England and France have not relied solely upon the strength of their own people, but are employing large numbers of colored troops from Africa and Asia in the European arena of war against Germany’s popular army. Ghurkhas, Sikhs and Pathans, Sepoys, Turcos, Goums, Moroccans, and Senegalese fill the English and French lines from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier.
Not only was this strategy deemed unfair, it was criminal. Germany’s enemies, the memorandum argued, had dispatched to Europe men from ‘countries where war is still conducted in its most savage forms’.53 While the authors of the memorandum conceded that ‘The laws of nations do not, indeed, expressly prohibit the employment of coloured tribes in wars between civilized nations,’ they argued that this was only the case if such troops were ‘kept under a discipline which excludes the possibility of the violation of the customs of warfare among civilized peoples’. Such constraints, the memorandum asserted, had not been maintained and thus it proclaimed that:
…the German Government sees itself compelled in the present war to enter a most solemn protest against England and France bringing into the field against Germany troops whose savagery and cruelty are a disgrace to the methods of warfare of the twentieth century. The Government bases its protest upon the spirit of the international agreements of the past few decades, which expressly make it a duty of civilized peoples ‘to lessen the inherent evils of warfare,’ and ‘to serve the interests of humanity and the ever-progressing demands of civilization’.
In the interest of humanity and civilization, Berlin therefore demanded that ‘coloured troops be no longer used upon the European arena of war’.54
Up to the summer of 1915, when the memorandum was published, Germany had mostly fought a dire propaganda war. The incredible violence unleashed against Belgian civilians in 1914, along with the needless destruction wrought upon the medieval town of Leuven (Louvain) and the execution of the English nurse Edith Cavell, could almost have been designed in London or Paris to make it easy for British and French propagandists to portray the Germans as the ‘Beastly Hun’ and their Kaiser as a ‘criminal’, ‘lunatic’ and a ‘monster’. Following the ‘Rape of Belgium’, the German Army was condemned in the Allied and neutral press alike for allegedly killing babies and cutting off the hands of Belgian children – often unsubstantiated cruelties which, nevertheless, gained credence. By 1915 French newspapers were no longer even writing banner headlines for each new German war crime, but merely listing them under the semi-permanent banner ‘Les Atrocités Allemandes’.55 But with the issue of race and the deployment of colonial soldiers, the German Foreign Office believed that it had found a cause that enabled Germany to portray itself as victim and characterize the Allies as transgressors of international law and of the conventions of civilized warfare. Furthermore, with the German gaze now on the issue of non-white soldiers, propagandists set out to demonstrate to domestic and international audiences that the colonial soldiers had committed their own war crimes against German troops and white civilians.
On 1 December 1914 the newspaper Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published a report claiming that Gurkhas and Sikhs had begun to sneak across no man’s land at night, enter the German lines and slit the throats of the German soldiers. For good measure the Indian troops would then, it was claimed, drink the blood of their victims.56 Ironically two months earlier, in September 1914, a newspaper in the Punjab had reported the similarly incredible rumour that ‘the Germans have cut off the heads of some Gurkha and Sikh soldiers and have sent them to the Powers with the complaint that the English are sending Indian soldiers to the front’.57 The official German memo of 1915 contained a long appendix listing alleged war crimes by non-white soldiers. Each of the incidents was backed up by ‘the sworn testimony of approved witnesses, and also extracts from diaries and letters of citizens of hostile countries’, all of whom claimed to be either the victims of, or witnesses to, the incidents. According to the German Foreign Office, these documented atrocities represented ‘only a selection from the comprehensive material at hand illustrating the barbarous behaviour of the mercenary coloured troops of England and France’.58 The memorandum asserted that among the war crimes that were routinely carried out were ‘the barbarous practice of carrying with them as war-trophies the severed heads and fingers of German soldiers, and wearing as ornaments about their necks ears which they have cut off’. The later appendices detailed how colonial soldiers:
…creep up stealthily and treacherously upon the German wounded, gouge their eyes out, mutilate their faces with knives, and cut their throats. Indian troops commit these atrocities with a sharp dagger which is fastened in the sheath of their side-arms. Turcos [North Africans], even when wounded themselves, creep around on the battlefield and like wild beasts murder the defenceless wounded.59
One alleged witness, civilian Susanne Ullrich, claimed that a white French officer had told her that ‘the clearing up of the battlefield was assigned chiefly to Moroccans and negroes; in France it was said everywhere that this was done purposely because it would promote the murder of the wounded Germans’. Another, the Bruges merchant Victor Schmier, testified to have:
…met in a valley among the dunes black North-Africans wearing white turbans. They called themselves Goumiers. I spoke to them and asked whether they had already seen much of the war, and whether they had shot many Germans. They replied in the affirmative, and one drew out from the pocket of his baggy trousers a string of putrid fragments of flesh. He raised it proudly aloft and counted the single pieces, to the number of twenty-three. He told me that these were all the right ears of Germans whom he had shot; and he meant to carry them home as trophies of victory.
