Lieutenant Colonel Albert Ditte explained the quasi-official attitude to native troops to an audience at the French war college in 1905: While he cautioned that military virtues were not the exclusive preserve of Europeans, “... the inconvenience of native troops lies in the confidence that one can have in their fidelity to the national flag. This is precisely why the employment of Europeans [in colonial expeditions] is indispensable.”8
Therefore, discipline was fragile because the political reliability of native troops was suspect. When this suspicion of disloyalty was combined with a lack of discipline, the potential for disorder was obvious. Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Louis Lentonnet, an officer of the Algerian tirailleurs who participated in the Madagascar expedition as part of the régiment d'Al-gerie, stated the problem more bluntly. Strict discipline with native troops was essential, he believed, because “it is a small step from scrounging to brigandage. The light column [in Madagascar] is a real Tower of Babel, where the French are in a minority. What would happen to us if the authority of the officers was no longer obeyed?”9 This was not mere paranoia or racism, for pillage and especially the capturing of slaves was so much a part of the French military system in Africa, especially in the Western Sudan, that many campaigns there probably owed their inspiration at least as much to Attila the Hun as to Napoleon. “Basically there was little difference between a sofa [African warrior] and a [Senegalese] tirailleur,” writes the Canadian historian A.S. Kanya-Forstner.
The prospect of plunder was the principal reason why the latter served the French, and the regular distribution of captives was the most efficient way to secure his continued loyalty. That female prisoners were euphemistically called épouses libres did not make them any less a form of payment. When [the governor general of the Western Sudan] tried to stamp out the practice [in 1894] by punishing some of the officers responsible, the main concern of his military commanders was to prevent the news from reaching the tirailleurs lest they be encouraged to desert. 10
Even the Legion slipped effortlessly into this local custom when it campaigned in the Western Sudan. For instance, in July 1894, when the French sacked the village of Bossé in the Mosi territory of West Africa, the 1,200 captives were distributed as slaves to the victors, with the legionnaires on the expedition given first pick just after the officers.11 Lieutenant Charles Mangin, destined to be one of France's most distinguished generals in World War I, was given thirty days’ detention in October 1894 for having distributed slaves among his servants and interpreters.12 The primary danger posed by pillaging, at least from the viewpoint of the French officers, was that it could easily dissolve the fragile notions of discipline among the native soldiers. Therefore, white soldiers were included in these expeditions to ensure that discipline was maintained as much as for their fighting qualities.
In 1894, officers even experimented with using legionnaires as cadres for black troops, an experiment which, in the opinion of Lieutenant Mangin, was unsuccessful: “Of 20 men from the Legion, 14 were casualties,” Lieutenant Mangin wrote after the action at Bossé. “Despite this, the impression of everyone was that the legionnaire is useless when he is isolated in the midst of natives and that this idea of ‘encadrement’ of Sudanese troops by the Legion is a great mistake.... This magnificent troop must operate with its own cadres. To disperse it is to destroy it to no benefit.”13 So while French military power abroad relied upon a heterogeneous soldiery, and even boasted of the virtues of this system, it is clear that the officers did not entirely trust it—an ironic conclusion in many ways, as the most notorious case of military indiscipline in Africa, the revolt of the Voulet-Chanoine expedition of 1898–99, occurred when white officers mutinied against French government authority.14
