Some of the reports that came into the French High Command outlining the weaknesses of African soldiers were written by commanders who had never subscribed to the Force Noire theory and who were hostile to Mangin and his growing influence. There had long been tensions between the followers of Mangin and French North African officers who regarded the Arabs and Berbers under their command as better soldiers than the Tirailleurs Sénégalais. The bitter debate that had raged between these two opposing camps ever since the publication of La Force Noire back in 1910 continued, in peaks and troughs, throughout the war. Although partly silenced by the symbolic successes at Verdun, Mangin’s opponents, in the latter years of the conflict, developed new arguments with which to dismiss the abilities of the West African troops. As the weapons on the Western Front became more advanced and as operations became more complex and integrated, the supposedly limited intellectual capacity of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, it was said, rendered the troops increasingly unsuited to modern warfare.
Another effect of the widespread belief that Africans were of low intellect was that the military authorities refused to offer the Tirailleurs Sénégalais proper instruction in French. Despite the fact that some of the African troops came from societies that were traditionally multilingual, the army remained wedded to the supposition that they were incapable of learning the French language. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it hampered the capacity of African troops to follow complicated orders or receive effective instructions in the use of the more advanced weapons, and so merely confirmed the negative views of their detractors. The army’s attempt to answer the question of language was a form of pidgin French, known as Français tirailleur or petit-nègre. It formed the basis for a list of orders and questions drafted by the army and issued to white officers in an official army instruction pamphlet.45 This reductive and infantalizing argot was deemed appropriate for men of ‘rustic intelligence’; but Français Tirailleur had the effect of hindering the efforts of Africans to acquired the language skills they needed in an increasingly technical war.
In a wider context, the lack of a proper education in French also denied African troops freedom of expression when dealing with wider French society.46 That society was one that the authorities were keen to school in the theory of the races guerrières.
FRANCE, JANUARY 1916. An edition of the magazine La Dépêche Coloniale Illustrée is published. It is, in fact, a special edition, which celebrates the service of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais. Included is a map of French West Africa, onto which are superimposed portraits intended to represent the various ‘races’ recruited into the Tirailleurs. Men from Senegal itself, Mauritania, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire and Niger are shown in profile – in accordance with current conventions of anthropological photography. Accompanying the map is a descriptive page headed: ‘Types of the principal races of West Africa, whence the Tirailleurs Sénégalais have come’. It names each of the men whose portraits are shown and explains where they have come from and the role they are now playing in the war.
When compared to the United States, or to much of the colonial world, France in the early twentieth century was a racially liberal society. Certainly, as with other Europeans, the French held deep cultural prejudices against the people of Africa; but what was different about French racism was that it was arguably more cultural than biological. It ascribed to Africans a whole array of negative traits, and questioned their intelligence, but tended not to regard racial ‘blackness’ as an insurmountable obstacle to preventing Africans from becoming ‘civilized’. The French colonial mission in Africa was built on the foundations of the nation’s republican traditions and revolutionary ideals. France justified the violent conquest of other peoples and their lands by claiming that, through assimilation or association with French culture, Africans could eventually be raised up from barbarism.
Racism of such a kind was widespread and shared by much of the ruling elite. It was, however, not to be permitted to interfere with the military service of the half-a-million non-white, colonial troops France was to recruit for the war effort. The French authorities therefore faced the task of somehow reconciling French racism with the official line, that black Africans were now soldiers of France come to defend the motherland. The powerful contemporary stereotypes of Africans as savage, violent and unrestrained were useful when promoting the idea that the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were a powerful force that France could unleash on Germany; the same stereotypes were profoundly unhelpful when trying to reassure the French public that their presence within France, behind the lines and billeted in towns and cities, was in the nation’s interest.
There were other elements of the popular racialized view of Africans that posed a challenge, too. African men were widely viewed as both uncontrollable and highly sexual. One official response was to juxtapose the image of the Tirailleur Sénégalais as a warrior in the trenches with an image of ‘le Grande Enfant’ behind the lines. This incarnation of the tirailleur saw him as childlike and naive, an overgrown boy, astonished by the wondrous society in which he now found himself, childishly amused by the simple pleasures of European life, and in the slow process of being guided slowly towards the light of civilization by France. Tirailleurs were at times depicted smiling and playful, but as physically giant figures, often set alongside tiny French children, hammering home their loyalty to France and the unthreatening simplicity of these bons sauvages. This was a comforting image to balance against that of Tirailleurs as savage warriors capable even of decapitating German soldiers.