Schmier added that ‘A second man took out from his trousers a head with red hair and a stubble of beard; it had been severed from the neck diagonally. He said it was the head of a German soldier whom he had shot. The eyes were half open and full of sand.’60
Such stories gained currency, and not only in the German media. Julius M. Price, the war artist and correspondent for the Illustrated London News, recorded in his war memoir On the Path of Adventure two very similar ‘grim yarns’ about the Senegalese troops, though in his version twenty-three ears were ‘all from the left or “heart side,” which it appeared gave them more value, as it indicated he had captured them from the enemy’.61 In other wartime retellings of similar stories, the ear tally is twenty-one or twenty-two. While the dates change, as do locations and the races of the soldiers involved, the central details remain remarkably consistent; there is a strong suggestion, therefore, that the stories were essentially folkloric.62
One explanation put forward for the potency of the severed-ears story is that some French officers might have offered African troops rewards for every German killed, monies paid on presentation of these war trophies as proof of each kill. If true, it suggests how the French also fell back on preconceptions of their West African troops as barbarous and bloodthirsty. Certainly, French authorities and civilians alike resorted to the same stereotypes when celebrating the service of African soldiers as the German propagandists did when condemning it. When units of Tirailleurs Sénégalais arrived in France in 1914, excited crowds had shouted: ‘Bravo les Tirailleurs Sénégalais! Couper têtes aux allemands!’ (‘Well done, Tirailleurs Sénégalais! Cut off the Germans’ heads!’).63 A few months later the French periodical Midi Colonial carried a cartoon of a French Muslim soldier with a necklace made of human ears and the caption ‘Be silent, be careful, enemy ears are listening!’64
The wartime atrocity stories that poured off the production line of the German propaganda machine were, to some extent, built on the foundations of recent historical memory. Similar claims had been made by sections of the press during the genocidal wars fought by the German Army between 1904 and 1908 against the Herero and Nama peoples of German South West Africa. Reports that the Africans had mutilated the corpses of the German dead – both soldiers and civilians – were for the most part newspaper inventions.
Some reports were so exaggerated that the army itself felt compelled to refute them; but such accounts had a deep impact at the time and firmly established black Africans, in the folk culture of late Wilhelmine Germany, as savages who were incapable of adhering to the rules of civilized warfare. This folk memory made it easier for wartime propagandists, a decade later, to bring Indian and North African soldiers into a category similar to that occupied by Africans in the popular German imagination. The weapons that were carried by the non-white troops were seen to substantiate, or at least add credence to the propaganda stories: and thus the kukri and the coupe-coupe were, in German propaganda, not traditional weapons but instruments of torture and mutilation.
