The sharp lesson, then the goodwill; and always even during the infliction of the lesson, fair dealing between man and man, and nothing taken without payment on the spot. This, the traditional policy of the great French Governors, was carried out in Fez. Only the lesson was not so sharp as many thought it should have been. But the policy achieved its end, and it was not long before many a Fasi, like his kinsmen of the Chaiou?a, would proudly assure you that he was a Frenchman. The work of settlement and order could be transferred to other regions, and Gerard de Montignac went with it. He served in the mountains about Taza during the autumn of that year, and then went upon long leave. He was in Paris for Christmas, and there, amidst its almost forgotten lights and brilliancies, took his pleasures like a boy. He hunted in the Landes, returned to Morocco, and a year later, after a campaign in the country south of Marrakesch, got his step and the command of his battalion. For three months afterwards he was stationed at Meknes and drew his breath. He had the routine of his work to occupy his mornings, and in this city of wide spaces and orchards to engross his afternoons. Meknes with the ruined magnificence of its palaces of dead kings, its huge crumbling stables, the great gate of mosaic built through so many years by so many captives of the Sallee pirates, and so many English prisoners from Tangier; that other gate hardly less beautiful to the north of the town; its groves of olives; its long crumbling crenellated walls reaching out for miles into the country with no reason, and with no reason abruptly ending—Meknes satisfied the ?sthetic side of him as no other city in that enchanted country. He delighted in it as a woman in her jewels.
But in the autumn the Zarhoun threatened trouble for the hundredth time—the Zarhoun, that savage mountain mass with its sacred cities which frowns above the track from Meknes to Rabat and through which the narrow path from Tangier to Fez is cleft. It was decided that the sacred cities must at last throw open their gates and the Zarhoun be brought into line. The work was entrusted to Gerard de Montignac.
“You will have a mixed battalion of infantry, a squadron of Chasseurs, a section of mitrailleuses, and a couple of mountain guns,” said the Commander-in-Chief. “But I think you will not need to use them. It will be a demonstration, a reconnaissance in force, rather than an attack.”
Thus one morning of June, Gerard led his force northwards over the rolling plain, onto the higher ground, and marching along the flank of Djebel Zarhoun, camped that night close to the tall columns and broken arches of Volubilis. In front of the camp, a mile away, dark woods of olive trees mounted the lower slopes, and above them the sacred city of Mulai Idris clung to the mountain sides, dazzlingly white against the sombre hill and narrowing as it rose to an apex of one solitary house. In the failing light it had the appearance of a gigantic torrent, which, forcing itself through a tiny cleft, spread fanwise as it fell, in a cascade of foam.
There was no fighting, as the Commander-in-Chief had predicted. At nine o’clock the next morning the Basha, followed by three of his notable men, rode down on their mules through the olive groves, and, being led to the little tent over which floated the little red flag of the commander, made his obeisance.
“I will go back with your Excellency into the city,” said Gerard, and he gave orders that a company of tirailleurs should escort him.
Thus, then, an hour later they set out: Gerard riding ahead with the Basha upon his right, the notables behind, and behind them again the company of tirailleurs advancing in column of platoons with one Captain Laguessière at their head. When they reached the first of the rising ground, Gerard reined in his horse and stared about him.
The Basha, a portly man with a black beard, smiled with a flash of white teeth and the air of one expecting compliments. He did not get them, however. Gerard’s face wore, indeed, a quite unfriendly look. He turned round in his saddle.
“Captain Laguessière.”
Laguessière, who had halted his company, rode up to Gerard’s side.
“Do you see?”
“Yes, my Commandant. I have been wondering for the last few minutes whether it was possible. If these fellows had put up a fight we might have lost a lot of men.”
“Yes,” said Gerard, shortly.