Yet official propaganda, and then commercial advertizing, was seemingly unable to resist the temptation of amalgamating these two contrasting images. In 1915 the image of the Tirailleur Sénégalais as ‘le Grand Enfant’ became imprinted onto French culture in an advertising campaign for the drink Banania. Posters showed a happy, smiling tirailleur in uniform, carrying the slogan ‘y’ a bon’ (‘it’s good’) in the petit-nègre form of pidgin French. A French wartime postcard then subverted the advertisement, using all the visual signposting to deliver a grimmer propaganda message. In this version, hinting at the old preconception of the African as cannibal, the tirailleur has a German Picklehaube helmet as an improvised cooking pot, hanging over a roaring fire. The implication was reinforced by a caption that played on the Banania slogan: ‘Y’ a bon! C’est le boche qui régale!’ (‘It’s good! This is a treat from the Boche!’)
Yet what is most striking about French propaganda images of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais are the similarities with the work of German propagandists, whose task it was to portray the Africans as savages and their deployment as a war crime. Both repeatedly depicted the Tirailleurs using their rifles as clubs, as if too animalistic to accurately fire them; in both, African faces are shown in distorted grimaces, with white staring eyes that seem to owe their inspiration to caricatures of the American South in the segregation era. Some of the most unpleasant German propaganda is unambiguously and viciously racist; yet there are these other, more ambiguous efforts, which – were it not for language differences – would be difficult to identify as either French or German.
Among the most pervasive and long-lasting effects of German propaganda against the Tirailleurs Sénégalais was the myth, generated in the trenches as well as in the propaganda offices, that they did not take prisoners and mutilated or killed those who fell into their hands. While there may well have been incidents of illegal killings or other atrocities, there were innumerable accounts of German prisoners being well treated by black French units. German troops were, however, so convinced of this particular myth that they feared being taken prisoner by black units, trying to surrender to whites whenever possible. The memoirs of Bakary Diallo, Force Bronté, one the handful of first-hand accounts of the war written by Tirailleurs Sénégalais, includes his encounter with a German prisoner:
A German who had mistaken our lines for his own, was captured with his load of coffee by a Senegalese sentry. When he saw himself surrounded by t
irailleurs, he began to shake. Poor man, couldn’t you have expected this possibility just as well as the gold of glory? The blacks that you took for savages captured you in war, but instead of cutting down your life, they made you prisoner. May your fear not prevent you from proclaiming in your country, tomorrow, after the battle, the sentiment of justice which will rehabilitate the name of the human race of which we are all savages.47
The German fear was, particularly, of being dispatched by a tirailleur’s coupe-coupe, a kind of machete. Like the kukri carried by the Gurkha regiments of the British Indian Corps, the coupe-coupe was a weapon of war that developed into a sort of regimental insignia.48 In the regions of French West Africa that were covered in thick vegetation, the utility of the coupe-coupe was obvious. Less well understood is that in the desperate hand-to-hand fighting, which was an all too common feature of both trench raids and major assaults, the coupe-coupe was a highly effective weapon. In the dog-legged trenches, in which men had to fight to take each corner, the French Lebel rifle was an unwieldy weapon. For the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, therefore, the coupe-coupe was their equivalent of the maces, knives, axes and coshes to which soldiers of all armies resorted in the enclosed confines of an enemy trench. In the hands of propagandists, however, the coupe-coupe became both emblem and ultimate proof of the innate and uncontrollable savagery and barbarism of France’s African soldiers – European innovations with poison gas, for example, notwithstanding. But this argument, made loudly and repeatedly by the Germans throughout the war, had real and lasting effects, well into the next war. And when German soldiers took French officers prisoner, they were known to wield a captured coupe-coupe as physical evidence of France’s degeneracy, an unfitting weapon for a civilized nation.
The obsessive fear of the coupe-coupe symbolized the evolution of German attitudes towards non-white colonial troops into a deep loathing, which permeated the nation’s propaganda.
