North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

VIII

Quick music comes down the evening street—the clatter of cavalry—the beautiful rhythm of horses’ backs—flash of French uniforms so harmonized with the African setting—spahis, tirailleurs, guns—a gallant and lively scene in the massed avenue! I love the French soldiers in Africa; but it is with a deeper feeling than mere martial exhilaration that one sees them to-night, for this is an annual fête-day, and their march commemorates the entry of the French troops into Tunis. One involuntarily looks at the faces of the natives in the crowds—impassible. But the old European cannot but feel a thrill at the sight of France, the leader of our civilization, again taking charge of the untamed and reluctant land and its intractable people to which every mastering empire of the North, from the dawn of our history, has brought in vain the force of its arms and the light of its intelligence. The hour has come again, and one feels the presence of the Napoleonic idea, clad, as of old, in the French arms; for it is from Napoleon, that star of enlightenment—Napoleon as he was in his Egyptian campaigns—that the French empire in Africa derives; and if, as the heir of the Crusades, France was through centuries the protector of Christians in the East, and that rôle is now done, it is a greater rôle that she inherits from Napoleon as the friend of Islam, with the centuries before her. Force, demonstrated in the army, is the basis of order in all civilized lands; that is why the presence of the French uniform delights me; but it is not by brute force that France moves in the essential conquest, nor is it military lust that her empire in Africa represents and embodies. It is, rather, a striking instance of fatality in human events that her advancing career in North Africa presents to the historical mind; a slight incident—a bey struck one of her ambassadors with a fan—forced on her the occupation of Algiers, and in the course of years she found herself saddled with a burden of colonial empire as awkwardly and reluctantly as was the case with us and the Philippines. There were anticolonialists in her experiences, as there were antiimperialists with us; and the arguments were about the same, essentially, in both cases—the rights of man, a new frontier, an alien people, with various economic considerations of revenue, tariff, exploitation. That obscure element of reality, however, which we call fate, worked on continuously, linking situation with event, difficulty with remedy, what was done with what had to be done, till the occupation spread from Algiers into the mountains, along the seaboard, over the Atlas, into the desert, absorbing the neighboring land of Tunis, skirting the dangerous frontier of Morocco—and now the vitalizing and beneficent power of French civilization, as it might almost seem against the will of its masters, dominates a vast tract of doubtful empire whose issues are among the most interesting contingencies of the future of humanity. It is a great work that has been accomplished, but is greater in the tasks it opens than in those already achieved.

The policy of pacification and penetration is, indeed, one of the present glories of France. There has been fierce fighting, hard toils of war; the land has been the training-school of French generals; and were it known and written, the story of French campaigning in the mountains and the desert would prove to be one of those heroic chapters of fine deeds obscurely done, rich in personal worth, that of all military glory have most moral greatness. The esprit of the soldiers was like that of devoted and lost bands—they were there to die. But it belongs to military force to be initial and preparatory, occasional, in its active expression; thereafter, in its passivity, it is a guarantee; it is order. The great line of French administrative policy, whether playing through the army or beyond it, was, nevertheless, the child and heir of Napoleon’s idea; amity with Islam. To respect rites, usages, prejudices, to make the leaders of the people—chiefs, judges, religious heads—intermediaries of power, to find with patience and consideration the line of least resistance for civilization by means of the social and racial organization instead of in opposition thereto, and to display therewith not a spirit of cold, proud, and superior tolerance but a frank and interested sympathy—that, at least, was the ideal of the French way of empire. It had its disinterested elements—respect for humanity was implicit in it. What strikes the close student of the movement most is not the military advance but the extraordinary degree to which the military advance itself was impregnated with intelligence, scientific observation, scholarly interest, economic suggestion, engineering ambition, as if these French officers were less men of arms than pioneers of knowledge and public works. The publications through fifty years by men in the service on every conceivable topic relating to the land and its people in scientific, economic, and historical matters are innumerable; they constitute a thorough study of vast areas. Such a fact tells its own story—a story of devotion in a cause of civilization.

Peaceful penetration does not mean merely that the railroad has entered the Sahara, and the wire gone far beyond into its heart, and the express messenger crossed the great waste; nor that the school and, with it, the language are everywhere, subduing and informing the mind; nor that agricultural science, engineering skill, economic initiative, and even philanthropic endeavor, hospitals, hygiene, are at work, or beginning, or in contemplation; but it means the restoration of a great and almost forsaken tract of the earth—from the Mediterranean and Lake Tchad to the Niger and the Atlantic—with its populations, to the benefits of peaceful culture, safe commerce, humane conditions, and to fraternity with the rest of mankind. It is not the brilliant military scene that holds my eye in the packed avenue, with its double rows of trees shadowy in the air, lined with brilliant shops and stately urban buildings, opera, cathedral, residence—the familiar modern metropolitan scene in the electric glare; but I see the work of France all over the darkened land from the thousand miles of seacoast, up over the impenetrable Atlas ranges, down endless desert routes—carrying civilizing power, like a radiating force, through a new world.