He moved westwards into the country of the Braue’s, and there his second misfortune befell him. His month’s instalment of money did not come to hand. It should have travelled upon mules from Tetuan, and a rumour spread that the English had got hold of it. Nothing, of course, could be said; Bartels had just to put up with the loss and see a still further diminution of his army. Within a month the new camp was raided by aeroplanes, and Bartels had to move again. From a harrier of others he had sadly fallen to being harried himself.
“There is a traitor in the camp,” he said, and he consulted Abd-el-Malek and stray German visitors from Tetuan and Melilla. They suspected everybody who went away before the raids and came back afterwards. They never suspected men like Ahmed Ben Larti, who was always present in the camp on these occasions of danger, not overconspicuously present, but just noticeably present, running for shelter, for instance, or discharging his rifle at the aeroplane in a panic of terror. Bartels, however, carried on with constantly diminishing forces until the crops were ripening in the following year. Then the aeroplanes dealt with him finally.
Wherever he pitched his camp, there very quickly they found him out and burnt the crops for a mile around. The villages would no longer supply him with food; his army melted to a useless handful of men; he became negligible, a bandit on the move. Ahmed Ben Larti called off the little train of runners which had passed in his messages to French agents in Tetuan, and one dark evening slipped away himself. His work was done, and almost immediately his luck gave out.
A telegram reached Gerard de Montignac at Rabat a week later from the French consul in Tetuan, which, being decoded, read: “Larti brought in here this morning. He was attacked two miles from here and left for dead. Recovery doubtful.”
The last of Ahmed’s messengers had been lured into a house in Tetuan, and upon him Larti’s final message announcing the date of his own arrival had been discovered. Further telegrams came to Rabat from Tetuan. Larti had lost his left arm just below the shoulder, and his condition was precarious. He began to mend, however, in a week, but three months passed before a French steamer brought to Casablanca a haggard thin man in mufti with a sleeve pinned to his breast, who had once been Captain Paul Ravenel of the Tirailleurs.
