Two days after Douaumont fell, French reinforcements began to arrive at Verdun in real numbers. The icy ground thawed and turned to mud, and a steady, unremitting pageant of deadly attrition began. It was not to stop for ten months. Both the French and Germans committed ever more men and resources to the crucible of Verdun. There, artillery bombardments were launched that were so titanic that not only were enemy positions obliterated, the hills into which they had been dug were reduced in height by up to twenty metres. Millions of tons of earth and thousands of men were atomized by the approximately 10 million shells fired by both sides – 2.5 million alone had been stockpiled by the Germans just for the initial assault. Throughout the spring and summer of 1916 offensive followed offensive. A spider’s web of railway lines was built by both armies to feed men and materials into the inferno and bring up the vast railway howitzers that crushed through the concrete of forts and obliterated strongpoints. Deadly gas attacks were launched, designed to wipe out whole battalions, while overhead the largest aerial battle the world had ever seen was fought out, the Germans and French both drafting in their elite squadrons and legendary air aces. Every hill of the Verdun battlefield, every trench line, strongpoint and fort was contested, with terrible losses. All told, 70,000 men were dying each month. The French kept the casualty figures from their newspapers, while Falkenhayn withheld the German death toll from even his fellow generals. Under the command of General Pétain, the French developed the ‘Noria’ system, by which men were rotated through the fighting zones around Verdun, lest their nerves be shattered by the ferocity of the bombardments and the intensity of the carnage.
In May 1916, command of the French Second Army at Verdun passed from Pétain to General Robert Nivelle, a man whose career had begun in the colonies. He had served in both Tunisia and Algeria and was a veteran of the French force sent to crush the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1898–1901. He had made his name during the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. Nivelle was not the only new arrival. He brought with him the man who was now Commander of the 5th Division: Charles Mangin. By now, as a general on the Western Front, Mangin had acquired two telling nicknames – the ‘Butcher’ and the ‘Eater of Men’: he had led Frenchmen and his Tirailleurs Sénégalais into battle, and their terrible casualties under his command had already been noted. Fighting for the survival of his nation rather than merely for the pacification of its colonies, Mangin had shown himself to be as fanatically dedicated to the principle of attack as he was to his Force Noire theory. Soon after his arrival at Verdun, Nivelle ordered Mangin to prepare for an assault to retake Douaumont. Although it reached the fort, the attacking units were unable to break into the catacombs within and take on its German defenders. They seized parts of the great structure but were forced by heavy losses to retreat.
In June 1916, before the French could launch a new operation, the Germans attacked with diphosgene gas, delivered in over 100,000 shells. It was not until October that Nivelle and Mangin were in a position to launch another, all-out offensive to retake Fort Douaumont. The final stage of that assault was led by a ‘colonial’ regiment of Moroccans – white settlers with a fearsome reputation as fighters. They were supported by the 43rd Battalion of Tirailleurs Sénégalais and two companies of Somali soldiers.
Douaumont, even today, remains a shocking sight. The subterranean fort appears like a great tor erupting from the earth, but made of concrete and rubble rather than living granite. Its thick, steel gun emplacements, observation posts and retractable turrets look like armaments stripped from a battleship of the nineteenth century, rather than the defences of a twentieth-century fortress. The forests that have grown up around the battlefield hide, under their shade, a lunar landscape of craters and ditches. Despite the softening effects of vegetation, Verdun is one of the few places on the Western Front where the ferocity of First World War artillery bombardments can still be seen and even vaguely appreciated. Above the single entrance to Fort Douaumont hangs a plaque. It reads, in translation:
On 24 October 1916, the Moroccan Colonial Infantry Regiment reinforced by the Senegalese 43rd Battalion and by two companies of Somalis, seized, with admirable élan, the foremost lines of German trenches and then advanced under the energetic command of Lt. Colonel Régnier breaking the enemy’s successive waves of resistance to a depth of two kilometres and inscribed a glorious page in their history by seizing in an irresistible assault the fort of Douaumont and holding it in spite of the enemy’s repeated counter-attacks.
