<h2><SPAN name="son-of-a-sheik"></SPAN>Son of a Sheik</h2>
<p><br/></p>
<p><span>The smell of the warm slime on the Jeliffe
River and the sweet, heavy and sickening
odour that exhaled into the unspeakable heat
of the desert air from the bunches of dead and
scorched water-reeds are with me yet; also the sight
of the long stretch of dry mud bank, rising by
shallow and barely perceptible degrees to the edge of
the desert sands, and thus disclosed by the
shrinkage of the Jeliffe during the hot months. The
mud banks were very broad and very black except
where they touched the desert; here the sand had
sifted over them in light transparent sprinklings.
In rapidly drying under the sun of the Sahara, they
had cracked and warped into thousands of tiny
concave cakes that looked, for all the world, like
little saucers in which Indian ink has been mixed.
(If you are an artist, as was Thévenot, you will the
better understand this.)</span></p>
<p><span>Then there was the reach of the desert that
drew off on either hand and rolled away, ever so
gently, toward the place where the hollow sky
dropped out of sight behind the shimmering
horizon, swelling grandly and gradually like some
mighty breast which, panting for breath in the
horrible heat, had risen in a final gasp and had
then, in the midst of it, suddenly stiffened and
become rigid. On this colourless bosom of the
desert, where nothing stirred but the waxing light
in the morning and the waning light in the night,
lay tumbled red and gray rocks, with thin drifts
of sand in their rifts and crevices and grey-green
cacti squatting or sprawling in their blue shadows.
And there was nothing more, nothing, nothing,
except the appalling heat and the maddening silence.</span></p>
<p><span>And in the midst of it all,—we.</span></p>
<p><span>Now "we" broadly and generally speaking, were
the small right wing of General Pawtrot's division
of the African service; speaking less broadly and
less generally, "we" were the advance-guard of
said division; and, speaking in the narrowest and
most particular sense, "we" were the party of
war-correspondents, specials, extras, etc., who were
accompanying said advance-guard of said wing of
said army of said service for reasons herein to be
set forth.</span></p>
<p><span>As the long, black scow of the commissariat
went crawling up the torpid river with the
advance-guard straggling along upon the right, "we" lay
upon the deck under the shadow of the scow's
awning and talked and drank seltzer.</span></p>
<p><span>I forget now what led up to it, but Ponscarme
had said that the Arabs were patriotic, when Bab
Azzoun cut in and said something which I shall
repeat as soon as I have told you about Bab Azzoun himself.</span></p>
<p><span>Bab Azzoun had been born twenty-nine years
before this time, at Tlemcen, of Kabyle parents
(his father was a sheik). He had been
transplanted to France at the age of ten, and had
flourished there in a truly remarkable manner.
He had graduated fifth from the Polytéchnique;
he had written books that had been "</span><em class="italics">couronné
par l'Académie</em><span>"; he had become naturalised; he
had been prominent in politics (no one can cut a
wide swath in Paris in anything without hitting
against </span><em class="italics">la politique</em><span>;) he had occupied important
positions in two embassies; he was a diplomat of
no mean qualities; he had influence; he dressed in
faultless French fashion; he had owned "Crusader";
he had lost money on him; he had applied
to the government for the office of "</span><em class="italics">Sous-chef-des
bureaux-Arabes dans l'Oran</em><span>," in order to recoup;
he had obtained it; he had come on with "us", and
was now on this, his first visit to his fatherland
since his tenth year, on his way to his post.</span></p>
<p><span>And when Ponscarme had spoken thus about
the patriotism of the Arabs, Bab Azzoun made
him answer: "The Arabs are not sufficiently
educated to be true patriots."</span></p>
<p><span>"Bah!" said Santander, "a man does not require
to be educated in order to be a patriot. And,
indeed, the rudest nations have ever been the most
devotedly patriotic."</span></p>
<p><span>"Yes," said Bab Azzoun, "but it is a narrow
and a very selfish patriotism."</span></p>
<p><span>"I can't see that," put in Ponscarme; "a patriot
is like an egg—he is either good or bad. There
is no such thing as a 'good enough egg,' there is
no such thing as a 'good enough patriot'—if a
man is one at all, he is a perfect one."</span></p>
<p><span>"I agree," answered Bab Azzoun; "yet patriotism
can be more or less narrow. Listen and I
will explain"—he raised himself from the deck on
his elbow and gestured with the amber mouth-piece
of his chibouk—"Patriotism has passed
through five distinct stages; first, it was only love
of family—of parents and kindred; then, as the
family grows and expands into the tribe, it, too,
as merely a large family, becomes the object of
affection, of patriotic devotion. This is the second
stage—the stage of the tribe, the dan. In the
third stage, the tribe has sought protection behind
the inclosure of walls. It is the age of cities;
patriotism is the devotion to the city; men are
Athenians ere Grecians, Romans ere Italians. In
the next period, patriotism means affection for
the state, for the county, for the province; and
Burgundian, Norman and Fleming gave freely of
their breast-blood for Burgundy, Normandy and
Flanders; while we of to-day form the latest, but
not the last, link of the lengthening chain by
honouring, loving and serving the </span><em class="italics">country</em><span> above all
considerations, be they of tribe, or town, or tenure.
