The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
a lifetime of foundation—the steady French transformation of
North Africa. It is like a coral reef, solid, detailed, infinitely
particular: the work of innumerable units, sacrificed, obscure,
tenacious, creative, permanent. None the less, what Lyautey has done
is a building by itself. It is like the new Gothic of Brazenose or
Magdalen at Oxford: one may say that there lay behind this also the
multitudinous, patient work of a lifetime or more since Pugin began: or
it is like Parsons’ turbine, which came after so much experiment, but
stands by itself all the same.
It is not belittling Lyautey’s great work in Morocco to say that these
things are only possible when there is frankly recognised the essential
principle of personal responsibility in governing; or (to put it in
Colonial phrasing), ‘one-man control,’ or, to put it in Aristotelian
terms, ‘MONARCHY.’
There is no other working form of administration over multitudes
of men, except the aristocratic; and the aristocratic form of
administration—which ruled for nearly three hundred years over
Protestant England after the Reformation had destroyed popular monarchy
and made wealth supreme—is only possible in those rare communities
where men enjoy being governed by a clique and look up to, and revere,
a special class whom they think of as their natural masters.
What Marshal Lyautey has done in the organisation of French Morocco
has been based upon two foundations which, when they are absent from
the effort to govern aliens—as one or both commonly are—make such
government increasingly difficult; until, at last, it has to be
abandoned. The first of these foundations is _working with_ the alien
people whom one administrates, not _against_ them, nor even _above_
them. The second foundation is the deliberate investment of one’s own
capital and energy _for the benefit of the alien governed_ rather than
for one’s own benefit: that is, the development of communications
and of building, the extension of instruction, the improvement of
waterways, afforestation—all manner of expensive functions which you
can only get from a government directly concerned for the good of _all_
the people and which will never be undertaken by the private home
trader working for his pocket alone.
It is the absence of this sympathy with, and eager help of, the
governed which prevents a trading community from ever biting into alien
soil. For, in a trading community, the administration of a foreign
dependency is directed to helping the home merchant or settler. The
road is driven, the river is bridged, not primarily for the benefit of
the governed, but primarily for the immediate profit of the governors.
With this there goes a contempt of the governed, which is a dangerous
sign, and later, that more dangerous sign, a hatred of them.
The foreign rule, therefore, gets more and more distasteful to
the governed. For half a lifetime they wonder at it: then they
grow restive, finding themselves despised to no purpose. Then they
permanently rebel. At last the unnatural tyranny breaks down. When it
breaks down the governors gradually depart and little impress of their
foreign rule remains.
It was so apparently between Carthage and her dependencies.
But when the governors expend themselves for the good of the governed,
an amalgamation takes place between the national spirit of the one and
of the other, and the superior trains and shepherds his subjects into a
common civilisation. One of the tests of success in alien government
is to note whether the governors despise or admire the governed. If
they despise them it is proof that they are unfit to govern. If they
admire in them what is to be admired, all goes well. I found in Morocco
that a contempt for Islam (I do not say a difference from Islam, but
a _contempt_ for it, a contempt which would regard the Moor as a
‘native’ and the French as in some way a ‘superior race’) was only to
be discovered here and there among the worst of the colonists. It was
your half-educated, lower-middle-class immigrant who took this attitude
and gave all the trouble. The higher you went in the scale, the greater
was the liking for the Moor and for his civilisation, the greater
the desire to understand him and to know his past, the greater the
admiration of his art, his dignity, his faith. When one got to the head
of things, in the Residency-General and in the Marshal’s own household,
there was an understanding of the whole Moorish past and present like
the understanding which a scholar has of his beloved text; it was an
intimate and all-pervading familiarity.
I carried away with me from that glimpse of the Atlas and of the
treeless run of burnt land beyond (for I travelled while the heat was
still upon us) vivid pictures in the mind: first of a vast tract of
dead upland, utterly bare, between Oudja and the Moulouya (I had come
from Oran); this tract had about it the accursed inhuman effect of the
great American deserts in the West of the United States; then, next in
order, of Taza on the edge of the hill fighting, and of the story I
was told there of two Moorish brothers. One of these would fight under
the French for six months and then desert. Thereupon the other brother
would enlist in his place. So much was the object of each the pleasure
of fighting and the advantage of pay, and so little the political idea
of independence.
Nor could any one forget who has seen it (and it is now become or will
soon become, a commonplace of travel) that great new road which I saw
in its last making, but which was already nearly completed. It is
driven right through Barbary like a stay, like a back-bone, from the
Bay of Carthage to the river-mouth of Rabat on the Atlantic tide; near
one thousand miles in its actual trace, and following the great ride
which the first Mohammedans took when they overwhelmed the West—when
that horseman rode into the sea surf on the sands by the bar of Rabat
River and cried out: ‘Had you not set bounds, O God, to the earth,
with this your sea, I would ride for ever westward and continue to
conquer in Your Name.’ A man may take his motor-car on the boat to-day
from Marseilles to Tunis and follow that strict and graded broad way
uninterruptedly till he comes to the Atlantic and, turning south to
Casablanca, ship it again for Europe.
