“You will understand,” said the officer who told me the story, “why we who have seen such things feel that we cannot abandon our civilising mission in Morocco, although it may be years before we get any material return for the blood and money it is costing us now. But,” he went on to say, “every year we are making more friends among the tribes, and since 1909 we have been getting on very hopefully with our Spanish-Arabic schools and hospitals and colleges of agriculture and commerce, while our native troops are already the pride of our army in Morocco.”
But to return to the Jota, after this long digression. In the summer of 1909 things were going very badly indeed, and the Government, true to the time-honoured Spanish rule of directing a distant war from the arm-chairs of Ministerial offices in Madrid, ordered the General in command to make a frontal attack on the Gurugú, the peak which towers over Melilla. This was intended partly to dislodge, once for all, the hornet’s nest of sharp-shooters who were worrying the Spanish garrison, but mainly to silence by a brilliant victory the growing murmurs of the nation against a campaign which popular orators declared to have been begun in the interest of a few wealthy capitalists owning valuable mines in the immediate neighbourhood of Melilla.
The General, Marina, a good officer and able strategist, protested in vain. The orders were explicit. Public opinion was dangerously excited, and a brilliant and decisive action had to be fought at once. The attack was accordingly attempted, with the result that one of the infantry regiments was caught in an ambush, and a whole battalion of the Cazadores de las Navas was practically wiped out. Considerably over a thousand officers and men of that and other regiments fell in the Wolf’s Gorge of the Gurugú, and so complete was the defeat that for three months the bodies of those martyrs to duty and a preposterous governmental system could not be recovered.
On the night of the catastrophe the Colonel of the Cazadores went to offer what cheer he could to the few survivors of his ill-fated regiment. Heart-broken himself, he found no words to say to the heart-broken men who hardly had spirit enough to stand up and salute him—half their comrades dead, their soldierly pride humbled, their demoralisation seemingly beyond repair. But as he stood among them, silent and grief-stricken as themselves, he saw that one of the men, hardly conscious what he was doing, had picked up his guitar and was lightly touching the strings. It must here be explained that although the Cazadores de las Navas is a Catalan regiment, it is mostly recruited in Aragón.
“A gleam of hope entered my heart,” said the Colonel, when many days after he related what had taken place. “If only he would play loud enough to be heard he would save us; I know what their music means to the men of Aragón. I dared not speak, I was so afraid of putting him off, for if he had known I was there he would have dropped the guitar to stand at attention. But he went on, a little louder and a little louder, and another man took up the air, and then another, until at last all the regiment—all that was left of it—followed suit, and all began singing—
“‘La Virgen del Pilár dice
Que no quiere moros ni moras,
Que quiere ser capitana
De la tropa aragonesa.’[8]
“Very softly they sang at first, as if it were a dirge for their dead friends, but when they came to the chorus their voices rang out as bravely and gaily as if all were well with us—