*3 Among the other Indian units in East Africa were the 2nd Kashmir Rifles, 3rd Kashmir Rifles, 130th Baluchis, 61st Pioneers, 27th Indian Mountain Battery, the 28th Indian Mountain Battery, 17th Cavalry, the Faridkot Sappers and Miners, and the 29th Punjabis.
Chapter 4
‘La Force Noire’
Africa in Europe – the ‘races guerrières’
1887. In this year French artist Albert Bettanier completes his masterwork, entitled La Tache Noire – ‘The Black Stain’. The principal figures of his painting are a geography master and his young pupil, who stand together, between the rows of desks to their backs and a great map of France in front of them, propped on an easel. As the rest of the class looks on intently, the frock-coated teacher rests one fatherly hand on the boy’s shoulder and with his other hand points solemnly to the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace and Lorraine – coloured black on the map. His focus remains on the wide-eyed face of the boy.
The painting exudes symbolism and allegory. Every detail of the boys and their classroom holds coded references ready for the viewer to decipher. The pupil wears the uniform of the school battalions, which train young boys of Third Republic France in military drill and rifle practice – hinted at by the gun-rack at the back of the classroom. The huge blackboard to the right of the French map represents Germany, while the scourge of Prussian militarism finds physical form in a war drum set on a table nearby. On the far wall, another map, that of the walled city of Paris as it was in the 1870s, reminds the viewer of the Prussian siege of the French capital at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Casting an ominous shadow over that map is another symbolic representation of Germany, in the shape of a ceiling-lamp. Black and spindly, its arms appear to stretch threateningly around Paris, as if it were the eagle at the centre of the flag of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany. The boys at their desks all play their roles, too. One, a blond-haired child seated in the first row, is dressed in a white military uniform and wears the Légion d’Honneur, the medal he is destined (one presumes) to win in some future war to restore French honour and territory, a war that will inevitably be the duty of his generation….1
Bettanier himself had been born in Lorraine, in the city of Metz, and he and his family elected to remain French following the annexation of their home province by the Germans. By the 1880s, having moved to Paris, he had achieved fame for both his artistic talents and his determination to use those gifts to constantly remind France of its loss and humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War. La Tache Noire was but the most successful and powerful of a series of his paintings that were both a lament to loss and a call to arms. But it was a work that also – perhaps unconsciously – touched on the other great issue confronting Third Republic France: that the classes of boys such as he depicted were, quite simply, too small in size. In the years between the 1870s and 1914, French military cadets – boys not much older than Bettanier’s – were often taken to the border and encouraged to gaze across at lost Alsace and Lorraine. Further east, beyond the horizon, lay Germany itself and for decades the French cadets who marched up the hills of the frontiers, to view the lands annexed by Germany, did so in the knowledge that the great enemy over that horizon was growing in strength and in numbers at a velocity that France was unable to match.
France had begun the nineteenth century as one of the demographic superpowers of Europe, second only to Russia, and by the time of its defeat in 1871 the population had reached 36 million. But that of the newly unified Germany, even before the absorption of Alsace and Lorraine, stood at 41 million, and by 1914 there were 67 million Germans compared to 40 million French. (Even in 2014, neither Britain nor France has reached the population that Germany attained by the time of the First World War.) To increase French anxiety, in 1897 Dr Jacques Bertillon, a celebrated demographer and Director of the Paris Statistical Bureau, wrote: ‘It grieves me to say it, but I see firm proof of the imminent disappearance of our country.’ The proof he was referring to was the latest national census, which demonstrated that for the last four decades the death rate in France had exceeded the birth rate.2 In the same decades in which France had projected its power, trade, language and culture across the globe, its population growth had ground to a halt. Villages had been left deserted, and unwanted homes and farms abandoned. At the same time, France’s population had been exceeded not only by Germany’s but also by Britain’s and Austria-Hungary’s. The nation, at the end of the century, had sunk to fifth place in Europe’s league table of populous nations.