Although they had not been the spear-point of the French attack, when the 43rd Battalion of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais marched out after the assault, to head through the towns and villages behind the lines, they were ordered by their white officers not to wash the mud from their uniforms, so that civilians would know that they were the Africans who had taken part in the recapture of Douaumont.30 Ultimately, it was Charles Mangin, the champion of the Force Noire, rather than Falkenhayn who enjoyed the last flourish of symbolism at Verdun. In the aftermath of Douaumont’s recapture, Mangin was depicted on the cover of the popular illustrated magazine Le Rire Rouge surrounded by the Tirailleurs Sénégalais he had helped make famous. The caption read ‘Un Noir vaut deux Boches’ – ‘One black is worth two Boches’.31 And in the afterglow of these events, much of the opposition to Mangin’s Force Noire was temporarily silenced. He and the French Army were free to set about determining, through experiment and according to theory, the best ways of deploying Africans troops on the Western Front.
There was, of course, one other expansive African empire in the Allied camp. One of the most perplexing questions raised by the French recruitment of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais for the Western Front is why the British did not do likewise. There had been British figures who, before the war, had argued for the raising of an African army for use across that continent and perhaps elsewhere. And the British, too, felt they had identified which of their subject Africans had the martial qualities needed – the Hausa of Nigeria, the Sudanese, and the Zulu in the south all passed muster in this respect. There were those at the top of the British Army in the latter half of the nineteenth century who were so impressed by the martial abilities of Africans that the 1859 Indian Army Reorganization Committee, set up in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, had toyed with the idea of garrisoning India not just with loyal local troops but also Africans, who might prove more reliable and be less likely to find common cause with the disgruntled voices of the subcontinent.32
In his tract The Colonies and Imperial Defence, published just a year before Mangin’s La Force Noire, the British colonel and ‘African expert’ P.A. Silburn condemned the British government’s position that ‘native races are not to be considered seriously in the organization of Colonial troops for Imperial service,’ asking: ‘Can the Empire afford such magnanimity?’ He continued: ‘Will reciprocity in this respect be shown by the Power or Powers we have to fight in the future? If any Power approves of our self-denial it will be because of the old advantage of fighting against one who has voluntarily tied up one of his arms.’33 Like others who feared for the future security of the empire, Silburn was adamant that ‘To be the decisive fighting machine the size of the Empire demands, the Army must include every available man, irrespective of race, creed, or colour… Native races, the subjects of His Majesty, must then be considered in the organization of our Army.’34 The first step in that process, he suggested, was that ‘The South African Colonies should between them ear-mark from among the tribes within their borders a force of 30,000 men.’ Here Silburn, who had strong views on South Africa and the threat posed by the menace of racial mixing, cautioned that ‘In the case of the Zulu it would perhaps be unwise to teach him the use of small arms…[as] there remains the fear, not ground-less, that to teach and encourage the use of the rifle by the native races may result in trouble if not disaster.’35 In West Africa the absence of a large white population reassured Silburn that recruitment could be carried out with less caution. The men of tha
t region were, in his analysis, especially valuable; after all, ‘The negro has proved himself a most excellent gunner; the Hausas in this respect are hard to excel.’36
Pre-war opposition to Silburn’s analysis, and more vocally to Mangin’s Force Noire theory, was nevertheless as strident in pre-war Britain as it was in Germany. A digest of recent articles (1911) written in English on La Force Noire noted the French War Department’s ‘sense of relief’ at the prospect of this extra manpower, but described the potential African recruits as ‘a new source of supply of what Napoleon called “cannon food”’.37 There was even disquiet in Britain at the formation of indigenous forces for use in Africa itself, something that every colonial power had pursued. In 1902, J.A. Hobson, in his influential Imperialism: A Study, warned of the terrible danger:
…whereby the oppressor at one deprives himself of the habit and instruments of effective self-protection and hands them over to the most capable and energetic of his enemies. This fatal conjunction of folly and vice has always contributed to bring about the downfall of Empires in the Past.38
Others, rather than looking to the imperial past for cautionary tales, envisaged dystopian futures. In 1898, H.G. Wells published his science-fiction novel The Sleeper Awakes, in which the hero (Graham) awakes after having fallen asleep for two centuries. He finds London ruled by the dictator Ostrog, a tyrant who enforces his rule through a militarized police force of black Africans – men recruited from Senegal and South Africa. Graham escapes from the monied elite he finds himself part of to explore London, and he finds a city where the white industrial poor live a troglodyte existence. They are, it seems, like the Morlocks of The Time Machine (a novel Wells had completed only three years earlier) but before the process of de-evolution has stamped itself upon their bodily frames. And the jailors are the Africans. Thus, in the same years when the French were using Tirailleurs Sénégalais to enforce their colonial grip on North Africa, Wells was envisaging a future age in which Africans would become the agents not of colonial repression but of class war, deployed by the rich to enforce their rule over the working class. In the climactic chapter, waves of African soldiers converge on London in a vast fleet of aircraft, and Graham encourages the white workers of London to construct anti-aircraft guns to defend themselves.
