LIGNE, MARETH
By W. M. COUSINS
Madame beamed and prophesied bonheur ; Medenine was a charming place, and the bride was lucky to be stationed there, for
all French wives found it delightful. Palm-leaves rustled in the garden, bathed in that cool fire which is midsummer in the oasis, and beyond the garden, full and gliding, slid the waters of an irrigation-canal. Gabes was considered a luxury station ; the wide French Quarter had shops that drew supplies by rail from Sfax and by ,sea. through Gabes - Port, the shallow, half - developed harbour on the Gulf. One lives well in this rich oasis ; true, there is no beef, but the French housewife does wonderful things with crayfish, eggs and spinach, with cucumbers and grape-jam. South of the town lie the cantonments, crowded with soldiers, formerly French, now German, later perchance to be replaced by British troops. Gabes is the base of the Ligne Mareth.
In the oasis life is changeless. There are four waif% 'villages within this bound, one of Arabs, two of Berbers and one of Jews, and in bad old days they dwelt in a state of feud, hunting each other arpong the palm-trees with daggers and guns. Europe has now forcibly composed their blood-feuds' and taught them the conduct of modern war. Gabes is one of the Great Oases—like Tripoli, Ghadames and Tozeur—islands of delight in a barren wold. Outside its boundaries lies low thorny scrub, within stands richness absolute, as if the most luxuriant garden of the West Indies had sprung up upon the desolate shore. " For under a high palm grows an olive, and under the olive a fig, and under the fig a pomegranate-tree and beneath the pomegranate a vine ;
' and under the vine wheat is sown, then vegetables and then garden- herbs, and all spring up in a single year." Thus spoke Pliny of this ancient grove.
Far other is Mareth, that oasis twenty miles to the south. Small,
• miserable, productive of nothing, it is no more than a clump of dry-weather trees by a flash of water at the road-side. There is no village, for even. to Arabs this infertile place was barely worth a settlement ; while the military works, which are of considerable moment, are closed from view behind coils of barbed-wire. Nothing could look less like the headquarters of a great defensive line. One estaminet, a store, some temporary dwellings—that is all one sees of Mareth.
Lesser oases will hardly bear human habitation. Adem, just north of Mareth, is tenanted only by the dead. Sad, spindly palm- trees prick the barren soil in ranks too scattered to be called a grove, and between them stand innumerable marabouts—white- washed shrines topped with a dome—each one the tomb of a MOslem saint. Some dry oases are inhabited for part of the year at seed-time and harvest the peasants betake themselves trA distant parts of the hills, where the relenting earth will yield them a little barley, and there they build themselves ghourbis—thin, wattled huts, such as are described by Herodotus. Among all these, back and forth, pass the Arabs of the Tent, true nomads, who wander all the year long, seeking pasture for their camels and goats.
Medenine thecharming Medenine!—Is a bleak and dusty town. The fly-blown French Quarter has one battered central square, in- sufferably windy in winter, arid with heat in summer-time, adorned with dry, unwilling eucalyptus-trees, a dejected copy of the back- blocks of Australia. The country round is a semi-arid steppe. The Arab town has a strange aspect, for this is the country of ghenlas, curious constructions, like a half drain-pipe or the arch of a tunnel, forced upon native builders by lack of long timber to make rafters for flat roofs.- At Ben Gardane they use them, at Tatahouine and Zarzis ; but at Medenine they stand piled upon each other like a honeycomb (as at Old Siwa), access to the upper stories being obtained by a series of pegs projecting from the front wall. Forty feet long by five feet wide, the ghorfa has no light nor air save by the single door ; the darkest European slum is a palace by contrast with this foetid nest. Perhaps later, having duly removed the inhabitants to safety, one or other of the warring States will condescend to drop a bomb on these monstrosities and blow them to fragments.
At Douiret and Matmata the Berbers dwell in caves. Out of friable rock they hollow a pit, twenty feet deep, flat-bottomed and broad, that holds the fire-stones of their hearth ; then they dig rooms in the rocky sides, one for sleeping, one for a store. Provided the cave does not run more than a dozen feet into the earth, it is no bad dwelling ; but there are also caverns of peipetual darkness, deprived of sun and wind, and horrible were the cases of disease found crouching at the back of these dens. These people Are miserably poor ; they live by cutting &a-grass on the hill, and grow a few stalks of barley, which they harvest by hand, as tai child would pluck a flower. There are no Europeans in the Matmata hills, except the ubiquitous soldiery, who have there a post and an artesian well, for a second line of defence. These ranges are rounded and low, not completely barren, but covered with patches of grey-green scrub ; farther south the hills are naked and erosion has gashed them with great ravines.
Westward from Tatahouine runs the Mareth Line, a series of posts designed to dominate all main 'entrances into Tunisia. Each fort is placed beside a well, yielding water more or less impregnated with magnesia and other impurities, or else by a gorge of the mountain where the Berber tribes had a settlement, with some fragment of terraced land bearing a few rare olives or peach-trees and dates. These tribes are not nomads ; they-live, very poorly, in villages of stone, with a communal storehouse set for defence on the crest of the ridge, like the great military posts. A metalled road joins Tathouine to Romada, a dying oasis of ghorfas and palms, and leads to Bit' Kicera and • the fort known as Borj Le Boeuf, a key-point on the line, a centre of administration and a former headquarters of the Goum Saharien. Above a greyish expanse of stones and broken rocks, a stout stone-built fort crowns a conical mountain-ridge ; behind it lies the douar, a small settle- ment of Berbers, before it lies the sky-blue distance of the endless Sahara. A high wind blows there, burning hot by day, icy by night under the brilliant stars ; men live at Borj Le Boeuf like sailors in a ship upon the high seas, their prow fronting the salt and bitter waste. Southward runs the line, leaving the mountains, as it nears the frontiers of Tripolitania, for a vast sandy upland pene- plain—through Dehibat, Bir Djeneien, Michiguig, and on to Tiaret and Fort Saint in the desert, right opposite Ghadames. Half of Tunisia is no more than this—a wide, uninhabitable desert south of the Cleats ; it is farther, as the 'plane flies, from Fort Saint to Tozeur than from Tozeur to Tunis. Behind the Ligne Mareth lies the Great Erg, a desert of sand-dunes, void of leaf and blade, where cars sink over their axles and the traveller is bewildered by the formless landscape of hillock and sif. There pass only the Touareg, who ride from the Fezzan, or caravans that go southward by old Saharan roads.
Behind the Tripolitan frontier lies an Italian Line, based on Ghadames and Nalut, fronting, post by post, the Ligne Mareth. By a strange reversal of fortune, the Tripolitan Line is now held by the Allies, while Axis forces occupy the well-built forts of France. Thus do men's plans go a-gley amid the chances of war.
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