So white troops were considered an essential ingredient in French imperial expeditions because they were disciplined and reliable. The question then became, where were they to be recruited? The metropolitan army in France was one source of white manpower. As has been seen, numbered French regiments had provided the mass of troops for the conquest of Algeria in the 1840s, and had even participated in the Mexican expedition. Yet with the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the extension of conscription in France, it became more difficult for the government to cast conscripts into campaigns of imperial expansion. Opponents of colonial expansion argued that these expeditions abroad were a distraction that took French manpower away from the critical frontier with Germany. Also, as will be seen in Madagascar, the dispatch of metropolitan units, even when composed of volunteers, on these often lethal colonial campaigns was political dynamite. Conscription had even turned once elite units of the Armée d'Afrique, like the zouaves and the Chasseurs d'Afrique, into pale imitations of their metropolitan counterparts. This basically left only three professional white infantry units more or less available on demand for service abroad—the penal Bats d'Af, the troupes de marine and, finally, the Legion. Besides, campaigns, especially those in Tonkin, continued to provide a great recruitment draw for the Legion, while it is also possible that the army used the Legion as a means to keep a presence in these domains normally reserved for the navy and armée coloniale.15
While volunteers for these expeditions were plentiful, legionnaires were not unaware of the risks they ran. As Martyn marched out of the barracks gate on the way to Oran to the strains of the Legion march, “I thought of the lively lot that had marched with me behind that tune on the former occasion, and wondered if I should again be one of the lucky few to return undamaged, finally coming to the conclusion that the odds against me were much greater than when I set out for Tonkin.” When the train left the Sidi-bel-Abbés station, only to stop after fifty yards and reverse back beside the quay, “Many of the superstitious legionnaires looked upon this as a bad omen and openly expressed their regret at having volunteered for the job.”16 However, their regrets vanished when they reached Oran and were feted for four days by the population, all of which reminded Martyn of Rudyard Kipling's poem “Tommy Atkins,”17 and led him to conclude cynically that “the French people love a legionary—when they want him.” Nevertheless, when the transports Mytho and Ville de Saint-Nicolas pulled away from the Oran docks on August 7, 1892, no legionnaire had taken advantage of the four days of festivities to desert.18
The seventeen-day voyage from Oran to Cotonou on Africa's Slave Coast was uneventful. On the 23rd, the ships came in sight of land—a long bar of sand that stretched away toward the east, dotted with palm trees and the low huts of an occasional village—which was the signal for a last-minute frenzy of clothes-washing and a general mucking out of the quarters. The ships soon dropped anchor off the town of Cotonou, whose wharf jutted two hundred yards into sea, and began the slow process of disembarkation by lighter and native canoe, a task that the Atlantic swells transformed into a test of athletic skill. “The clumsy or the fearful have to be careful, for not only do they risk crushing a limb between the lighter and the metal pilings of the wharf, but if they lost their grip on the rope [ladder], it would be very difficult to save them because of the state of the sea and the presence of sharks,” wrote Lieutenant Jacquot. “... Some men are so terrorized that we are obliged to put them in a basket and hoist them onto the platform . . ,”19 Martyn, too, declared that the landing was carried out “in the exciting and haphazard manner peculiar to the surf-bound West African coast.”20
However, the relief of a successful disembarkation was quickly replaced by disappointment at the appearance of Cotonou: “I imagined a small town or at least a large village,” wrote legionnaire Leliévre, who instead found a settlement consisting of the aforementioned wharf, six or seven huts, a “factory” that traded in almonds and palm oil for shipment to Europe, a blockhouse, a small military hospital, the house of the French resident and a few wrecked native canoes on the beach.21 Therefore, it was with few regrets that the soldiers, once they collected their rifles and ammunition, clambered aboard native canoes or small French river gunboats for the twenty-mile trip across Lake Nokoué an
d into the mouth of the Ossa River to Porto Novo.
Porto Novo, the staging point for the expedition, was the chief city of the Tofa kingdom, a French protectorate at war with its more powerful neighbor to the north, King Behanzin.
