“Why will they not let us women go too!” cried another mother. “We could kill all the Moras [female Moors] and then they would bring no more little Moors into the world to be the ruin of Spain.”
It was curious to observe how the eternal race-hatred came out at the very name of Moor—the tradition of the long contest between Christian and Moslem. The Moors of Morocco cannot be held to have inflicted any serious injury on the nation for many centuries past, yet such is the force of ancient tradition among the peasantry that the very name of Moro calls forth the cry, “They are the ruin of Spain,” and if you ask for an explanation you will be told that “The Moors are always pressing upon us and trying to take our country from us.”
One pathetic yet humorous incident was related by the Infanta Doña Paz (aunt to Don Alfonso) in a letter which she wrote to the Press about this time, exhorting her fellow-countrywomen to have patience and be of good courage. Describing her experiences of the patriotism of the men and the devotion of the women, she told how a poor mother, learning that her son was ordered to report himself for service, followed him from village to village, as he pursued his avocation of pedlar, carrying his regimental trousers, which had been put away in the family clothes-chest. When she found him at last, there was barely time for him to catch the appointed train, and the two hurried together to the station with the trousers flapping like a flag as they ran.
The sons of mothers like these do not shirk their duty when called upon to fight for their country. I believe that if the whole truth were told, we should find that no one was more indignant at the protest supposed to have been initiated by the working classes of Barcelona than the reservists whose grievances were its ostensible object.
Fresh from an exceptionally rough crossing, weak with sea-sickness, rusty in their drill after three years of home life, the reservists who sailed from Barcelona found themselves led straight from the ship on to the field of battle. This I had from a naval officer on the man-of-war that took them out.
“If they had been veterans,” he said, “such a situation would have been trying to them, and they were only raw fellows who hardly remembered the words of command. And yet I tell you they behaved with such courage and
A RESERVIST At THE FRONT.
[To face page [208].