The surprise of that Moroccan feat was the way in which it was handled
during the Great War. When war was already certain in the last days
of July, 1914, the Government in Paris, the politicians, sent orders
to the Resident-General that all troops should be withdrawn to the
coast, the interior to be abandoned, and reconquest (if possible!) to
be achieved after the Peace. We who know what those words ‘after the
Peace’ have come to mean, know also that it would have been the end
of the French in Morocco. It would have been the return to the old
pressure upon the Algerian frontier and evidence to all Islam that
Europe had failed.
What the soldier did was to maintain his garrisons in spite of the
politicians. What was astonishing, he continued the development of
Morocco during all those four years of mortal strain, as though the
peace had not been broken. Still was the railway laid, and still the
new road completed, and still were the buildings set up, and still was
the wild hill country contained by its ring of troops; until, when
the curtain lifted in ’19, Europe saw, not the Morocco there had been
when the Occident entered on its great struggle, but another Morocco,
wealthier, stronger and more settled, with great new European towns
side by side with the Moslem, and with the whole territory organised.
These new great towns are planned and are built under a military
rule—and that is very wise, for the anarchy of individual mercantile
effort would have made the experiment break down. No house may be
built in the European fashion to jar against the spirit of the place.
Everywhere the roofs must be flat and the outline preserved. Also
the European town is kept wholly distinct from the Mohammedan. Thus
in Meknes you may hear Mass in a chapel which lies within the very
thickness of the city wall—it is the old chapel of the Portuguese
prisoners during the past of the great Sultans—but you may not enter
that chapel from _within_ the city; the door faces outward, upon the
country side of the wall. Upon the day before I left Morocco, a soldier
who was driving me upon the heights above one of the new cities in his
car said to me musingly, as we had halted to look down upon the view of
mixed Europe and Africa and of all that vast new wealth: ‘It is just
ten years ago that the Sultan of the day, annoyed with his brother,
had him devoured by lions.’ Those who love contrast will not find it
stronger anywhere than in this strange land.
But these distant memories of Morocco go ill with the presence of a
Devon sea under the breaking of a chill dawn. Those African pictures in
my mind, hot sand and palm, painted by memory in the night, grew pale
and disappeared in the northern daylight, as do the coloured flashes of
the headland lights with the coming of the day.
There was still no more wind than would just make the Nona feel her
helm. My companion slept below. The heave of the sea grew less; and
then, to my disgust and dread, over the sea, already too hazy (so that
the high land some three miles away was like a ghost), a fog came
drifting up and enveloped us altogether.
I put her up a point more westerly, so as to be on the safe side, for
I did not know what current there might be here, and I had to give the
land a good offing. I did not want to come up through the fog in such
calm weather to hear, close at hand, the treacherous murmur of slightly
moving water upon rocks.
Of all experiences at sea in a small boat, under sail, there is none
in these days of steam and petrol more trying (after a certain length
of it) than being thus half-becalmed with barely steering-way in a
part of the sea where the great ships ply up and down, they themselves
independent of the stillness that holds you fast. You can hear (as
I did on that morning) the beat of the propellers, miles away or
close at hand. You hear the hooting from time to time of a ship’s
siren—but there is nothing to tell you where your danger may be, nor
upon what line it may be approaching you. Some with more experience
could, perhaps, have judged that these occasional sounds were at such
and such a distance, each or none of them threatening; but to me it
seemed as though every steamer in the Bristol Channel was atop of us.
I have no doubt that had the fog lifted I should have had nothing in
sight but a couple of outward bound tramps halfway to the horizon, and
perhaps one small steamer in from the Atlantic seas, and going up to
Avonmouth, rather nearer to our shore so as to save the strength of the
tide. Indeed, when the fog did lift towards noon, the sea was of that
appearance, with not half a dozen craft to be seen, and none near. But
in the white, cold blankness of the mist (with nothing whereby to judge
save the ear), the rhythmic beating of the blades seemed anywhere close
at hand; and if the hooting of the steam whistles was dull and dim,
that seemed due not to distance, but to the blanketing of the dense
cloud. It rose at last, first in patches and wreaths, then altogether,
and a pale sun showed over distant land.
There is one thing that has always puzzled me about the Devon and
Cornwall peninsula, and that is why the entry into it, up to quite late
in history, seems to have been from the north.
The deep harbours and secure anchorages are to-day on the south. There
is a whole string of them; and it is the south that faces towards
the main civilisation of the continent. You have the profound inlet