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Updated: June 14, 2025
One of the few peaceful camping-grounds between Marrakesh and Mazagan was at a little distance outside an Arab village of about thirty little pointed thatched huts, enclosed within a zareba of thorn-bushes: it was called Smeera.
It was a patch of rock cropping up from the summit of a sand-hill that fell away from it on all sides, and was just about the size required for the zareba. The camels were unloaded and the bundles of forage laid down side by side and formed into a square, the wall being some four feet thick and two feet high.
"Well, if you've any proposition, pasha, I'll take it to him. I'll be seeing him to-night." "I can give him fifty thousand pounds." "It isn't enough to save the situation, pasha." "It will help him over the first zareba." "Are there any conditions?" "There are no conditions, effendi." "And interest?" "There would be no interest in money." "Other considerations?"
They fastened me to a tree behind the trench, just inside the zareba, and I should certainly have been killed by our own musketry fire, had not my boy, who had come into the camp in disguise, cut my cords. I fell as if shot, and he threw himself down on me; until the Camerons burst in, when I at once joined them, and did what little I could in the fight."
No zareba would be raised, for there would be many a long march before the caravan reached perilous country. Here a fire could be built, for there was no danger in showing smoke and raising a rose-red glow against the silver. The unveiled women, whom Stanton had diplomatically allowed to accompany their husbands, began to cook supper for the men; couscous and coffee and thin, ash-baked bread.
As soon as this had marched out the first brigade followed, taking its place in echelon a hundred yards on its right rear, so that its fire commanded its right flank and protected it from an attack in the rear. It consisted of the 89th, 75th, and 60th Rifles, under General Buller. The camels and baggage animals remained under a guard at the zareba.
The outposts got together and stood back to back, forming rallying squares which the enemy could not break; the Berkshire men who were cutting bush rushed back to the zareba where the small naval brigade was suffering severely, for the guns not being in position the enemy got into the square, but so quickly did the Berks men follow them and recover their weapons, that, though 124 Arabs got into the square no Arab came out again.
Two of the three Egyptian battalions of Lewis's brigade were placed on the left rear of the British brigade, the third battalion was in square round the camels. Two field batteries were in front of the infantry, and two to the right of Maxwell's brigade. Half a mile from the zareba the infantry halted, and the artillery and Maxims opened fire.
Things irritated him acutely, which before he had accepted as inevitable his Uncle Donald's moustache, for instance, and its owner's habit of employing it during meals as a sort of zareba or earthwork against the assaults of soup. "By gad!" thought Ginger, stopping suddenly opposite Devonshire House. "If he uses that damned shrubbery as soup-strainer to-night, I'll slosh him with a fork!"
He had been greatly exhausted by the night march and had had a slight sunstroke before the square moved out; the doctors had therefore ordered him not to accompany it, but to stay at the zareba and assist the general and other wounded. "You are looking very shaky, Clinton," Easton said when he joined him.
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