FRANCE’S BLACK EMPIRE

Evening Star, Issue 20687, 9 January 1931, Page 12

FRANCE’S BLACK EMPIRE

HUMORED MILLION AFRICANS Julius Csesar built his empire and held it together with good roads, stone roads over which the famous Iron legions of Rome tramped from one cud to the otho of the world as it then existed (writes Henry Wales, in a special despatch from Fez to the Chicago ‘Tribune’). Marshal Lyautcy, French military Governor of Morocco, for a dozen years, fron 1912 to 1924, emulated his genial predecessor, and made road construction the key of his policy. It yielded such good results that his successors have continued it, and ;n\ now extending the roads in all directions. , ' Before Lyautey started to work the roads in Morocco were like they are to-day in the Spanish, zone, and even in Tripoli—as Mussolini has not yet adopted his famous countryman’s policy. Just paths and trails covered in a foot of dust for nine months in the year and quagmires the other three. It was impossible to move transport over them, it was dangerous to attempt to penetrate away from the coast, because columns driven into the desert could be cut off by raiding tradesmen, ■tarved out, and massacred. So Lyautey set to work. He impressed all the natives in the protectorate to help, and they began Freaking stone, grading, digging ditches on either side, and then constructing good wide, well-ballasted roads. Lyautey got oil from France to tar his thoroughfares, and they have been kept up ever since. , ~ After fifty years of possession the Spaniards were never able to strike through from Tctuan to Chechouan, sixty miles, on a decent road, and as a result their force thero was surrounded, pinched off, and decimated during the retreat in 1924 because no reinforcements nor supplies could be Armoured cars and light tanks that General Primo Da Rivera had purchased in England and 1' ranee to quell Abel el Krim sprawled beside the dirt road, mired and unable to move. When the French took a hand in the Riff campaign they troops up to a dozen points on the French side of the frontier, and then started a converging attack which soon had Abd el Krim suing for peace. . While the motor cars of the transit companies and tourists race down the hard roads the burros and camels and miserable horses of the Arabs, and these gents themselves on foot, wander along on the path beside. The rock roads are too hard on the unshod ieet of their animals and on their own tootAs one travels for miles and miles over this region lie wonders why colonists try to force a meagre living from the dry, baked, inhospitable earth when there are other places where results con'd be obtained so much easier. Mile afte l mile the country is just sand and rocks, with tiny little bushes like sagebur 1, , and at rare intervals where there is water the dreadful ncin, castor oil plant, and a few stiaggy palms. . . , L i But North Africa is what makes Franco ap empire and enables her to boast of a hundred million population from the Niger north, mostly blade. The empire school, in the I'rcnch army, which is well represented on the General Staff, thinks very highly of the blackslidcr, the Senegalese, and all the rest of his tribesmen, despite the sorry showing thev made in the World War. . The thesis" is imbedded in the 1* rench navy, and the principal cause of the Franco-Italinn deadlock on relative strengths lies in the Paris Government’s determination to maintain a sufficient fleet to guarantee safe passage of her black man power fiom Africa across the Mediterranean to Marseilles* at such time ns she may need it. It is a curious contradiction that while the French General Staff stresses the need fo. credits, continually larger appropriations for national defence to enable the mechanisation of the army, and insists that the war of the future will be a machine war, it also holds tenaciously to the Manpin doctrine which focusv-s on !hc hundred million black man power in Africa. Just as the British tried their contingents from India and found them worthless against high explosive and machine gun fire, so the French tested their Senegalese and other black detachments on the western front, and found them fit only for cannon fodder and not too good even at that. The fanatical courage of the Algerian and Moroccan troops was glorious, but they form only a tiny proportion of tho horde of 'blacks which the staff coqnts on utilising in a future war. Morocco and Algeria have a new bone of contention in this connection, each territory fighting bitterly_ to ensure that the projected trans-Saharun railway traverse its country to tap the black man power of tho Nigerian jungles. The Paris Government has various proposed _ routes under consideration and it is expected that part of Tardieu’s five billion franc development fund will ho apportioned out to begin work on this line next year.