‘Perhaps I can do so in a few minutes, if you stay by me.’
The general passed within a few yards, and, ignoring us, went back to the ambulance brigade to see a wounded man of the Foreign Legion. We followed him and took his photograph as he shook hands with the trooper on the litter.
‘Good picture,’ I said.
‘Rotten,’ said the Scot. ‘They’ll think in London that I got Drude to pose; the wounded chap hadn’t a bloodstain on him and he smoked a cigarette.’
We had not long to wait, however, before an example of real misery came to our view. A Goumier covered with blood, riding a staggering wounded horse, brought in a Moor without a stitch of clothes, tied by a red sash to his saddle. Captor, captive, and horse fell to the ground almost together. The Goumier had been shot in the chest, and expired while his fellow horsemen relieved him of his purple cloak and his turban and gave him water. The Moor (who had been taken in the fire at Taddert) was a mass of burns from head to foot. On one hand nothing remained but stumps of fingers, and loose charred flesh hung down from his legs. Well might the French have shot this creature; but they bound up his wounds.
At one o’clock the Arab camp was a mass of smouldering rags, while Taddert blazed from every corner. The day’s work was done. Long parallel lines of men marching single file in open order trailed over the stony ground back towards the white walled city.
CHAPTER V
NO QUARTER
On the next excursion with the French I happened to see the shooting of six prisoners. We set out from camp as usual at early morning and moved up the coast for a distance of eight miles, with the object of examining a well which in former dry seasons supplied Casablanca with water and was now no doubt supplying the Arabs round about. By marching in close formation and keeping always down in the slopes between hills we managed to get to the well and to swing a troop of Goumiers round it without being noticed by a party of thirteen Moors, of whom only three were properly mounted.
The unlucky thirteen had no earthly chance. The Goumiers swept down upon them, killing seven, and taking prisoners the remaining six. As I was marching with the artillery at the time, I missed this little engagement, and my first knowledge of it was when the prisoners trailed by me on foot: six tall, gaunt, brown men, bare-legged, and three of them bare-headed, none clad in more than a dirty cotton shirt that dragged to his knees. They moved in quick, frightened steps, keeping close to one another and obeying their captors implicitly. Allah had deserted them and their souls were as water. The Goumiers, fellow Mohammedans and devout—I have seen them pray—followed on tight-reined ponies, riding erect in high desert saddles, their coloured kaftans thrown back from their sword-arms—brown men these too, with small black eyes and huge noses. French soldiers of the Foreign Legion drove three undersized asses, carrying immense pack-saddles of straw and sacking meant to pad their skinny backs and to keep a rider’s feet from trailing ground. They were too small to be worth halter or bridle, and the soldiers prodded them on with short, pointed sticks, that brought to my mind Stevenson’s ‘Travels with a Donkey.’ One of the Frenchmen brought along a gun, a long-barrelled Arab flintlock, an antiquated thing safer to face than to fire. Besides this, I was told, one of the prisoners had carried a bayonet fastened with a hemp string to the end of a stick; the others seem to have been unarmed. They were indeed a poor bag.
Without the least idea that such prisoners would be shot, I did not follow to their summary trial, but moved, instead, over to a spring, where some artillerists were watering their horses, while a dozen sporting tortoises stirred the mud. The gunners had bread and water, while I had none. Bread and water are heavy on campaign, and a few cigarettes I had found were good barter. My cigarettes were distributed and we were just beginning our breakfast, when a man standing up called our attention to the Goumiers coming our way again with the Moors. They were walking in the same order, the prisoners first in a close group, moving quickly on foot, not venturing to look back, the Goumiers, probably twenty, riding steady on hard bits.