IN OTHER LANDS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 261, 3 November 1928, Page 17 (Supplement)

IN OTHER LANDS

OUTPOSTS OF EMPIRE A FRENCH KHYBER PASS (By Sir Valentine Chirol). (In the following articles Sir Valentine Chirol, the distinguished journalist. tells a few of his reminiscences of many years of travel in the Near, Middle, and Ear East.) {Some solution had to be found for the pruuicm of keeping the wild tribesmen on the barren, rocK-girt borderland uf Arglianistan under sulhcient restraint to deter them from harrying the mure settled districts under direct British administration without driving them into such violent resistance as in the great Tirah rising of 1898, whilst ai»o securing a safe passage for the native caravans that traded between Northern India and Afghanistan. So a broa.l belt had been defined and proclaimed as “independent territory,” in which the Afridis were left free to follow their own primitive customs, including their endless tribal and family ven deltas, on the one condition that they respected the Pax Britannica on the Knyber Road itself, which was only guarded at long intervals by three isolated forts nelu by small detachments, not of British troops but of local militia under Biit’sh ollicers It'was an extraordinary achievement. The individual Afridi was soon ready to join, of his own free will, a corps like the Khyber Rifles, and, having once donned a smart but tight-fitting uniform which at first sorely irked him, he passed suddenly from his wonted atmosphere of lawlessness into one of orderly routine under military discipline: at the cud of his appointed time of service he put on his old rags again and passed Lack just as suddenly into his old life. The secret of his cheerful loyalty to his British ollicers was that they understood him ami liked him for his fine manly qualities, and were ready even to make allowances for the old Adam that was still in him. Marshal Lyautey. Until I went for the first time to Morocco, more than twenty years later, I liked to believe with most Englishmen that our people had a monopoly of the peculiar qualities of pluck and initiative and endurance, combined with good nature and a keen sense of humour, essential for the sort of work I had seen them doing on thy North-west Frontier, With all my admiration for French, it was a complete revelation to me that they also could possess much the same qualities. Boon after 1 l ad landed at Casablanca, in Decern ber, 1923, 1 met the great French sol dicr and administrator Marshal Lyautey, who had steered the Protectorate safely through the very critical years of the Great War, and by his unfailing consideration for Moorish customs and beliefs had so largely allayed the original hostility of the country to the French occupation that he had even been able to send the bulk of the French garrison back to the battlefields of France and to rely, with the authority of the Moorish Sultan behind him, on local forces and the famous Foreign Legion, consisting, strangely enough, very largely of Germans, for the maintenance of order.

Nevertheless, there were large wild and mountainous tracts in the Middle Atlas in which the Berber tribesmen still stubbornly withstood French “penetration’ 7 just as they had often defied the tyranny of their Moorish rulers. But around the area officially known as “territoire insoumis” the French had resorted to a system which, as Marshall Lyautey explained it to me, seemed to resemble so closely the system adopted on our North-western Frontier when I had visited it that 1 asked him whether it would be possible for me to see it working on the spo’.. He willingly assented and promised to give me all the necessary facilities. So in glorious wintry weather I started from Mcknes on a motor tour of about 100 miles to Ain Leu and Timidhat, two of the French advanced posts in the Middle Atlas. After sleeping a night at Azaru, a small town in relatively settled territory, the road to Ain Leu, picketed at long intervals by Algerian Spahis, lay for the most part through fine oak and cedar forests, sometimes sprinkled with snow. But to Timidhat it rose over a succession of desolate plateaux, swept by a keen wind from the snow-clad Atlas. The meagre patches of cultivated land grew more and more rare, and the solitude was only broken by a few scattered Berber encampments. The Berbers A hard-bitten race, as to whose origin ethnologists are not yet agreed, the Berbers differ widely in complexion and in temperament from the softer lowland population we call Moorish. They speak a different language, and, though they also profess to be Mohammedans, their religion sits more lightly upon them; they cling to their own tribal laws ami customs even when at variance with Islamic orthodoxy. The Frenchmen are extremely friendly and as enthusiastic as any British Frontier officers over their peculiar and intensely solitary work and in each place we spent some delightful hours comparing notes on Indian and French frontier policies and methods whilst each impressed upon us. with a wealth of picturesque tales, what far finer fellows his own wild Berber tribesmen were than others with whom his less fortunate comrades had to deal in less favoured districts. Another point also was clearly brought home to me—namely, that th e Frenchman’s relations with natives are inclined to be much more intimate and more familiar than ours as a rule are, because ho is generally far more free from colour prejudice.