“I’ll send him a telegram,” said Gerard de Montignac.
Now this was in the spring of autumn, 1916, when Bartels was in the full bloom of power. His camp was full, for the danger was small, the pay high, and the discipline easy. The Moor brought his horse and his rifle, was paid so many dollars a day, and could go home if the pay failed or his harvest called him. But in the autumn Bartels in his turn began to suffer annoyance. Thus, on one occasion a strange humming filled the air, and a most alarming thing swooped out of the sky with a roar and dropped a bomb in the middle of the camp.
Bartels ran out of his hut with an oath. “They’ve located us at last,” he growled. Not one of his soldiers had ever seen an aeroplane before, except perhaps the man who was cowering down on the ground close to him with every expression of terror. Bartels jerked him up to his feet.
“What’s your name?”
“Ahmed Ben Larti.”
“They make a great noise, but they hurt no one,” Bartels declared. “Tell the others!”
The others were running for their lives to any sort of shelter. For, indeed, this sort of thing was worse than cannon. And unfortunately for Bartel’s encouragements, the aeroplane was coming back. It dropped its whole load of bombs in and around that camp, breaching the walls and destroying the huts and causing not a few casualties into the bargain. There was an exodus of some size from that camp under cover of the night, and Bartels the next morning thought it prudent to move.
He moved westwards into the country of the Braue’s, and there his second misfortune befell him. His month’s instalment of money did not come to hand. It should have travelled upon mules from Tetuan, and a rumour spread that the English had got hold of it. Nothing, of course, could be said; Bartels had just to put up with the loss and see a still further diminution of his army. Within a month the new camp was raided by aeroplanes, and Bartels had to move again. From a harrier of others he had sadly fallen to being harried himself.
“There is a traitor in the camp,” he said, and he consulted Abd-el-Malek and stray German visitors from Tetuan and Melilla. They suspected everybody who went away before the raids and came back afterwards. They never suspected men like Ahmed Ben Larti, who was always present in the camp on these occasions of danger, not overconspicuously present, but just noticeably present, running for shelter, for instance, or discharging his rifle at the aeroplane in a panic of terror. Bartels, however, carried on with constantly diminishing forces until the crops were ripening in the following year. Then the aeroplanes dealt with him finally.
Wherever he pitched his camp, there very quickly they found him out and burnt the crops for a mile around. The villages would no longer supply him with food; his army melted to a useless handful of men; he became negligible, a bandit on the move. Ahmed Ben Larti called off the little train of runners which had passed in his messages to French agents in Tetuan, and one dark evening slipped away himself. His work was done, and almost immediately his luck gave out.