Germany’s unprecedented demographic boom, by contrast, was a trend that showed no sign of slowing down. The German anxiety was the mirror opposite of the French one: the inability of the Reich to find space, work and opportunities for its excess population, the so-called Volk ohne Raum – ‘people without space’. Those in Germany who had led the clamour for colonies in the 1870s and 1880s, a campaign that pressured Chancellor Otto von Bismarck into the acquisition of Germany’s four African territories, had argued that only with an empire would Germany be able to find living space for the Volk ohne Raum, millions of whom were being lost in emigration to America.
Thus, while Germans talked of the evident and natural vitality of their race, Frenchmen were reading predictions of their coming extinction and discussed ways of ‘saving the race’. In the last year of the nineteenth century, the ailing Emile Zola caught the mood of his times with his novel La Fécondité. A joyous evocation of the power of life and a hymn to the community of nation, it was also – in part – an appeal to French womanhood. ‘O French mothers,’ pleaded Zola, ‘make children, so that France may keep her rank, her strength and her prosperity for it is necessary for the world’s salvation that France should live.’3 To the consternation of politicians, generals and philosophers – as well as novelists – French women had gained access to contraception well before women in Germany and Britain. The better-off had managed to escape, almost completely, the animal cycle of reproduction. Yet this liberation of French womanhood was looked upon, by Zola and others, as a calamitous threat to the very existence of the nation. France’s declining birth rate, and Germany’s demographic boom, meant that when it came to men of military age, France could muster a mere 4.5 million men compared to Germany’s 7.7 million (and rising). Reflecting on France’s defeat in 1871, a chorus of voices sought to ascribe the calamity to a culture of decadence, of which the low birth rate was a symptom. (The superior tactics and leadership of the Prussian forces were brushed aside as minor details.)
Bettanier’s paintbrush was animated by these the twin obsessions of Third Republic France: the dream of revenge (Revanche) to regain the lost provinces, which mired France in a culture of awestruck militarism of a sort that even Prussians might have found excessive; and the fear that, with each passing year, this national mission seemed to be slipping beyond the nation’s reach as a direct consequence of the birth-rate crisis. These two phenomena – and a potential solution – came together in the pugnacious, if diminutive, figure of General Charles Mangin, a soldier for whom La Revanche was the keystone on which his austere character was built, and a military theorist who believed that he had found a ‘reservoir of men’ that might tip the scales in France’s favour.
PARIS, 23 JUNE 1940. Adolf Hitler – the former dispatch runner, who had spent four years in the trenches dreaming of reaching Paris as a mere foot soldier – arrives in the city as conqueror and Führer, nine days after his Wehrmacht has entered the capital. In six weeks Hitler’s army has achieved what his own generation had previously failed to do in four years. In the warm light of a June morning, accompanied by architect Albert Speer, the sculptor Arno Breker and a gaggle of generals, all in their Sunday best, Hitler makes a triumphal tour of the city. Newsreel film shows the Führer and his generals standing at the Trocadero, with the Eiffel Tower as their backdrop; the scenes reverberate around a stunned world. If he wishes to, at this moment of triumph, Hitler can take revenge on Paris for the humiliations meted out on Germany after the earlier
war. He might order the destruction of the Palace of Versailles, where the hated treaty of 1919 was signed. He might level Les Invalides and take Napoleon’s body to Berlin, or strip the Louvre of its treasures.
Instead he orders the destruction of just two of the French capital’s many statues. The first is of Edith Cavell, the heroic and humane British nurse, whose execution by the Germans in 1915 created a martyr and a potent propaganda figure for the Allies. The second is of Charles Mangin.