At Porto Novo, the disembarking legionnaires were greeted by the Tofa sovereign. “The monarch came and looked on quite affably while we were marched in,” Martyn wrote, “and didn't seem at all put out when we laughed at him.... He had on a French naval officer's cap, and a richly embroidered frock coat, but nothing else whatever ...”22 The “barracks,” large hangars covered with palm leaves that sheltered rows of camp beds of local confection, were comfortable enough. However, apart from a small European quarter, the town was a squalid labyrinth of mud-walled, palm-thatched houses separated by narrow lanes teeming with naked children, pigs, chickens and most forms of household rubbish, settled upon marsh ground beside a lagoon. “Add to this that the natives have the detestable custom of burying their dead beneath the floors of their huts, and you will no longer be surprised of the frequency in this town of fevers and pernicious diseases,” opined Jacquot.23 In Porto Novo, light tropical uniforms and pith helmets were distributed to the legionnaires, as well as porters to carry their supplies: “We were told that all were volunteers, and therefore we must go gently with them so as not to put it into their heads to desert,” Lelièvre recorded. “We were told that the blacks were always slow to obey, but if one used persuasion they would do everything asked of them.... I had no trouble recognizing the one assigned to me ... he was blind in one eye, and so I could always locate him in the column.”24 Then they were sent to catch up with the bulk of the expedition made up of marines and Hausa and Senegalese tirailleurs, who had preceded them.
The expedition was commanded by Colonel (later general) Alfred-Amédée Dodds, a mulatto from Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, who had graduated from Saint-Cyr and spent his entire career in the French marines. “His face reveals this intelligence of mulattoes,” one of his officers recorded, “lit by large eyes showing a great softness.”25 The objective of the French column was the city of Abomey, about eighty-five miles north-northwest as the crow flies from Cotonou. Dodds had rejected a direct march on the capital, preferring to travel up the Ouémé River, which ran north from Porto Novo, and then to march the forty miles overland from Paguessa to take Abomey from the southeast. While this route virtually doubled the distance from the coast to Abomey, it offered several advantages—it avoided the marshes that a direct overland approach would have encountered, as well as turning Behanzin's main forces, thought to be concentrated south of Abomey. Above all, the river route would reduce French dependence upon porters, facilitate supply and give Behanzin gunboat artillery support for a large portion of his expedition. He divided his forces into three groups of 800 men each by mixing his white and native troops, giving him a force of around 2,700 men, with about an equal number of porters, leaving a reserve of around 900 men at Porto Novo. At the same time, he sent a diversionary force of two companies of Senegalese to march from Grand Popo on the south coast directly toward Abomey.26
The French estimated the Dahoman army at 12,000 “men,” which included the contingent of female warriors quite naturally known to Europeans as Amazons. However, the French writer Alfred Barbou declared this a vast overestimate, claiming that the standing army numbered about 4,500, including 800 Amazons, capable of expanding to perhaps 10,000 if a levée en masse were declared.27 Nevertheless, by African standards, they were a formidable force, and none more so than the Amazons. This corps of female warriors had been organized in the first half of the nineteenth century, originally from non-Dahoman captives, to provide a loyal bodyguard for the king. However, they had participated in most of Dahomey's wars and by mid-century had become one of his most prestigious units, which meant that many of the kingdom's most important families began to place their daughters in it. The attraction of service with the Amazons, apart from the military prestige, lay in the fact that Amazons were extended most of the privileges accorded to the king's wives: They lived in the large royal palace at Abomey, had their food prepared for them, and anyone who met them on the road had to make way for them. However, they were forbidden relations with men other than the king on punishment of death. But as the king already possessed a fairly substantial harem, this rule in effect condemned them to a life of chastity, a condition they shared with the Legion and that perhaps contributed to the ferocity of both units.
Apart from the Amazons, the Dahoman army contained a standing force of two thousand to three thousand male warriors directed by a special class of military chiefs. In wartime, numbers were expanded by the obligation of all free males to serve. Each soldier carried his own provisions on campaign, usually enough to last about two weeks. Tactically, the army usually went into battle in an arc formation, the most important chiefs fighting on the right wing while the lesser chiefs fought on the left. Each wing was divided into two divisions and each division into several units led by the village war chiefs. By African standards, the Dahoman army was tactically elaborate, able to fire by ranks, offer covering fire, form extended lines from deep columns and undertake flanking movements.28 However, although around two thousand rifles had been purchased through German arms dealers by 1891, the majority of Dahoman soldiers still fought with blunderbusses, bows and arrows and short swords. And, despite these tactics, it was an army whose main purpose was not to fight pitched battles, but to undertake slave raids on the frontiers of the empire and, in this way, to force villages to accept Dahoman suzerainty. It was an army that had already begun to fall behind its better-armed opponents in Africa, especially the Hausas. Its shortcomings against the French had already been demonstrated in 1890, when they had been repulsed before Cotonou with heavy losses.29 This should have caused the Dahomans to reassess both their strategy and their tactics before they undertook a major campaign against the French. However, as these battlefield maneuvers appear to have been deeply bound up with the Dahoman social structure and court ritual, it would have required a political revolution to change them.
