RIFFI TRIBES

Shannon News, 2 October 1925, Page 4

RIFFI TRIBES

SILENT AND UNSEEN. FRANCE'S MOROCCA& TASK. Looking through glasses yesterday, with all that adjusting and focussing and lowering of glasses to get the objective with the naked eye, after all the mistakes and false successes which always precede an effort to discern with glasses what you cannot discern naturally, I saw a Riffi tribesman at last (writes the special correspondent of the Daily Mail at French headquarters on June 5). He was a dark line on a patch, motionless, fixedly watching the . track which wound away beneath him. Around mo were all the life and the cries and laughter in the French camp perched on the heights of Ain Aisha, above the Ouergha liiver. Here the mobile column of Colonel Freydenberg, which flits from place to place, now to relieve a post, now to scour a valley, now to storm a hilltop, but ever moving at full speed to the place of emergency like a firefengine tearing to the danger of the hour, was taking a day of rest. The Desert’s Challenge. The sun poured dawn on tents which seemed like a couple of play-ing-cards put together, beneath which night-black Sengalese were lying prone. Yellow-turbaned Zouaves, Algerian sharpshooters, legionaires, Frenchmen burned brick-red, talked and strolled or sat eating round large messtins and drank peppermint and anisettes at a Bohemian canteen. In the plain below the horse and supply lines moved ceaselessly like a new-sprung mining settlement. Even though it was a period of what soldiers call rest, the whole industry of war stirred and vibrated. The contrast lay before in the dmpty landscape, in that motionless figure watching all day on the ridge near Taounat. So much lay westward. Eastward was a ,stret,eh of green empty land at the end of which were dereliet airsheds which airmen had burned that morning so that they might give no shelter to the Riffs. The northern fore-ground was filled with the mountain of Senadja, barren as a slate to look upon, and, behind was the blue prospect of mountain on mountain. , Into that stony labyrinth of mountain the Riffs go, and from it they come. All lay bare, silent, sinister in thh sun, which kerned to pour down its warmth in vain on the mountains, which responded wit no culture or house or sign of man: They seemed to brood arid say in voices of rock, "We are waiting for you, O soldiers of Europe. Come forward, O soldiers of Europe; we are waiting for you all day.” Into these central recesses—for at this point is the centre of the present front—it looks as if thousands of men could enter and disappear.

First Warning. In the little posts on the tops of the lesser hills below them small French detachments have lived like herpes. They went there really in times of peace, a few men and a lieutenant and a political officer perhaps. The lieutenant himself was generally his own political officer. He was there to get into contact with the tribes and learn who [passed over the tracks and, what was the gossip of the ranges. Ther e came a day—those who have to do with native races know what it means— when a sort of chill fell, and a strange form or two were seen on th e mountain paths and the few local Moors answered questions differently. Warily the little posts dreAv themselves into their hill-tops. And those who could do so laid , in water and provisions. And then a day arrived: well it was like one of those occasions when you are walking in th e mountains and turn a high corner into what seems an empty valley, and then suddenly its .sides are filled with shadows, and birds come from nowhere are flying and rising and dipping all about you. Round the little posts came Riffs like shadow of birds. And the bullets Avhich cast no shadow in this world followed fast.

j There was such a post at Ain Leuli, just the other side of Taounat. I have been talking to Lieutenant Barthelemy, of th e 13th Tirailleurs, who was relieved with his tiny garrison after standing a twelve days’ siege there. He is the conventional mere boy, a .pink-cheeked, fair-haired young fellow from the Vosges, with, as he tells his story, a wonderful laugh which has yet something of a strain in it. Ice From Aeroplanes. "You can’t see Abdel Krim’s men,” he said; "they are all behind rocks and trees. They flit about and throw grenades ceaselessly. I had to withdraw every one of my men from the centre of the post, and we lay ail. the last eight days, night and day, behind a breastwork I had built quietly of sacks of coffee and a few other stores. There we had to lie in utter silence! The tribesmen would creep within calling distanc and cry to my Algerians to come out and they would give them women and milk.

“But I never let them whisper an answer. I had to match the Riffs at their own mystery, so that they did not know whether we were dead or alive, and when they stole up to see, the first and last they heard was my machine-gun. The airmen I used to signal to by strips of material specially placed on the ground, and sometimes I ventured a heliograph. The airmen flew so low, .so dangerously low for themselves, that they could drop blocks of ice without smashing them into fragments into my twenty or thirty yards of open surface. The ice saved us, as it gave my men water to drink. I had some wine but most of my men who are Moslems would not drink it even then.

“The worst experience of all was when we were relieved yesterday. The only, side to get. out safely from the post was sheer descent. All the other sides were commanded by marksmen, and even the cliff side was covered bv two w e could not dislodge. When it came to my turn to go after my men and the sergeant I guessed the marksmen would be waiting .specially for me, the officer. So I just put my hands to my shins, made myself into a ball, let myself (go over the edge and turned over and over, against stones and overythinng, down to safety."