France's Black Empire

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 3 January 1931, Page 9

France's Black Empire

J- ULIUS CAESAR built his empire and held it together with good roads, stone roads over which the famous Iron Legions of " Rome tramped from one end to the other of the world as it then existed, writes Henry Wales, in a special dispatch from Fez to the Chicago ‘ ‘ Tribune. Marshal Lyautey, French military governor of Morocco, for a dozen years, from 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 are right 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 tlie desert could be cut off by raiding tribesmen, starved out and massacred. So Lyautey set to work. He impressed all the natives in the protectorate to help, and they began breaking 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 thev have been kept up ever since. After fifty years of possession the Spaniards were never able to strike through from Tetuan to Chechouan, 60 miles, on a decent road, and as a result their force there was surrounded, pinched off and decimated during the retreat in 1924 because no reinforceemnts nor supplies could he got up. Armoured cars and light tanks that General Primo de Rivera had purchased in England and France to quell Abd el Krim sprawled beside the dirt road, mired and unable to move. When the French took a hand in the Riff campaign they sprinted 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, 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 feet of their animals and on their own tootsies.

A Hundred Million Africans

Their Part in Future War

As one tarvels 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 could be obtained so much easier. Mile after mile the country is just sand and rocks, with tiny little bushes like sagebush, and, at rare intervals, where there is water, the dreadfid, ricin, castor oil plant, and a few straggly palms.

But North Africa is what makes France an empire and enables her to boast of a hundred million population from the Niger north, mostly black. The empire school in the French army, which is well represented on the general staff, thinks very highly of the black soldier, the Senegalese, and all the rest of his tribesmen, despite the sorry showing they made in the world war.

The thesis is imbedded firmly in the French navy, and the principal cause of the Franeo-Italian 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 from Africa across the Mediterranean to Marseilles at such time as she may need it.

It is a curious contradiction that while the French general'staff, stresses the need of 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 Mangin doctrine which focusses on the hundred million black man power in Africa.

Just as the British tided their contingents from India and found them worthless against high explosive and machine gun fire, so the French tested their Senegalese and other 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 portion of the horde of blacks which the staff counts on utilising in a future war.

Morocco and Algerian have a new bone of contention in this connection, each territory fighting bitterly to ensure that the projected frans-Saharan railway traverse its territory, to tap the black man power of the 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 be apportioned out to begin on this line next year.