In the end, the full truth about human war trophies, the mutilation of the dead and the killing of prisoners will probably never be known. It is inevitable in a war in which millions of men were mobilized that atrocities took place; it is equally clear that while such incidents were rare, reports of them were common and exaggerated.*1 Atrocity stories, on both sides, were amplified and duplicated, distorted by constant telling and re-telling. But the sheer weight of German propaganda convinced both German soldiers and civilians that the taking of war trophies, the killing of prisoners and even acts of cannibalism were not rare aberrations but the standard practice of Asian and more particularly black African soldiers. Unable, ultimately, to prove that colonial soldiers were illegal combatants, Germany’s propaganda machine instead encouraged the belief that men from Asia and Africa were incapable of fighting according to the rules and conventions of war and instead fought according to their innate savage instincts. In this way they were portrayed not so much as fighting in a war, as hunting German soldiers as if they were some sort of prey.65 But still, France recruited.
The consequences of France’s races guerrières theory reached their apotheosis early on the morning of 16 April 1917. In the shadow of the great ridge at Chemin des Dames on the Western Front, twenty battalions of Tirailleurs Sénégalais – around 15,000 men – huddled together in icy, water-logged trenches shrouded in thick mist. They had come from across French West Africa – Senegal, Benin, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina-Faso, Niger, Guinea and Mauritania, from thousands of tiny villages as well as from the towns of the region such as Bamako, Abidjan, Cotonou and – literally – Timbuktu. These were the men, boys, orphans, slaves, abductees and volunteers who had been ‘recruited’ during 1915 and 1916. Even before the new offensive began, the Tirailleurs had begun to suffer badly in the freezing conditions: 1,100 of them had been already been withdrawn from the trenches, suffering from pneumonia or other complaints caused by the cold.
The Battle of Chemin des Dames – known as the Second Battle of the Aisne to British historians – was the main component of the great offensive promised by generals Nivelle and Mangin ever since their victory at Verdun. This was their moment. Nivelle was supremely confident that French artillery and his unswerving faith in the power of a shock assault would achieve what no Allied general on the Western Front had managed in three years of fighting – a complete rupture of German lines and breakthrough into the open country behind. What the attackers were supposed to have done upon reaching open country – by which time they would have gone beyond the range of supporting artillery – was not clear. Yet Nivelle’s infectious bravado swayed his colleagues. The attack was to take place along a front twenty-five miles long, immediately following an enormous barrage. Nivelle projected that there would be only around 10,000 French casualties – modest by the standards of the war. Fearing that the general’s faith in his own strategies might have got the better of him, the more cautious men of the French Medical Services prepared themselves to receive fifteen-thousand. In the end, the total was ninety-thousand.66
Opposing the French and the Tirailleurs Sénégalais was the German Seventh Army, which was dug into some of the most formidable defensive positions on the whole of the Western Front. Improved, refined and reinforced since they were first excavated in the weeks following the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, the German positions were further strengthened by the deep quarries that had been dug into the Chemin des Dames ridge over the preceding centuries. These the Germans now used as underground bunkers to protect them from French artillery. The Germans also had good views over the French positions below, and the land over which any attackers would have to come was waterlogged and already churned by artillery. Furthermore, the Germans had adopted a system of defence in depth. The front lines were only lightly defended and most troops were held in reserve. By the time any French attackers reached the real centres of German resistance, they might well have already exhausted themselves and lost contact with their own artillery.
