Word: berbers
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Each time the French Foreign Legion nabs an important chieftain in the perpetual Berber rebellion in French Morocco, another springs up to take his place. Two of the greatest of these blue-cowled die-hards were the Brothers El Hiba and Merebbi Rebbo Mehammedan of the south, sometimes called "The Blue Sultan,"* sometimes "The Saint." Nabbed in 1917 by the French, El Hiba passed his baton on to Brother Merebbi. For 16 years Merebbi's home has been the wide Moroccan Desert and the passes of the Atlas Mountains. By day he has worn dust on his tongue, sand...
...fast. In the wet coastal heat they sweat the dye from the cloth to their skins. No true Blue Woman would look at a man who was not also a good deep blue. The Blue Men's rebellion flickers 200 mi. south of the main Berber rebellion around Marrakesh. Their chief capitals, fortified oases, are Tiiznit, Smara and Kerdous. Their last few Sultans have been notably stupid...
...long, hot years the Foreign Legion and native troops have shuffled over the sand waves and stony wastes of the Moroccan Desert in "the war that never ends." The French War Ministry has steadily issued dispatches calling it "a campaign of pacification," noting "resistance of rebellious tribesmen." Actually fierce, Berber horsemen have been fighting a costly war of thrust and ambush, much like the Indian wars of the western U. S. last century. The Berbers are a white race occasionally producing a blue-eyed blond. Unlike the Arabs who once conquered them, they are honest and straightforward. Their active, often...
When General Hure launched his campaign last year, the remnants of the Berber rebels were loose in the desert south of the Atlas Mountains. In a slow encircling movement he herded them northwest to the rim of the desert. His plodding columns closed in from north, east and southeast like beaters in a lion hunt. On the south and southwest, crack Legion regiments waited for the prey to enter the trap. Slowly, suspiciously, the Berbers, carrying their women and children, rode into the mountains up four confluent valleys a year ago last spring. The trap was sprung...
...valleys, turning them into poison gas traps. But he knew that his enemy was brave and honorable, that such a massacre would have sown rebellion in Morocco for decades to come. He chose the harder job of forcing a straightforward surrender. In their strongholds, the leaders kept the Berbers at a pitch by preaching "Death before surrender." The French began a tedious, hazardous prowling up the peaks, picking off snipers. In one desperate skirmish they killed the Berber Generalissimo Sidi Ben Ahmed. Some of his rattled followers climbed to a stronghold on the mighty Tizier Ouzine peak. French native troops...