The campaign for the Spanish war on Morocco harvested a generalised patriotic fervour that was exceptional in the nineteenth-century peninsular milieu. The call for war against the historic enemy that the ‘Moors’ represented provided the illusion of a new colonial project in times of Spanish imperial collapse; the vindication of the derision to which Spain was subjected by north-western European powers; and an outstanding feeling of unity in times of marked socio-political disunity. The chapter surveys the polysemic campaign by scrutinising an array of sources in Spanish and Basque—including media outlets, printed and chanted poems, and archival documents. The first part looks into the two hegemonic standpoints, namely the liberal and the conservative. It stresses the ground they shared, and the main differences that separated them—particularly as regards Spain’s Islamic past, on the understanding of which relied that of the colonial invasion. The second part complicates the homogenising and dichotomically ordered narrative of the patriotic fervour, by looking at a poem by the prominent intellectual and feminist Concepción Arenal; and by digging into the contribution of the Basque Provinces to the war as envisioned by the institutions and the common people forced to enlist the ‘voluntary’ corps.