THE RIFFIAN RUFFIANS

Whoever seeks colorful incidents in his daily papers should feel grateful to Abd-el-Krim and his little playmates for giving him something to stimulate his imagination almost every day. Such a person must have been highly pleased yesterday morning to read that Abd-el-Krim, feeling a bit pettish, had blown one of his prominent ministers from the mouth of a cannon. Sometimes one regrets that such things do not happen more often in European politics.

The whole character of the Moroccan war is one of high lights and shadows, corresponding to this last most picturesque of incidents. The daily press dispatches from the Riff should never bore anyone. The American soldiers of fortune with the French forces ignore the state departments' august disapproval and proceed to the day's fighting like bad boys playing truant. Unreasonable obstinacy displayed by the Riffians in refusing to be intimidated by the comic opera Spanish army precipitates a political crisis in Madrid. A French officer, perhaps a distant relative of General Nicholas Herkimer, directs his command from a stretcher for eleven days after being shot through both hips. The underdogs in the fight are lean, brown men who live in the desert and make nothing of shooting French aviators out of the air like so many crows.

Without judging the rights and wrongs of the struggle, one cannot avoid some sympathy with the desert chieftain who is putting up a gallant fight against the French military machine. The loss of Asdir, the Riffian capitol, was hailed last week by the French press as the definitive beginning of Abd-el-Krim's downfall. His cause, of course, was doomed as soon as the French began to take the rebellion seriously but newspaper readers will be sorry to see him disappear from the day's news, if only because, as this latest playfulness with his minister shows, he does things in such a vivacious manner.