Like all great science-fiction writers, Wells was playing with exaggerated versions of ideas that were current and with phenomena that were at least vaguely conceivable. If the soldiers of French West and Equatorial Africa could become the guard-dogs of empire, why could they not also become the protectors of industrial wealth or the privileges of the ruling classes? French socialists nursed similar fears, believing that black French colonial troops might be used to repress the French working class. Yet the fear of armed Africans en masse seemed to have taken a deeper hold in Britain than in France, despite the lack of any such force within the British Army.
In August 1914, with Britain struggling to hold a modest stretch of the Western Front and to find the men to defend the empire, such racial fears were clearly at odds with harsh demographic realities. An MP, R.P. Houston, was one of the first to challenge official reluctance to raise a mass African army. He called for the recruitment of a regiment from the ‘martial races’ of South Africa – most notably the Zulu – and for its rapid deployment to the battlefields of Europe. Houston’s plan was ill-conceived, as the Union of South Africa was the least likely part of British Africa to allow the arming, training and deployment of black Africans. The issue re-emerged in the summer of 1916, in the weeks after the Battle of the Somme. With the military and political leadership of Britain plunged into crisis, there was near panic within official circles at the catastrophic losses the British Army had suffered. Kitchener’s home-grown volunteers were being decimated and the nation faced a fresh manpower crisis. By that point, of course, tens of thousands of Indians had come and gone on the Western Front; the Indian cavalry were still there. Yet the government steadfastly resisted the military logic of recruiting Africans for the Western Front, despite what was now a chorus of loud voices demanding that the empire emulate the French and consider not just recruitment but conscription in Africa.
That year, what was dubbed the ‘Black Army Lobby’ emerged. Its most vociferous spokesman was Major Darnley Stuart-Stephens, a career soldier who had commanded the Lagos Battalion of British Nigeria in the 1880s. In October 1916, during the protracted Somme campaign, Stuart-Stephens published an article in the English Review entitled ‘Our Million Black Army’. In it he promised to use his experience of Africa to personally recruit a force of 20,000 Africans in just two months. Describing Africa as an ‘almost unlimited reservoir of African man-power’, he projected that if a full-scale recruitment drive were initiated across the British-controlled territories of Africa a force half-a-million strong could be raised, trained and thrown into battle against the German line, all within just nine months.39 What Stuart-Stephens called the ‘black fighting material’ of Africa consisted of tribes who, he argued, were every bit as martial as the martial races of India. ‘In northern Nigeria alone,’ he believed, ‘there are to-day more than 700,000 warlike tribesmen. Let them be used! These “bonny fechters” are now engaged in the pastoral arts of peace. But I would make bold to assert that a couple of hundred thousand could, after six months’ training, be usefully employed in daredevil charges into German trenches.’40 The first Africans the major wanted to see dispatched to the Western Front were Sudanese battalions, ‘70,000 big, lusty coal-black devils, the time of whose life is the wielding of the bayonet, and whose advent would not be regarded by the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to come of the same sort’.41 Tapping into this vast human resource would allow Britain to man the Western Front with an army whose natural propensity for war would simultaneously save white lives and help overcome the awesome military might of Germany.
