ON THE RIFF FRONT.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4870, 28 August 1925, Page 3

ON THE RIFF FRONT.

WITH THE FOREIGN LEGION. A NIGHT SCENE.

(By

J. M. N. Jeffries,

‘‘Daily Mail”

correspondent in Morocco.) The tents of the Foreign Legion were pitched on a slope in the centre of Taounat camp. As one looked down upon tnem storien of old warfare came to the mind. The monstrosities of modern superhuman fighting here were nowhere to be seen. Not here were flame-throw-ers and tanks and asphyxiating gas or the darkness of those bases where human beetles hide from human insects of the air. The camp instead flickered with a thousand watch-fires, dwindling from those which smoked and Hared nearby to match-lights in the distance. The stamping and neighing and jingling of the cavalry lines mingled with the calls from fire to fire of the soldiery, crying their good-nights ere they lay down by the blaze. At the foot of their guns, pointing out over the valley, the gunners rolled themselves in cloaks and settled to fitful sleep.

At such a camp must Wellington and Soult have gazed and listened, amid the outposts in the Peninsula. And in itis midst the Foreign Legion still kept vigil.

With a great laugh a broad-set legionary cast down a great hunch of meat at the edge of the blaze. From the fire they called out to him in halfboard snatches of Spanish, French, German —for all nations are in the Legion, and of Germans more than a few. At a camp-fire near where I was standing they were all Germans, or perhaps Austrians, with broad, bearded faces strange above their French uniforms. Presently, in answer to a message, a young soldier with a tin of cocoa in his hand came up and made himselr known. He was the sole British Legionary in that company, a corporal named Carrol, born in Montreal, a real soldier of fortune who enlisted in the Legion after having his fill of Gallipoli.

A well-spoken young fellow was Corporal Carroll, and we had an odd talk there in the gathering darkness. He had come, with his lieutenant in his old British regiment over to Africa to enlist, and his lieutenant, Norman by name, had quickly won his conim’tssion and was a lieutenant of France at Sidi-Bel-Abbes. There was an American in his battalion, a' boxer from Boston. But Kearney was over there in the rough trenches on the hill across the valley, the hill of Astar. The Legion had recaptured it that morning, after it had fallen . through native treachery.

When they had reached the top of Astar they had found the dead French sergeant at his post, burnt to the knees. His own Danish comtade, Count Kashe, had fallen -beside him then, on the hill-crest, a bullet through his head, and called but one final entreaty to his British corporal as he fell.

There were many men of family scattered about the Legion who came in and went out like that.. Lawless deeds had brought some of the _Legionaries to its ranks,, but it was mostly wildness. A Belgian sergeant came and talked to us, and he was so quiet and grave of voice, seemed at once so sad and steady, that I wondered what had led him theer. “Oh, the sergeant ?” they told me later, “the sergeant had a motor.cycle in Brussels, and he was veij fond of it and used to go very fast. He : ran into a gii’l. and she died, and he lied in terror of prison, and here he

We talked on and on, as the fires sank lower. Presently there were but voices, the Belgian sergeant and the British corporal telling of the life and death of the Legion ; how it 'yas not tso much at the forlorii hopes which, came so regularly but at the fatigue one grumbled; how the march to position under Riff fire w'as bad, but it was- the return, when, aS often, they evacuated at evenfall and the Riffs, from behind rock and trees, sniped at their backs, which was worse ; ol how other British compatriots got along, Wilson, White, Steadman, who was also a corporal, Dunn, who had been in the Black Watch and had gone after discharge to Dunkirk from London for a trip one day on a return ticket, and when he woke up at Dunkirk next morning found himself enlisted in the Legion ; and of how the German Legionarias fought well but bullied the'French who were in the Legion under foreign names; and of their general good understanding with their officers,, stern in peace but human and kind in war ; how they played a bit of football at the depots, and how God knew where they were going to. light to-morrow; and how you threw the tent away you carried even under fire in order to move more freely and picked up another from one of the dead at the end of the engagement. Then the Belgian sergeant bade me a gentlemanly adieu in his sad, grave voice of a man of sixty, and the brave young corporal went back to his cocoa-making. And fast and furious the crickets chattered on, the crickets at their endless task, the dry crickets whisking away mortality—“out of the dust —into the dust—out of the dust—into the dust.” But the legionaries paid them no heed, but witli five fairly sure hours of living before them lay down, and the camp in the mountains slept before action.