by Pete Ayrton
‘Give yourself up!’
Three others, peeping out from behind their cover, echoed the cry – ‘Give yourself up!’
Mohamed who, as a matter of fact, had given himself up a long time ago, could not understand why four armed men should take so many precautions against an unarmed one, and wounded at that. When he saw the four men round him still afraid, and when he noticed their poor physique and small stature, Mohamed, the stubborn, magnificent Berber warrior, utterly despised them and, in spite of his wounded leg, prepared to fight them.
He let them approach closer, little by little. Hidden in the folds of his burnous he still had his scimitar, and his loaded rifle was in easy reach of his hand. He waited for the right moment then, rapidly pulling out his dangerous weapon, he plunged it, like lightning, full into the chest of his nearest assailant. He then stooped to grasp the rifle and, crouching, shot down a second man and turned to aim at a third who threw down his sporting-gun and started to run. But he had no time to shoot. The fourth militiaman, a goat-herd from the Sierras, stocky and strong, charged him head foremost like an infuriated ram and they fell to the ground in an embrace of hatred, both brimming with the lust to kill. They fought rolling and twisting; serpent and mongoose. The green eyes of the Berber were fixed on the dark eyes, injected with blood and bile, of the Castilian peasant. The Moor’s eyes flinched before the monstrous ferocity of the Spaniard’s look as the spirit of his ancestors had fallen in that other mortal embrace that lasted for eight centuries and ended with the conquest of Granada. The goat-herd stretched his short neck and, opening his jaws like a beast of prey, sunk his sharp, strong, wolfish teeth into the throat of the Moor who, in agony, made a supreme effort to rise, with his enemy still grasped in his arms and to throw him off; the strong jaws and teeth were tearing at his flesh. He tore himself away and with knife in hand he advanced to kill, but the goat-herd had seized a large sharp-edged stone and flung it at him, catching him on the forehead with a blow which felled him. Then, in blind fury, the Spaniard squeezed the Moor’s throat until his eyes bulged in their sockets.
The goat-herd only let go when he heard one of his wounded comrades call to him for help. He was bleeding from the knife-wound which was, however, less serious than it looked. The other militiaman had also had a narrow escape with a superficial flesh wound in the arm. The third militiaman had come back by then and, between the three of them, they lifted the Moor up and took him to a hut a short distance away where they threw him across a mule in order to take him in triumph to the nearest village.
They thought he was dead. Mohamed, however, had undoubtedly more than one life. In spite of a bullet through his leg, a ghastly wound in the forehead, a lacerated neck and the deep marks of the goat-herd’s hands on his throat, he was still alive; so much so, that when they halted for a moment to light a cigarette, he jumped to his feet with a supreme effort, but this proved too much for him and he fell down.
‘Shall we finish him off?’ asked the militiaman who had run away in a panic. He caught hold of his sporting gun by the barrel and was ready to use it on the Moor’s head as a club.
‘No. Let us take him alive to the village,’ said the goat-herd.
‘When I killed a wolf in the Sierras and brought him to the village, they paid me twenty-five pesetas. For a live Moor they ought to give us one hundred at least.’
While still discussing how much they would get for their quarry, they replaced the Moor across the back of the mule, and tied his hands together with a stout cord, and started off in the direction of Montreal, the village whose church spire could be seen in the distance.
Secured with a rope to the mule’s pack saddle, the Moor’s head dangled near the ground, and their progress was marked by a bloody track.
The village was situated at the bottom of a valley under the shadow of the Gredos mountains, and the Almanzor and Galayos peaks stood like gigantic sentinels, barring the passage of the rebel armies. Franco’s troops had their headquarters in Avila, in the Sierras some miles from Madrid, and from there they were trying to cross the passes in order to be able to descend into the valleys occupied by the loyalists. In this way the advance on Madrid would, they imagined, be a simple matter. The militiamen guarding the passes with advanced posts were considered strong enough to prevent the advance of the enemy and so, in the villages of the valley twenty to twenty-five miles away, the people felt secure and continued to live their ordinary uneventful and peaceful lives.