Yet I do not believe this to be the last, the highest,
the noblest form of patriotism.</span></p>
<p><span>"No," continued Bab Azzoun, "this development
shall go on, ever expanding, ever mounting,
until, carried upon its topmost crest, we attain to
that height from which we can look down upon
the world as our country, humanity as our countrymen,
and he shall be the best patriot who is the
least patriotic."</span></p>
<p><span>"Ah-h, </span><em class="italics">fichtre</em><span>!" exclaimed Santander, listlessly,
throwing a cushion at Bab Azzoun's head; "</span><em class="italics">va te
coucher</em><span>. It's too hot to theorise; you're either a
great philosopher, Bab, or a large sized"—he
looked at him over the rim of his tin cup before
concluding—"idiot." ...</span></p>
<p><span>But Bab Azzoun had gone on talking in the
meanwhile, and now finishing with "and so you
must not blame me, if, looking upon them" (he
meant the Arabs) "and theirs, in this light, I find
this African campaign a sorry business for France
to be engaged in,—a vast and powerful government
terrorising into submission a horde of
half-starved fanatics," he yawned, "all of which is very
bad—very bad. Give me some more seltzer."</span></p>
<p><span>We were aroused by the sudden stoppage of the
scow. A detachment of "Zephyrs," near us upon
the right bank, scrambled together in a hollow
square. A battalion of Coulouglis, with </span><em class="italics">haik</em><span> and
</span><em class="italics">bournous</em><span> rippling, scuttled by us at a gallop, and
the Twenty-Third Chasseurs d'Afrique in the front
line halted at an "order" on the crest of a sand
ridge, which hid the horizon from sight. The
still, hot air of the Sahara was suddenly pervaded
with something that roused us to our feet in an
instant. Thévenot whipped out his ever-ready
sketch-book and began blocking in the landscape
and the position of the troops, while Santander
snatched his note-book and stylograph.</span></p>
<p><span>Of the scene which now gathered upon us, I
can remember little, only out of that dark chaos
can I rescue a few detached and fragmentary
impressions—all the more vivid, nevertheless, from
their isolation, all the more distinct from the grey
blur of the background against which they trace
themselves.</span></p>
<p><span>Instantly, somewhere disquietingly near, an
event, or rather a whirl of events that rushed and
writhed themselves together into a maze of dizzying
complexity, suddenly evolved and widened like
the fierce, quick rending open of some vast scroll,
and there were zigzag hurryings to and fro and
a surging heavenward of a torrent of noises, noises
of men and noises of feet, noises of horses and
noises of arms, noises that hustled fiercely upward
above the brown mass and closed together in the
desert air, blending or jarring one with another,
joining and separating, reuniting and dividing;
noises that rattled; noises that clanked; noises that
boomed, or shrilled, or thundered, or quavered.