Charles Mangin, by now elevated to the High Command, inevitably deployed the Tirailleurs as shock troops, in the first waves of the attack. A German officer, Reinhold Eichacker, who left a vivid and horrifying account of the assault, recalled that the first waves of attackers were indeed black Africans. Only when they had been decimated by German artillery and machine-gun fire did ‘finally the whites themselves charge’. As they approached the line of dead and dying Africans, lying in heaps in front of the German trenches, Eichacker had no doubt that ‘The same thing will happen to the whites. We are waiting for them.’ His account is not only revealing about how the French deployed their African soldiers; it drips with racial hatred:
At 7:15 in the morning the French attacked. The black Senegal negroes, France’s cattle for the shambles… Let them come, the blacks! And they came. First singly, at wide intervals. Feeling their way, like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish. Eager, grasping, like the claws of a mighty monster. Thus they rushed closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing in their cloud. Entire bodies and single limbs, now showing in the harsh glare, now sinking in the shadows, came nearer and nearer. Strong, wild fellows, their log-like, fat, black skulls wrapped in pieces of dirty rags. Showing their grinning teeth like panthers, with their bellies drawn in and their necks stretched forward. Some with bayonets on their rifles. Many only armed with knives. Monsters all, in their confused hatred. Frightful their distorted, dark grimaces. Horrible their unnaturally wide-opened, burning, bloodshot eyes. Eyes that seem like terrible beings themselves. Like unearthly, hell-born beings. Eyes that seemed to run ahead of their owners, lashed, unchained, no longer to be restrained. On they came like dogs gone mad and cats spitting and yowling, with a burning lust for human blood, with a cruel dissemblance of their beastly malice.
The first blacks fell headlong in full course in our wire entanglements, turning somersaults like the clowns in a circus. Some of them half rose, remained hanging, jerked themselves further, crawling, gliding like snakes – cut wires – sprang over – tumbled – fell. Nearer and nearer rolled the wall… Our artillery sent them its greeting! Whole groups melted away. Dismembered bodies, sticky earth, shattered rocks, were mixed in wild disorder. The black cloud halted, wavered, closed its ranks – and rolled nearer and nearer, irresistible, crushing, devastating! And the rifles were flashing all the time. A dissonant, voiceless rattle. The men still stood there and took aim. Calmly, surely, not wasting a single shot. The stamping and snorting of thousands of panting beasts ate up the ground between us.
And now came the gruesome, inconceivable horror! A wall of lead and iron suddenly hurled itself upon the attackers and the entanglements just in front of our trenches. A deafening hammering and clattering, cracking and pounding, rattling and crackling, beat everything to earth in ear-splitting, nerve-racking clamor. Our machine guns had flanked the blacks!.67
The assault by the Tirailleurs Sénégalais on the left-hand end of the ridge was but one disastrous element of the wider catastrophe that was Nivelle’s Offensive of 1917. It was a calamity that destroyed the general’s reputation: he was replaced by Pétain within days. It also tarred the already dubious fame of Charles Mangin. Now more than ever, ‘the Butcher’ was perceived as a commander who was frivolous with men’s lives. When Mangin had heard that troops
, including the Tirailleurs, were unable to advance in the face of German barbed-wire entanglements that should have been neutralized by the French guns, he was reported to have barked: ‘where the wire is not cut by the artillery it must be cut by the infantry. Ground must be taken.’68 The failures at Chemin des Dames and elsewhere sparked within the French Army the most serious and widespread military mutiny of the First World War, one of which the Germans somehow remained almost completely unaware. More a military strike than a violent uprising, the exhausted, disillusioned French troops declared themselves willing to hold the front-line trenches but unwilling to take part in any further attacks. The battle also raised question marks in the minds of some over the effectiveness of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais.
The reasons for the French failure at Chemin des Dames were legion. Not only had the Germans seized a copy of the French plans during a trench raid in Champagne in February, they had got hold of even more up-to-date and specific plans from a hapless French NCO captured just two weeks before the battle. They had thus readied fifteen counter-attacking divisions behind the lines, using the deep quarries (known as the Dragon’s Cave) to conceal and protect them. Today the Dragon’s Cave is the site of a moving memorial to the thousands of Tirailleurs Sénégalais who died there. These casualty rates were not solely a consequence of the Africans having been deployed as shock troops, nor the failure of the French High Command to prevent the battle plans from falling into enemy hands. By 1917 the Tirailleurs were dying in such numbers because they were being very deliberately used as cannon fodder, placed in the first waves of attack and set against the most difficult of objectives. This was done in order to reduce casualty rates among white French units. The evidence for this policy is overwhelming.
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