At this point I was forced to interrupt. ‘I would suggest that you view the picture-drama before you judge it, Herr Count. It was made in the same moral tradition as Birth of a Nation.’’
He was good enough to blush and offer me a gruff apology. He did not, he added, refer to present company in any of his pronouncements. He had every respect for the professions and the moral values of others. We lived, after all, in a modern world where certain realities had to be accepted. And thus, a model German, he returned to his original point. ‘The world’s predicament is too dangerous for any indulgence in fantasy, certainly not of this present glorious charade which, I admit, we all are enjoying. But we do not personally,’ he added, ‘very often have to overhear the screams from the dungeons.’
Mr Weeks murmured that he thought if there were any irregularities of that sort the French authorities would investigate them and, if necessary, correct them. There were, after all, certain bargains one had to strike with a powerful ally. The French could not - realistically - be seen to be supporting a tyrant.
‘So he makes the tyranny less visible. And we all accept his hospitality and act to help him hide his complex systems of torture, extortion and terror!’ Schmaltz would have none of it. He was of that class of over-sensitive German who made trouble for the Turks during the Armenian crisis. I could only admire him, without necessarily always agreeing with him, or even liking him.
‘What action would you suggest we take?’ enquired Fromental mildly. ‘We cannot employ an army of spies.’
‘It is not the barbarism abroad I speak of, Herr Leutnant, but the sleep-walking at home. That’s my main concern.’ The German was friendly. ‘We should all be looking to our domestic problems first, forgetting old differences and harnessing the positive energy which exists in every ordinary person.’
Fromental wanted to know if ordinary decency could be ‘harnessed’ and if so how.
‘Through community and idealism,’ replied the Count, busy with his meerschaum, ‘not through communism and rhetoric. We must all pull together for the common good.’
Lieutenant Fromental did not put his scepticism into words.
That evening the Pasha invited us to his tent. ‘This has become a rare privilege since he met your beautiful colleague.’ Mr Weeks winked at me. He had not detected, any more than the others, that my relationship with Miss von Bek had been other than professional. They had chosen to assume simply that we were engaged upon some joint mission of the Italian and British governments. I think it suited neither of us to make any more of our story than the Berbers would. Stories become very swiftly embroidered when translated, as it were, into literary Arabic. Fromental, my only confidant, agreed. “Those who live under tyranny, Mr Peters, make no progress. They learn only how to stay in one place. They learn a form of silence: the banal expressions of bureaucracies and armies, the conventions of the ruling élite, who fear a living, questioning, language. Thus the public language is allowed to say nothing new, though the people make new language every day. This was how Arab literature ceased to be the seminal literature of the mediaeval world, supplying the West with almost all its present story-forms and narrative devices. New Arabic is nothing more than a way of retelling the same myths in different guises. One perceives this effect in the Turkish Empire and everywhere the hammer and sickle crush and cut. There are no advantages to tyranny, save for the tyrant.’
‘And his,’ I counterpointed, ‘is an inefficient method of keeping power, as the financiers of New York will verify!’
El Glaoui was, I must admit, the very model of a modern benevolent tyrant; urbane, expansive, generous and humorous, anxious to understand other points of view than his own, eager to embrace the twentieth century while supremely certain of the superiority of his own way of life. As we seated ourselves on the cushions of his great tent while our hands and faces were washed by his handsome negro slaves (he was rumoured to hide his Caucasians for fear of giving Europeans offence) I was immediately seduced by his hospitality and his charm. Each guest was welcomed and questioned as to his needs. His individual tastes were courteously recollected by the Pasha. Mr Weeks, beside me, murmured that he wouldn’t be surprised if the old boy hadn’t been educated at Eton. Lieutenant Fromental was listening carefully to Count Schmaltz addressing his host on the matter of the recent Riffian wars.
‘But you flew, did you not, Lieutenant Fromental, with the French air force?’ The Pasha signed to include the young man and allow him to speak for his own people.
‘For a few days, Your Highness, yes. As an observer, of course. I’ve never felt any wish to control one of those things!’
Rose von Bek spoke up. ‘I envy you, Lieutenant.’ I had hardly noticed her in the shadows. She wore a long becoming gown, heavily embroidered in the Berber style, and her head was covered by a kind of turban. Berber women frequently went unveiled and frequently only covered their faces in imitation of more sophisticated Arab customs. In the villages, I had been told, it was considered uncouth rather than irreligious to go uncovered. (The cinema, says Mrs Fezi, changed all that. Again, she blames the Egyptians. ‘Now they are all film stars in the country towns,’ she says. ‘But we didn’t wear veils, any of my family. And that was in Meknes.’)
‘Envy me, mademoiselle?’ said my young friend in surprise.
‘You flew at will over this wonderful country. We, on the other hand, scarcely glimpsed its beauty before we crashed.’ (She did not see fit to explain why we had observed so little of the passing landscape!) ‘I wish I could have been your pilot! What an awfully thrilling sight. The Riff massing in all their glory!’
‘Actually, mademoiselle,’ said Lieutenant Fromental in some embarrassment, ‘we were bombing villages. With the Goliaths, you know. They are the very latest heavy bombers. The smoke and the fires tended to obscure our view of the Riff.’
‘Six thousand hours of flight and three thousand missions. What was it, forty bombing flights a day!’ The Pasha exclaimed all this in terms of the warmest admiration. ‘I read it in Le Temps. Forty bombing flights a day!’
‘And still Abd el-Krim and his Riffians were able to bring those planes down. Sharp-shooters lying on their backs in rows and firing in concert! Aeroplanes make no real difference to warfare, in my opinion. Only to civilians.’ Mr Weeks was a confessed admirer of the rebel chief. ‘How many squadrons did you have out there? Fourteen? It was folly. The British had equally disastrous experience bombing the Kurdish villages in Iraq. The aeroplane can never be an independent agent of warfare. It should no more operate on its own than should artillery. In the end it’s always up to the infantry. Or,’ he admitted, after due consideration, ‘sometimes the cavalry. I doubt if the French would have had a war in Syria at all if it hadn’t been for their indiscriminate bombing in the first place. The Times said so quite clearly. Destroying villages, of course, gives the enemy scores of homeless recruits.’
I began to laugh at this. ‘Come now, Mr Weeks. You’ll be telling us next that the airship is an invention of the Devil!’
He shrugged and held up his hands, trying to smile as he dropped the subject. His hatred of every kind of flying machine was well known.
‘However, the aeroblane is effective,’ pronounced the Pasha suddenly, silencing us. He paused to take some stuffed sweetmeat from the tray his slave offered him, ‘as Mr Weeks says. As artillery is effective. Did you know, Mr Weeks, that much of our family’s bower was founded on the ownershib of one Krubb cannon?’