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.
IX
Tunis is the gateway by which I entered this world—the new world of France, the old world of the desert. It was almost an accident of travel that I had come here, refuging myself from the life I had known, and seeking a place to forget and to repose, away from men. I had no thought of even temporary residence or exploration; but each day my interest deepened, my curiosity was enlivened, my sympathies warmed, and slowly I was aware that the land held me in its spell—a land of fantastic scenery, of a mysterious people, of a barbaric history and mise en scène, a land of the primitive. I coursed it from end to end.
The best description of North Africa as a visual fragment of the globe is that which delineates it as a vast triangular island, whose two northern horns lie, one off Spain at Gibraltar, the other, with a broader strait, off Sicily—with a southward wall overlooking the ocean-like Sahara, and running slantingly to the Atlantic, whose seaboard makes the narrow base of the triangle. This immense island is gridironed through its whole mass with mountains, ranging southwest and northeast, and hence not easily penetrable except at those remote ends; it is backed by table-lands of varying breadth between the Northern and the Saharan Atlas, which form its outer walls, and the conglomeration of successive ranges at varying altitudes, with their high plateaus, is cut with deep gullies, valleys, pockets, fastnesses of all sorts—a formidable country for defence and of difficult communication. Under the southern edge of the Saharan Atlas, like a long chain of infrequent islands, runs the line of oases in the near desert from the northeasterly tip of the lowlands of the isle of Djerba southwesterly the whole distance to the Atlantic, and here and there pressing deep into the waste of sand and rock; under the northern wall stretches the arable lowland here and there on the Mediterranean coast where lie the mountain-backed ports. At the highest points, in Morocco, lies perpetual snow, and the land is snow-roofed in winter.
Among these wild mountains in antiquity lived an indigenous blond race, whose blue-eyed, clear-complexioned descendants may still be met with there, and mixed with them a darker population from the sunburnt desert and lowlands, the Getulae and Numidians of history, of whom Jugurtha was a fine and unforgotten type; on these original and tenacious races, whose blood was inexpugnable, poured the immigrant human floods through the centuries from north and south, west and east, but the natives maintained their hold and the stock survived. The Punic immigration, with its great capital of Carthage, only touched the coast; the Romans established a great province in Tunisia, founded cities and garrisoned the country as far as the desert and into the Riff, and made punitive expeditions among the nomads to the south; the Visigoths flocked from Spain, overran the whole country, and passed away like sheets of foam; the Byzantines rebuilt the fortresses, and their hands fell away; the Arab hordes in successive waves carried Islam to the western ocean, and, settling, Arabized great tracts of the Berber blood, and made the land Moslem, but with a deeper impregnation than when it had been Romanized and Christianized; while through all the years of their slow and imperfect dominance new floods of fresh desert blood poured up from the Sahara, much as the barbarians fell from the north upon Rome. The massive island was thus always in the contention of the human seas, rising and falling; yet the Berber blood, the Berber spirit, continually recruited from the Sahara, seems never to have really given way; taking the changing colors of its invaders, it persisted—a rude, independent, democratic, fierce, much-enduring, untamable race. It wears its Islam in its own fashion. It keeps the other stocks, that dwell in it, apart; the Jews, the Turks, Italians, Maltese, Spaniards, are but colonies, however long upon the soil, and even though in some instances they adopt native costumes and ways. And now it is the turn of France—that is to say, of dominant Western civilization in its most humane and enlightened form.
How many interests were here combined! A land of natural wildness, of romantic and solemn scenes, of splendid solitudes and varying climates; a past dipped in all the colors of history; a race of physical competency, savage vitality, where the primitive ages still stamped an image of themselves in manners and actions and aspect; the fortunes of one of the great present causes of humanity, to be paralleled with Egypt and India, a work of civilization! It could not but prove a fine adventure. And so I turned nomad, and fared forth. Bedouin boys, rich with my last Tunisian copper, gave me delighted good-bys as they ran after my carriage, screaming bright-eyed; and I felt as if I had already friends in the lonely, silent land as the long level spans of the high aqueduct marched backward, and the train sped on.