We note with regret that the French troops in Equatorial
Africa suffered heavily in an action fought near Drigele, the capital of the Massalit. Since the reconquest of the Egyptian Soudan by British troops, large numbers of slave-raiding Mussulman bands betook themselves to Wadai, and have provided the negro Arab Sultans with arms in exchange for slaves. Two of these Sultans, at the head of five thousand men, attacked Lieutenant-Colonel Moll, the military corn; mandant of the Chad district, on the morning of November 9th, and though beaten off with a loss of six hundred killed and wounded, inflicted severe losses on the French column, Lieutenant-Colonel Moll, two other officers, and more than thirty men being killed and upwards of seventy wounded. Only two months ago the Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa complained of the inadequacy of the French troops— four thousand eight hundred men, of whom twelve hundred are in the Chad district—to police a country four times the size of Franee, and especially referred to the hostile attitude of the Massalit.
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