Charles Mangin, long dead by 1940, is largely forgotten today outside of France; but after the First World War his legend burned bright in both the French national consciousness and the minds of a whole generation of German statesmen and soldiers. Like Hitler, he had been consumed, motivated and energized by his hatreds. Short, whip-thin and constantly agitated, his bitterness and fiery lust for La Revanche was imprinted on the lines of his face. In most photographs his protruding jaw appears to be permanently clenched, as if awaiting some imminent blow. His thick black hair stuck up straight, giving him a somewhat thuggish appearance. In historian Alistair Horne’s memorable words: ‘Mangin was a killer, and he looked the part.’4
At the same time that Albert Bettanier and his family had abandoned their home in Lorraine, Mangin’s own family – conservative, Catholic and deeply patriotic – had been forced to abandon their lives and property in Alsace. Mangin had then entered the army, serving as a lieutenant in Africa – first in Sudan, then Mali and French North Africa. Indeed, in the years before 1914 he was to spend two-thirds of his career in France’s colonies, specializing in leading actions to pacify rebellious peoples. It was Mangin who had led a column of Tirailleurs Sénégalais during the Fashoda Expedition, the two-year-long and dangerously misconceived French mission in 1898, which had almost sparked an Anglo-French war on encountering Kitchener’s forces in Sudan. Mangin breathed in the air of the continent more deeply than most colonial soldiers. In French West Africa he learnt Bambara, the lingua franca of that vast colony, and following his time in the French North African colonies he took to sleeping in a tent – irrespective of the weather. Wounded three times and decorated for his bravery, he had gradually come to regard himself as an African ‘expert’. At some point in his early career, Mangin, it seems, also became influenced (or at least inspired) by the work of Count Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé.
De Vogüé was one of those figures, seemingly unique to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were able to combine work as an amateur archeologist with a passionate orientalism, while at the same time serving as a diplomat. An attaché to the Ottoman Empire and later an emissary to Russia, de Vogüé became a notable expert on Russian literature, influencing the reading habits of many of his countrymen. But his influence on Mangin was more philosophical than literary. De Vogüé’s ideas on nationhood and empire, for the most part, ran along well-worn grooves. Like many others, he looked to the example of Rome in the hope of identifying the forces that caused great powers to decline and empires to collapse. By contrast with some, though, who put Rome’s fall down to racial mixing, de Vogüé saw it as a consequence of cultural and civilizational decline – and all around him in fin-de-siècle France he detected the same cancer at work. He postulated that Rome might have saved itself by infusing the blood and savage energy of Barbarian tribes to counter the crippling decadence of the Romans themselves. France, de Vogüé suggested, could harness the life-energy and warrior spirit of the culturally inferior peoples of its empire, forging their menfolk into new legions dedicated to the defence of France.
In 1899, the year of Zola’s La Fécondité, de Vogüé published Les Morts qui parlent (‘The Dead Who Speak’), a novel that embraced these thoughts. Exposed to the ‘school of action and responsibility’ that was life in the West African colonies, Pierre Andarran, a young officer, becomes a new sort of Frenchman, freed from the decadence of metropolitan France and its corrupting politics, one of the ‘cadres of our national regeneration’. In many ways, Pierre is a romanticized fictional version of what Charles Mangin was to become.5 In conversation with his politician brother, Pierre predicts that when his generation of colonial officers finally take command of the French Army their masculine vitality will ‘make our European adversaries think twice before trying to push the French around’.6 Having fought alongside black Africans, Pierre is also convinced of their great martial potential in a French national rebirth. In one crucial passage, Pierre appeals to his brother:
If you would like to provide us with the means, we could put at your disposition tomorrow one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand incomparable soldiers, Senegalese, Sudanese, Hausas; bayonets who do not reason, retreat, or forgive; submissive and barbaric forces… England subjugated the world with a few regiments of Sepoys. We can give you the same tools for the same service.7
In fact, France had begun to recruit Troupes Coloniales in its African colonies as early as the 1820s, and by the end of the century all the colonial powers in Africa, including the Germans, had created similar armies of local mercenaries. In 1857, the Governor General of French West Africa, Louis Faidherbe, established a new force, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais (‘Senegalese Riflemen’). He envisaged they would enable him to police and then expand French control in the region, and they were repeatedly deployed during the conquest and ‘pacification’ of the two federations of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. Despite their name, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were recruited from right across the enormous French colony, and not just Senegal. Some of the earliest ‘recruits’ were slaves bought from local owners; but some were volunteers, attracted by the offer of regular pay and the excitement of military service. Like the sepoys of India, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were eventually deployed beyond their homelands, sent to suppress revolts and police the local populations of France’s other African colonies: Madagascar, French Congo, Chad and North Africa.