To the right and left of the track which led up to the gate of the town, very well placed, just on the first rise of the ground, were fire trenches. Not roughly scooped shallow depressions, but real trenches scientifically constructed. Deep and recessed and with traverses at short intervals. The inside walls were revetted; arm rests had been cut for the riflemen, the earth dug from the trenches had been used for parapets and these had been turfed over for concealment; there were loopholes, artfully hidden by bunches of grass or little bundles of branches and leaves. Communication trenches ran back and—nothing so struck Gerard de Montignac with surprise as this—the extra earth had been built into parapets for dummy trenches, so that the fire of the attacking force might be diverted from those which were manned.
The surprise of the two officers caused the Moors the greatest satisfaction. The three notables were wreathed in smiles. The Basha laughed outright.
“They are good,” he said, nodding his head.
“Too good,” replied Gerard, gravely. “But it is as well that you did not use them against us.”
To the Moors this rejoinder seemed the very cream of wit. The Basha rocked in his saddle at the mere idea that his trenches could have been designed against the French.
“No, indeed! We are true friends of your Excellency and your people. We know that you are just and very powerful too. These trenches were intended to defend our sacred city from the Zemmour.”
“Oh, the Zemmour! Of course,” exclaimed Gerard, openly scoffing.
The Zemmour were turbulent and aggressive and marauders to a man. They lived in the Forest of Mamora and sallied out of it far afield. But they were also the bogey men of the countryside. You threatened your squalling baby with the Zemmour, and whatever bad thing you had done, you had done it in terror of the Zemmour.
The Basha was undisturbed by Gerard de Montignac’s incredulity.
“Yes, the Zemmour are very wicked people,” he said, smiling virtuously and apparently quite unconscious that he himself presided over a city of malefactors and cutthroats. “But now that you have taken us poor people under your protection we feel safe.”
Gerard smiled grimly and Captain Laguessière stroked his fair moustache and remarked: “He has a fine nerve, this old bandit.”
“And when did you expect the Zemmour?” asked Gerard.
“Two weeks, three weeks ago. They sent word that they would attack us on a certain night, so that we might be ready.”
“And then they didn’t come?” said Gerard.
“No.”
Captain Laguessière laughed, incredulous of the whole story. But Gerard recognised a simple form of humour thoroughly Moroccan. To warn your enemy that you meant to attack him, to keep him on the watch and thoroughly alarmed all night and then never to attack him at all—that might well seem to the Zemmour a most diverting stroke of wit. The Zemmour, after all, were not so very far from Zarhoun.
“I wonder,” said Gerard.
“I don’t, my Commandant,” replied Captain Laguessière. “I think that if they hadn’t seen our mountain guns passing up the track below, we should have found these trenches manned this morning.”
Gerard turned about on his horse and looked down onto the plain.
“Yes. They could see very clearly. That’s the explanation—so far.”
He gave his attention once more to the construction of the trenches.
“And who taught you to make those trenches, my friend?” Gerard asked, looking keenly at the Basha. The Basha answered composedly:
“It was Allah who put it into our heads. Allah protecting the holy city where Mulai Idris lies buried.”
“That’s all very fine,” Captain Laguessière observed. “But then who lent Allah his copy of the Manual of Field Engineering?”
“Exactly,” Gerard agreed with a laugh. “I think we had better find that out. No Moor that ever I met with would take the time and trouble, even if he had the skill, to work out——” and the laugh died off his lips. He turned suddenly startled eyes upon his companion. “Laguessière!” he exclaimed, and again, in a lower key, “Yes, Laguessière! I was sure that I had never met you before.”
“Not until this expedition, my Commandant.”
“Yet your name was familiar to me. I did not think why. I was too busy to think why. But I remember now. You were in Fez two years ago. Yes, I remember now.”
His face darkened and hardened and grew very menacing as he sat with moody eyes fixed upon the ground and seeing visions of old and pleasant days leap into life and fade. “Volubilis, too!” he said in a low voice. “Yes, just below those olives.”
Strange that he should have seen the columns and broken arches yesterday and again this morning, and only thought of them with wonder as the far-flung monuments of the old untiring Rome! And never until this moment as things of great and immediate concern to him—signs perhaps for him to read and not neglect. For of all the pictures which he saw changing and flickering upon the ground, two came again and again. He saw Baumann and his friends riding in the s............