The four men had found Mohamed in one of the wildest spots in the Sierras. To the villagers, the presence of a Moor in those parts was staggering and unbelievable. It was thought that the rebel troops were still on the other side of the mountains. The passes, for all they knew, had not been forced. The peasants did not know, however, that the previous night the rebels had thrust a wedge of Moors and Legionaries through an almost inaccessible pass of the Sierras, and that these were advancing on enemy territory so as to take the militiamen by surprise in the rear. Mohamed, straying apart from the troops, possibly to indulge in some private marauding of his own, had been discovered by the patrol of one of the recruiting stations dotted about to round up anyone suspected of fascist sympathies.
The entrance of the Moor and his captors in Montreal was indeed spectacular. The villagers had on other occasions seen their hunters return from the Sierras carrying across the back of a mule a wild goat of the Capra Hispanica species. At times they had been shown big brown foxes which had been caught in the pine woods or even some lonely wolf; but they could not realise that the quarry could be a Moor – a strange creature more dangerous than a wild animal. They surrounded the hunters in admiration, the children with wide-open eyes shouted:
‘Look! Look! they have caught a black man, a Moor,’ while the women, in fear and rancour, approached the wounded prisoner to hurl insults at him.
The patrol halted in front of the Revolutionary Committee Room. Mohamed was released from the mule and taken before the leaders for questioning. But the Moor knew only a few words of Spanish and kept repeating them in a confused and monotonous sing-song.
‘No matar Moro (No kill the Moor) ... In the name of Dios Grande no matar Moro,’ he kept saying, imploring them to spare his life. ‘Moro be red... be Republica.’
A long argument started between the members of the Committee as to what to do with the unusual case. The republicans argued that the best thing to do was to take the prisoner to Madrid and deliver him into the hands of the proper authorities; the anarchists said that the logical thing to do was to let him go free so that he could in this way be redeemed from his past slavery and eventually become a free citizen and a decent member of the anarchist community; the communists were of opinion that the man must be attended to, his wounds taken care of, and when he was healed and restored to his normal strength, he should be enlisted in the fighting militia and sent to the front in defence of the people. There was one more opinion: outside the Committee Room the excited voices of the villagers and militiamen shouted that they wanted the prisoner and that he belonged to them, to deal with as they pleased, which was to kill him without any further delay.
There was such a pandemonium of angry voices, hoarse and violent, and cries of hysterical women round Mohamed that he became confused and weak and it was clear that at any moment he might die, thus frustrating the plans of all. He looked so ghastly that even those who clamoured for his immediate death thought better of it; it wouldn’t be much fun as there was so little of Mohamed left to finish. It was therefore decided that the wounded Moor should be rushed to the local hospital, which was already filled to overflowing. Two militiamen took hold of him by the arms and half-dragged, half-carried him to the hospital, followed by a mass of villagers and militiamen who continued to discuss the situation. On the way, a militiaman asked them to stop for a second. He explained that he was taking pictures for the papers and that a photo of the Moor would be a good subject. Mohamed was placed against a wall to be photographed but every time the cam
eraman tried to get his camera ready the Moor started to scream and to jump at him, believing that he was going to be shot with some kind of mysterious weapon. The cameraman who wanted a posed photograph had to be contented with a snapshot of a wild man.
In the hospital they placed him on the operating-table and for two hours doctors and nurses in white overalls tended him with great care. They did all in their power to alleviate his suffering and to hurt him as little as possible while tending his wounds. The face of the savage African relaxed as he realised dimly that the figures in white, like so many ghosts, were being kind and gentle to Mohamed. He began to smile at them tentatively, the large-mouthed childish grin of his kind. Surely those nurses with such gentle hands were Houris of Mahomet’s Paradise.
The members of the Committee, however, were not satisfied with the result of their arguments. It was considered necessary to go back to the Committee Room for more arguing, and the villagers and militiamen assembled again outside to continue their agitated discussions.