While Stuart-Stephens was certainly the most energetic member of the Black Army Lobby, the most influential voice was that of Winston Churchill. In May 1916 he argued in the House of Commons that a force of Africans be recruited and deployed (in addition to extra Indian regiments). ‘Let us… think,’ he warned Parliament:
…what historians of the future would write if they were writing a history of the present time and had to record that Great Britain was forced to make an inconclusive peace because she forgot Africa: that at a time when every man counted… the Government of Great Britain was unable to make any use of a mighty continent… It would be incredible but it is taking place… What is going on while we sit here, while we go to dinner, or home to bed? Nearly 1,000 men – Englishmen, Britishers, men of our own race – are knocked into bundles of bloody rags every twenty-four hours… Every measure must be considered, and none put aside while there is hope of obtaining something from it.42
Ranged against Churchill and Stuart-Stevens was an unlikely alliance of humanitarians (concerned about exploitation), military theorists (who dismissed the abilities of black troops) and white settlers supported by the leadership of South Africa (who had refused to countenance any policy that led to guns being placed in the hands of black Africans). Churchill and others supported calls for missions to be dispatched to the French Army to explore how the French had been able to forge the Tirailleurs Sénégalais into such an effective fighting force; but nothing came of such enquires.
The conclusion to the whole debate had one final irony. In East Africa, Lettow-Vorbeck’s raison-d’être for his dogged guerrilla war was to try and bog down Allied men and resources that might otherwise be used on the Western Front. In one sense he need not have bothered. British policy decisions meant that no black Africans under arms would ever be heading from British Africa to the Western Front.
There had been seventeen battalions of Tirailleurs Sénégalais on the Western Front during 1916; they also fought on the Somme, the offensive conceived in part as a way of drawing German forces away from Verdun. Over the course of 1917 the number of battalions leaped to forty-one, and by war’s
end it had reached no less than ninety-two.43 Their actual deployment was, like their initial recruitment, heavily shaped by French racial thinking. The firm conviction that Africans were naturally suited to the attack both encouraged and justified their use as shock troops, particularly in the last two years of the war, after Charles Mangin had been elevated to the High Command. Eventually the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were so synonymous with frontal assaults that white French soldiers learnt to recognize the arrival of black units in the front lines as the portent of an attack.
In 1918 the High Command issued its Notice sur les Sénégalais et leur emploi au combat, a manual for officers leading Tirailleurs Sénégalais. It was an attempt to summarize tactical thinking on the use of the African units and offer white officers a better understanding of the men under their command. For the most part it simply regurgitated the races guerrières theory, and once again the various peoples of French West Africa were listed, evaluated and ranked. Apparently impervious to empirical evidence and blind to recent experience, the authors of the Notice asserted that the peoples of the African interior were born-warriors while men from the coast were mediocre soldiers. Wolof, Serer, Tukulor and Bambara men were all defined as being especially warlike and among the best soldiers.44 But the Notice did not focus solely on martial abilities; it went on to catalogue and explain the limitations that the French had come to ascribe to their African troops, the root cause of which was the supposedly limited intellect of Africans – as compared to Frenchmen and other colonial troops. One consequence of these purported inadequacies was an alleged propensity among the Tirailleurs Sénégalais to panic. This had been noted by French commanders in previous encounters, from the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 to some of the fighting at Verdun in the summer of 1916. Specific reasons why African units might have performed poorly on these occasions were brushed aside in favour of explanations based on race. One conclusion drawn was that Africans struggled in defensive operations. The explanation for this went roughly as follows: while it required moral courage and skill to defend a trench, to assault an enemy position required only the sort of innate unthinking courage Africans were known to possess. The Frenchman, supposedly more intelligent than the African, and fighting for a cause he understood and a civilization he appreciated, could be better relied on to stand and fight as a defender, and to intelligently use the terrain to his advantage while doing so. Africans, despite all their natural warrior instincts and unthinking courage, lacked the intellect to acquire the more nuanced skills in defence and therefore had to be supported in this task by white officers and other white companies appended to their battalions. Without the stiffening presence of white soldiers, Africans could be put to flight by the enemy. The deployment solution designed to solve this was to position, behind black battalions, one white reserve battalion, whose task it was to prevent the blacks troops from fleeing and, if possible, to exploit the breaches in the enemy lines created by the attacks of the African battalions. The obvious and inevitable corollary of this policy was that the Africans would suffer heavier losses than the white battalions supporting them.
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