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If the theme of war slipped in it was discussed with an intellectual contempt, and loose-lipped old men found a frightful mirth in the cut-throat exploits of Moroccans and Senegalese, in the bestial orgies of drunken Boches, and in the most revolting horrors of bayonet charges and the corps-a-corps.
On the wharves swarmed all kinds of Mediterranean men, Greeks from the continent and from the islands, Levantines from the coast of Asia, Spaniards, Italians, Algerians, Moroccans, Egyptians. Many had kept their original costume and to this varied picturesque garb was united a diversity of tongues, some of them mysterious and well-nigh extinct.
The people of the country were strongly in favor of Abd-el-Kader; and when their Sultan, after a French bombardment of Tangiers and Mogador, made a treaty with France by which the Algerian hero was "placed beyond the pale of the law throughout the Empire of Morocco, as well as in Algeria," and was to be "pursued by main force by the Moroccans on their own territory," the Moorish population was filled with resentment.
The Moroccans of the plain are an industrious and money-loving people, and the sight of these rapidly improvised exhibitions, where the industrial and artistic products of France and other European countries were shown in picturesque buildings grouped about flower-filled gardens, fascinated their imagination and strengthened their confidence in the country that could find time for such an effort in the midst of a great war.
You wondered if they were French, Italians, Belgians, English, Australians, Canadians, Moroccans, Algerians, or Americans. It was too dark to see, but suddenly you heard a familiar voice saying, "Gosh, I wish I was back in little ole New York," and you made a grab in the darkness for that lad's hand. All during your trip no trainman appears.
Behind them their respective troops were drawn up, and almost as soon as the first salutes were exchanged the Caïd declared the negotiations broken off. The French troops accordingly withdrew to the coast, but during their retreat they were attacked by the Moroccans. This put an end to peaceful negotiations, and Tangier was besieged and taken.
Amongst the passengers there were five members of the family which the Bakri had succeeded as kings of the Jews; two ostrich-feather merchants, Moroccans; Captain Krog, from Berghen in Norway, who had sold his ship at Alicant; two lions sent by the Dey to the emperor Napoleon, and a great number of monkeys. Our voyage was prosperous.
Raisuli, apologising for delay on the ground that he had been away in the Isle of Dogs cracking a crib, wrote suggesting that the Germans and Moroccans should combine with a view to playing the Confidence Trick on the Swiss general, who seemed a simple sort of chap. "Reminds me of dear old Maclean," wrote Raisuli. "There is money in this. Will you come in? Wire in the morning."
Strange that they should have caught it! Their expression was the same as that which I had noticed on the Tailleurs, the Foreign Legion and the Moroccans the crack troops of France.... So they had become that already! At the first hint of danger, their courage had taken command; they had risen into soldiers.
Leaving Koritza, a clean, well-kept town of perhaps 10,000 people, which was occupied when we were there by a battalion of black troops from the French Sudan and some Moroccans, we went snorting up the Peristeri Range by an appallingly steep and narrow road, higher, higher, always higher, until, to paraphrase Kipling, we had
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