The leader of the overflow meeting was the goat-herd whose guttural voice dominated the turmoil. ‘He was right,’ contended some other goat-herds, muleteers and lumbermen friends of his – ‘Enough with the arguing of the Committee. The Moor belonged to the people. The militiamen who had captured him were villagers. He was not going to be sent to Madrid nor was he going to be let go free or enlisted in the fighting militia.’
The goat-herd was appointed to go to the Committee Room to demand that Mohamed should be delivered to the villagers. The members resisted and tried to convince the goat-herd, who, after cursing and swearing against ‘that b— lot of politicians,’ ran from the Committee Room and shouted to the crowd ‘come on!... let us get the Moor!’
They ran like a pack of wolves, forced an entry into the hospital, overpowered the resistance offered by the doctors and nurses, found Mohamed in one of the beds still smiling as though he were in Paradise, and dragged him out amidst vociferations and curses.
They placed him against a wall. Mohamed, with his slow wits enfeebled by weakness, could not realise what was happening and on what could be seen of his face amongst the white bandages, there still lingered a smile of satisfaction. He imagined perhaps, that as he was against the wall, they were going to perform some kind of gentle rite. To take his picture with a box, like the other man who, he now realised, had not meant to hurt him. He had not much time to wonder, for the militiamen pointed their rifles at him and he fell, pierced by a score of bullets, the smile just waning from his half-hidden face.
Soon Mohamed would be wandering in his Paradise in search of Mahomet, to ask for the solution of the riddle: ‘Will you tell me, oh great and wise Prophet, why they were so kind as to take the trouble to try to heal me if they had meant all the time to kill me in the end?’
That night the ‘Caids’ (chieftains) of the ‘mehalla’ (company of Arab troops) waited in vain in their tent for Mohamed to serve them mint-tea as usual. A patrol watched and waited all through the night. At the break of dawn, when all hope of finding him was lost, one of the Caids, resting in a corner of the tent and smoking a pipe of hashish, was dreamily evoking the splendid figure of the lost Mohamed, who was a valiant young warrior, for many years his loyal henchman, and more like his brother-at-arms than a servant. Both had been born in the hamlet of Ait el Jens on the Southern side of the Atlas mountains where the courageous blue-eyed Berber warriors made war from birth to death with the Desert nomads. Mohamed and the Caid, who had drunk milk from the same breast, had never been separated from one another. They had fought together ever since they were youngsters; first to counter the raids made by the hungry inhabitants of the Sahara who wished to take possession of the fertile meadows of the Sus and the Nun, afterwards, under the Blue Sultan who led them from victory to victory before Marrakeech and, still later, in the chivalrous encounters between the warlike tribes of the Bu Amaran; and finally in the disastrous campaign against the French, that for four years had kept them on the run until they were forced to retreat across the Draa river to the boundary of the Desert.
When the Spanish soldiers had taken possession of the Ifny territory, soon after the advent of the Republic had spared the Berber warriors the hard necessity of having to take refuge in the Sahara in their flight from the victorious French army, those indomitable fighters had, with great pleasure, taken up service with the Spanish soldiers who offered them not only a possibility of revenge on the French, but good money in payment as regular colonial troops and, above all, new rifles and plentiful ammunition.
The Spanish soldiers who had occupied Ifny were controlled by fascist officers who were plotting against the republican régime, so that when the 1936 rebellion broke out, they told the Berber warriors that they must go to Spain to fight against the reds who were being helped by France and Russia. These born fighters, loyal as are all good Moslems to pacts of friendship, accepted gladly the chance to fight for the rebel cause on Spanish soil.
Equipped with splendid new weapons of German origin, they were shipped to Spain where they saw, for the first time, great cities with large houses and shop windows displaying untold riches. The watchmakers’ shops containing thousands of watches and the jewellers’ shops full of golden objects and precious stones of every kind glittered and sparkled before their dazzled eyes, conjuring up to their simple minds visions of abundant booty which they hoped would materialise. The Berbers kept their promise of loyalty and, under an iron discipline, fought with great courage against the enormous masses of red soldiers hurled against them. But the reds had not learned the art of war and either let themselves be killed like heroes, or ran away like herds of frightened deer.
