THE TURCOS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 154, 25 November 1914, Page 3

THE TURCOS.

(By Walter S. Hiatt). t The use of the French of her fierce Afrioan troops in this war, and her reliance on her Algerian colonies for food if the war lasts long, lias here pass- '■:(! all but unnoted. I Yet there, is more than this in Africa' I role. She is as much the cause of this war as she was of that between Carthage and Borne in the older days of the world, when the great Hannibal first led black troops into Europe. I If Gcirmany wins. France stands to lose an Empire which she has for half a century been silently building up in A(frica. We who live on this side of the water know little of the immense fertility of this African continent and of France's loot held there. We do not realise that France is mistress of"*iearly £0 per cent, of a continent which comprises one-fifth of the land on the globe; that she holds one half of an area larger than the North American continent by just two million square miles. Her actual holdings in Africa take in a rich area nearly twice the size of continental United States. They reach from the banks of 1 the Congo river to the shores of the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the fertile valley of the Nile. The newspapers here are raving over the expenses of this European war. The money spent in it is a mere bagatelle to the wealth of empire that may be won or lost by it. England almost went to war with France sixteen years ago because the latter was too rapidly absorbing the African Continent. When Captain Marchand took the territory covering the water sources of the Nile, with the ultimate possibility of diverting them fnto the Sahara Desert, the Fashoda incident was created. England demanded Ins retreatgwith war as an alternative. France ' withdrew Marchand but the incident left a bitter feeling. The truth is that the continent of Africa, some thirty years ago, was stolen and divided like a big luscious pie. among various European nations, and Ormany came late at the cutting. Worse yet, France having seen the pie first, got the biggest' Share. MAKING THE DESERT BLOOM. With all Germany's wonderful commercial expansion, which was accelerated by the billion of dollars she exacted as a war indemnity from France in IS7O, she has ever felt the room for territorial expansion. She has citizens who make excellent colonists, but she lias ! no place to send them. England, France.. Holland, and even little Belgium, with ' its rich African Congo, Iliad ftll got the 'start of her. Often must. Germany have regretted that she did not also exact from helpless France African territory its well as Alsace and Lorraine. But in those days African territory was little valued. Setting foot on this African territory in 1818, in the same year that the United States suppressed the pirates at Tunis, in 1830 France really took Algiers, the city and province, to-day only a two days' journey across the Mediterranean I from her port of thn Marseilles, Under such governor.? as the first—General Charon—year by year, slowly in the hap-py-go-lucky, apparently aimless fashion I which is the seeming vice of the French, she made headway in northern Africa. Even her deep defeat at the. hands of the Germans in IS7O did not stop her. And this empire, though founded on a dream, is not fruitless. It is one of solid commerce and prosperity. Soldiers of France, in their advances have not left a trace of blood and fire. When possible, they have used the champagne bottle and a few decorations of the Legion d'Honneur which the. natives prize even above the vain ftencli. They Siave, built roads that tile Germans might have envied; they have run steel rails through desert and mountain and forest, through far Abyssinia to connect with the Soudan railroads on the Sobat river.

French engineers have drilled wells and drawn water where there is none. ! The more daring of them propose to tap the Mediterranean and make the Sahara an inland sea of feitile coasts as I once it may have been. They are doing J with Africa what we have done to our own great American desert, so primitive and dreary only 35 years ago. "When tliie English occupy a country," runs an international saying, "they build a custom house; the Germans a fort; the French a road." To-day the French have fiOOO miles of railway, 25,000 miles l of telegraph, and 10,000 miles of tele- < phono in Africa. Trees, cattle, grass, I oats, wheat, dates, wine, grapes, olives, ' potatoes and beans are grown in abundance. The fisheries off the coast have been made productive.

DOUGHTY BLACK SOLDTETtS. Whether France will he tricked out of her African possessions—to which, inoidentally, may be added the huge island of Madagascar on the south-east coast—as France has of so many of her colonial possessions—is yet to be seen. It is well worth Germany's money and time to try it. But in the present what Germany has

long feared has come to pass. France is using her black army! Two years ago General Friedrich von Bornhardi, of the German Army, wrote:—"lf the French succeed in making a huge African army available for a European theatre, the estimate of the French compared with ours will be quite different." ( The quality of these troops is excellent. Hardy by nature, the best of training has been given them. The example is set by the regiments of wild white troops known as the legion estrangere and the battalion des joyeux. These troops, made up for tile most part of Frenchmen too wild to serve in home regiments, have the reputation of fearing neither God nor man. Their battlecry is:—"II y a de la goutte a boire la haut!" (There's something to drink up j there!) The African troops, made up of Arabs. Berbers, and! other races, led by French officers ..arc apt pupils for ■ war. They obey an order even better i that white men, and have never been ■ known to shirk their share of a fight. In the initial mobilisation of the s French troops, an army corps of these

• troops were thrown across the oVlediter- ! ranean, protected by the powerful French fleet at Toulon. With war undeclared at the end of July, by August black troops were leading bayonet charges at Altkircli and Muelhausen on the German . o frontiers. o France may yet find that the greatest | r, of her achievements in Africa has been a the building up of an army there. In a peace times the army is limited to about ; e 75,000 men, with perhaps a half a million -■ to draw upon for -war. Has France af- !® (fronted civilisation by bringing into 8 " action on Christian European soil black and Maliommedan troopers? Has she hazarded tlw moral superiority of the white man? Perhaps. Still has not r . e the while man disgraced his moral supern~. iority by his desire for la goutte a boire la liaut? en ____________