By the early twentieth century the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were well established as a professional mercenary army, which had proved itself an effective fighting force; but they were still regarded as only being suitable for service in the colonies. France, during the same decades, had recruited units of North African soldiers in Algeria and Tunisia, and in its great moments of peril in the Franco-Prussian War had brought these men, Arabs and Berbers, onto the European battlefield. It was the first appearance in modern times of fighting units from Africa on the European continent. Yet the thought of deploying black men from sub-Saharan Africa on European soil was seen as a step too far.
In 1907, Mangin became Commandant Supérieur of the Troupes du Groupe de l’Afrique Occidentale Française. In that capacity, he began from 1909 onwards to set out a new vision for the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, and they were a radical departure. He became the key spokesman for an informal group of army officers, most with colonial service under their belts and personal experience of leading Africans in battle. What Mangin argued for was not only the expansion of the Tirailleurs into a force hundreds-of-thousands strong, but that this black army be used to defend France and perhaps one day help reclaim the lost provinces from Germany. Black Africa, in Mangin’s conception, would become France’s ‘reservoir of men’. He justified this radical policy – in the face of enormous opposition – by energetically arguing that the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were a potential solution, though not a comprehensive one, to France’s birth-rate crisis. (On the latter issue, Mangin was able to point to his own efforts in that area. As true French patriots, he and his wife had rejected birth control and done their bit in the demographic race against Germany by having eight children.)
In 1910, Mangin published his book La Force Noire – in effect his manifesto for the expansion of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais and the French North African forces. With little in the way of hard demographic data to support him, and in the face of practical objections from many of France’s colonial experts, Mangin claimed that France would be able to recruit 10,000 West Africans each year; it was after all France, and no
t Britain, that possessed the most extensive empire in Africa.8 Mangin confidently asserted that despite France’s recent practice of purchasing slaves to serve in the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, he could persuade thousands of men from West Africa to volunteer for service. Tantalizingly, he also suggested that his estimates were perhaps conservative and that even greater numbers of men might be drawn from the region.9
The rationale behind the Force Noire theory was not just that Africa was a huge and easily tapped reservoir of fighting men, but that racial factors – both physiological and psychological – made some of them specially suited to modern, industrialized warfare. Mangin argued that Africans, as members of allegedly primitive races, had ‘warrior instincts that remain extremely powerful’.10 He suggested that Africans were naturally capable of carrying heavier loads than other soldiers and were better able to survive and fight in harsh climates. Mangin and others of a similar view cited dubious anecdotal evidence, including the suspiciously opportune accounts of French surgeons who reported that they had successfully operated on African men without the aid of anesthetics. Slipping into the idiom of racial anthropology – one of the most influential pseudo-sciences of his age – he claimed that Africans had an underdeveloped nervous system, which, in some unspecified way, enabled them to withstand the shock of battle, rendering them conveniently immune to the post-traumatic, psychological conditions that blighted white European troops. With all the over-assured confidence of an amateur psychologist, Mangin maintained that the low intellectual abilities of Africans meant that they were unable to rationally analyse their chances of survival in a combat situation, and so they believed only in fate. This lack of analytical aptitude meant that Africans were consequently less distressed by the thought of impending combat, and less psychologically damaged having gone through the experience. Later, he even claimed that African troops were so unperturbed by the experience of modern warfare that they were able to sleep through bombardments, if so ordered. In one of the more infamous passages of La Force Noire, Mangin wrote:
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