France has won hers by pacific
penetration. Look at Senegambia as it is now under French rule,
and compare its condition with what it was as Mungo Park describes
it at the end of the eighteenth century; contrast the modernised
Dahomey of to-day, with its railways, schools, and hospitals, with
the blood-soaked, cannibal country of the early '60's; remember that
Algeria has doubled in population since the last Dey, by striking
the French consul with his fan, turned his country into a French
department—and you will have a bird's-eye view, as it were, of what
the French have accomplished in the colonising field.
If French Africa becomes in time a rich and prosperous dominion—and I
firmly believe that it will—it is to her patient and intrepid pioneers
of civilisation—-desert patrols, railway-builders, well-drillers,
school-teachers, commercial investigators—that the thanks of the
nation will be due; for they are pointing the way to millions
of natives, on whose activities and necessities the commercial
development of Africa must eventually depend. So I trust that those
at home in France will give all honour to the men at work in the
Sahara, the Senegal, and the Sudan or rotting in the weed-grown,
snake-infested cemeteries of the Congo and Somaliland; men whose
battles have been fought out in steaming jungles or on lonely oases,
far away from home and friends and often from another white man's
help and sympathy; sometimes with savage desert raiders, or in action
against Hausa, Berber, or Moor; but oftenest of all with an unseen and
deadlier foe—the dread African fever.
[Illustration: THE TROGLODYTE TOWN OF MEDENINE, SOUTHERN TUNISIA.
Perhaps the strangest city in the world. The dwellings, known as
rhorfas, are built in the form of horseshoes to keep out thieves.
_Photograph by Soler, Tunis._]