King Behanzin did not have a good press with the French, in part because his regime, a fairly tyrannical and militarized one, practiced polygamy, ritual sacrifice and cannibalism, hardly the sort of thing to win him many friends even on the anti-imperialist left. They also complained that their subsidies, paid to buy his friendship, had instead been invested in Winchesters and Franco-Prussian War vintage chassepots, with which Behanzin had replaced about half of the muskets carried by his troops, 400,000 rounds of ammunition, five “machine guns” (in fact, old French mitrailleuses) and six Krupp cannon purchased from German merchants of death in Togo. Furthermore, he had employed these weapons in the attack upon Cotonou in 1890. And while the French had been obliged to digest this unneighborly act and sign a peace treaty with Behanzin in October 1890, basically because the government felt that their parliamentary majority could not survive a war in Dahomey, colonialists in France and Africa were itching for an opportunity to reopen hostilities.
That opportunity came on March 27, 1892, when Dahoman soldiers fired upon the French gunboat Topaz as it ventured up the Ouémé into Dahoman territory. The fact that the French resident was on board was deemed to be sufficiently insulting to launch an invasion of Dahomey. In fact, the situation was far more complicated than the French, posing as, protectors of the Tofas, cared to concede. Until the 1880s, Abomey had controlled all of the territory running to the coast. However, the French began to demand that Cotonou be handed over to them, claiming this as her right based upon trade treaties concluded in 1868 and 1878. In truth, the clauses upon which French claims to Cotonou rested were the forgeries of French merchants. As these clauses did not exist in the Dahoman texts, Abomey quite naturally rejected them.
The dispute became more aggravated when the French extended their protection to the Kingdom of Porto Novo, which had been a Dahoman tributary since the 1820s. In 1889, the aggressive colonial minister Eugène Etienne s
ent Dr. Jean Bayol, a navy doctor fanatically devoted to French expansion in Africa, to Abomey to demand that Cotonou be handed over to the French. When he met with refusal, he occupied Cotonou, incarcerated the Dahoman governor, and annexed a large block of territory to the west of Lake Nokoué that included the old slave trading station of Whydah. This was a major strategic and economic blow at Dahomey, for it completely severed the Dahomans from their coastal outlets through which they shipped palm oil, their only cash crop, upon which they depended to support their large army. The French then tried to force the king of Dahomey to renegotiate his tariff agreement, which provoked the attack on Cotonou, which was successfully repelled by the garrison of Senegalese troops.30
As usual in matters of colonial expansion, the skirmish quickly outgrew the confines of a local dispute when Berlin protested that the French were attempting to expand their sphere of influence in violation of standing treaties. The explanation for the outrageous French behavior toward the Dahomans, and for the German response, can be found in France's strategic designs in Africa, rather than in any deep desire to corner the palm oil market. The colonialists in Paris had caught a bad case of the jitters because they feared that the Bight of Benin would become a southern front through which the Germans in Togo might advance upon the fabled city of Timbuktu, already targeted for annexation by the French. Meanwhile, the British, already active north of Lagos, would be the first to reach Lake Chad, a land believed so bountiful that French propagandists were already touting it as a potential “French India.”31 Therefore, the conquest of Dahomey, Paris hoped, would sever the ambitions of her imperial rivals in the Western Sudan, while opening a southern approach to support her own expansion westward from Senegal into the Niger basin.32
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