And then came sight of blue-grey tumulous
curtains—but whether of smoke or dust, I could not
say, rumbling and billowing, bellying out with
the hot tempest-breath of the battle-demon that
raged within, and whose outermost fringes were
torn by serrated files of flashing steel and
wavering ranks of red.</span></p>
<p><span>And this was all at first. I knew we had
been attacked and that behind those boiling
smoke-billows, somewhere and somehow, men, infuriated
into beasts, were grappling and struggling, each
man, with every sinew on the strain, striving to kill
his fellow.</span></p>
<p><span>And now we were in the midst of a hollow
square of our soldiery, yet how we came there I
cannot recall, though I remember that the water
of the Jeliffe made my clothes heavy and
uncomfortable, although a mortal fear sat upon me of
being shot down by some of our own frenzied
soldiers. And then came that awful rib-cracking
pressure, as, from some outward, unseen cause,
the square was thrown back upon itself. And with
it all the smell of sweat of horses, and of men,
the odour of the powder-smoke, the blinding,
suffocating, stupefying clouds of dust, the horrible
fear, greater than all others, of being pushed down
beneath those thousands of trampling feet, the
pitch of excitement that sickens and weakens, the
momentary consciousness—vanishing as soon as
felt—that this was what men called "war," and
that we were experiencing the reality of what we
had so often read.</span></p>
<p><span>It was not inspiring; there was no romance, no
poetry about it; there was nothing in it but the
hideous jar, one against the other, of men drunk
with the blood-lust that eighteen hundred years
had not quenched.</span></p>
<p><span>I looked at Bab Azzoun; he was standing at the
gunwale of the scow (somehow we were back on
the scow again) with an unloaded pistol in his
hand. He was watching the battle on the bank.
His nostrils quivered, and he shifted his feet
exactly like an excited thorough-bred. On a
sudden, a trooper of the Eleventh Cuirassiers came
spinning round and round out of the brown of the
battle, gulping up blood, and pitched, wheezing,
face downwards, into the soft ooze where the river
licked at the bank, raising ruddy bubbles in the
water as he blew his life-breath in gasps into it,
and raking it into gridiron patterns as his quivering,
blue fingers closed into fists. Instantly afterward
came a mighty rush across the river beneath
our very bows. Forty-odd cuirassiers burst into it,
followed by eighty or a hundred Kabyles.</span></p>
<p><span>I can recall just how the horse-hoofs rattled on
the saucer-like cakes of dry mud and flung them
up in countless fragments behind them. They
were a fine sight, those Kabyles, with their fierce,
red horses, their dazzling white </span><em class="italics">bournouses</em><span>, their
long, thin, murderous rifle-barrels, thundering and
splashing past, while from the whole mass of them,
from under the shadow of every white </span><em class="italics">haik</em><span>, from
every black-bearded lip, was rolling their war-cry:
"Allah, Allah-il-Allah!"</span></p>
<p><span>Some long dormant recollections stirred in Bab
Azzoun at this old battle-shout. As he faced them
now, he was no longer the cold, cynical </span><em class="italics">boulevardier</em><span>
of the morning. He looked as he must have
looked when he played, a ten year-old boy, about
the feet of the horses in his father's black tent.
He saw the long lines of the </span><em class="italics">douars</em><span> of his native
home; he saw the camels, and the caravan crawling
toward the sunset; he saw the women grinding
meal; he saw his father, the bearded sheik; he saw
the Arab horsemen riding down to battle; he saw
the palm-broad spear-points and the blue yataghans.
In an instant of time all the long years of culture
and education were stripped away as a garment.
Once more he stood and stepped the Kabyle. And
with these recollections, his long-forgotten native
speech came rushing to his tongue, and in a long,
shrill cry, he answered his countrymen in their
own language:</span></p>
<p><span>"</span><em class="italics">Allah-il-Allah, Mohammed ressoul Allah.</em><span>"</span></p>
<p><span>He passed me at a bound, leaped from the scow
upon the back of a riderless horse, and, mingling
with the Kabyles, rode out of sight.</span></p>
<p><span>And that was the last I ever saw of Bab Azzoun.</span></p>
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