Proud of their brilliant rôle of ‘conquistadores’ they allowed themselves to be made a fuss of by the women and by those whom they called the ‘Hebrews’ ... timid people unfitted to take up arms. Wherever they passed they were the object of special acclamations. The women presented them with religious pictures and scapularies which they accepted with the supreme indifference of true believers. Allah was God and Mahomet was his prophet! Had any of the ladies who so kindly feted and fussed over the Berber warriors guessed at their innermost thoughts and true feelings, their Christian and civilised souls would have been truly horrified.
The Caid, saddened by the disappearance of his beloved Mohamed, left the tent where the other Moorish officers were asleep and strolled up to the mountain; the light of the moon pierced the outspread branches of the pine-trees dappling the earth with deep shadows. The thin air of the Sierra Gredos caressed and stimulated the dark-skinned Caid’s hot brow. The camp fires had been extinguished one after the other. Only one ray of light was left in the whole camp. It shone in the tent of the European officers, and the Caid, attracted by the light and noise, walked slowly in that direction. The officers were celebrating the victory of the day and were toasting their next triumph. Their bursts of laughter and their songs added to the Caid’s sadness. The African warrior stood near the tent for a long time thinking deeply, and the joyful sounds and the strange speech sank into his dormant consciousness, arousing a strong emotion of disdain and hatred towards these alien people. Dumbly he resented their drinking and singing to celebrate victories bought so dearly with the blood of his brother warriors while he wandered alone and disconsolate, his heart grieving over the loss of his loyal friend Mohamed, whose death only he would mourn.
Someone lifted the flap covering the entrance to the tent and came outside. The Caid tried to hide himself, but had no time to do so.
‘What on earth are you doing here, Caid?’ asked the officer.
‘I was sad and deep in thought,’ he answered.
‘Well, come in and drink with us. That will sweep away the cobwebs.’
Another officer came out and they insisted on taking him with them. They offered him wine which he refused.
‘The Caid is sad,’ explained an officer, ‘because this afternoon the reds hunted down one of his most valiant “mejaznies,” Mohame
d the courageous.’
At this the Caid nodded his head in assent and smiled ceremoniously, as though trying to excuse himself for his weakness.
‘Never mind, Caid... forget it. Drink a little, that will help you.’
‘Leave him alone,’ said an officer of the Foreign Legion who was already well-soused. ‘The Moors are a lot of fools, they won’t chase away troubles by drinking... They don’t know how good it is to drown sorrow in booze. One of the Caid’s men has been killed and until he is avenged he will not be happy again. Am I not right, Caid? You want revenge, don’t you? Well, you won’t have to wait long... to-morrow at the latest. How many ears of red militiamen do you want my men to cut off to-morrow in memory of your loyal Mohamed? How many did you say? A thousand? Ten thousand? Do you want us to bring you the ears of the President of the Republic? Don’t be so sad, Caid! You shall have them. I swear it. On my honour, Caid. On the honour of the Legion... I swear it!’
And the Foreign Legion officer went on repeating this. He made a great fuss of the Berber warrior, toasted him, glass in hand, his bloated face close to the noble and serene visage of the Caid, his lips puffed and his speech thick. The Caid sat unmoved, even when he felt the drunken officer’s loathsome spittle spraying against his face.
When it became evident that the vanguards of Moors and Legionaries had forced the mountain passes in a surprise attack and were invading the valleys, it was too late to organise any serious resistance. The only loyal forces were the local militias who were armed with all kinds of obsolete weapons. The news that the Moors and Legionaries had advanced, leaving behind them a trail of desolation and death without quarter, was brought by the villagers and peasants of the terrorised villages. The men were ready to resist to the end.
‘Give us arms! Arms!’ they shouted in despair.
But all was in vain, for there were no arms to give them. Masses of peasants armed with sticks, slings, scythes and old sporting-guns were nevertheless ready to fight. At the last moment the Madrid Government sent a column of militiamen and the most courageous amongst the peasants and villagers joined their ranks eagerly.