The initial German victories on the Western Front throughout August and into early September 1914 had generated a great wave of optimism. In this atmosphere, the appearance on the European battlefield of non-white, colonial troops fighting in French and British uniforms was dismissed by German newspapers as merely an oddity or interpreted as a symptom of the Allies’ military weakness.49 It is perhaps not coincidental that the German press hardened its line and began to energetically condemn the deployment of African and Indian troops at the moment when German fortunes took a turn for the worse with the Allied counter-attacks of the Battle of the Marne. The change was particularly noticeable after the so-called ‘race to the sea’, by late October 1914. The end of mobile warfare and the beginning of static, trench fighting ended all possibility of a short war, and in doing so allowed the French and British time to do what Germany feared – draw in men and materials from their colonial empires.
By the end of October 1914, the corresponding attitude of the German press to the deployment of non-white troops on the Western Front and the strategy of the German propaganda machine had shifted to something approaching hysteria. Africans and Asians in the British and French ranks were now said to represent an attack on civilization – and to be a betrayal of the white race. Max Weber, later in the war, raged against Britain and France for having unleashed ‘a refuse of Africans and Asiatic savages’.50 After the war, he regretted that German propaganda had not more effectively tapped into the groundswell of outrage and used the simple and emotive issue of race to forge greater national unity ‘to say this and only this all over again: that Germany continues to struggle for its existence against an army of Negroes, Gurkhas and sundry other Barbarians from all nooks and corners of the world, who wait in the wings to turn our country into a desert’.
Despite Weber’s disappointment at what he felt was his nation’s insufficient propaganda response, German magazines from the time remain shocking to the modern reader. The cartoons in the popular graphic magazines portrayed Asians and (especially) the black Africans of Mangin’s Tirailleurs as savage monsters, cannibals, rapists and sub-human thugs of pitifully low intelligence. At various times and in various publications German writers, cartoonists and journalists condemned the colonial soldiers as ‘dehumanized savages’, ‘a motley crew of colours and religions’, an ‘African exhibition’, a ‘black flood’, ‘dark mud’, the ‘black shame’ and an ‘auxiliary rabble of all colours’.51 The word ‘auxiliary’ was used repeatedly to suggest that non-white troops were not true soldiers.
German propaganda railed not just against the supposed savagery of the colonial troops but at the fact that men from so many nations and races had been brought to Europe to fight. A German sense of geographic encirclement transmuted into national and racial victimhood, as if the whole world really were conspiring against Germany. In a post-war essay, German linguist Wilhelm Doegen complained that ‘Germany did not fight against a world of armies… but rather against a world of races.’ It was, however, a Swede – the celebrated explorer Sven Hedin – who perhaps best expressed the sense of moral outrage and indignation felt by Germans. With the German Armies in the West was Hedin’s propagandist and unashamedly biased account of scenes behind the German front lines as he encountered them in late 1914. In one of the most emotive passages, he wrote:
…there are five continents – supporting the gospel of war and hatred. The two Western powers of the Entente bear the responsibility for having caused the Dance of Death to involve the whole globe, for they are bringing into the fight masses of men raked together from all parts of the world : Canadians come in their ships from America, Turcos and Senegalese negroes from Africa, and poor Hindus and Ghurkhas, bronzed by the sun of India, lie freezing in the trenches – these are the representatives of Asia – and lastly, Australia and New Zealand are sending their contingents, over land and sea, from the Antipodes. And what is the purpose of which the attainment is thought worth such a world-wide levy of warriors? Why, Germanic culture is to be uprooted from the earth. And it is the bearers of this culture, the people of Luther, Goethe, Beethoven, Helmholtz and Röntgen, that are called barbarians and Huns – a danger to the future and civilisation of the white race! It is therefore fit that Ghurkhas and Senegalese should come and save us from relapse into the dark ages.52
Hedin’s contention, that the deployment of colonial soldiers was a means not only to win the war but also to destroy German culture, was repeated elsewhere. But the Swede also voiced a wider German contention that the black and brown men fighting for the Allies were themselves the victims of British and French treachery: savage and uneducated, they were the unknowing tools of an immoral strategy.
When the German press launched its campaign against the deployment of colonial soldiers on the European battlefield, the newspapers claimed that not only was it a crime against Germany but also a profound threat to global racial order and the dominance of the white race. German wartime propaganda exploited what was indeed, for the British in particular, a genuine concern – that soldiers from the colonies, having been trained in the use of modern weapons, ordered to kill white men, tended to by white nurses, and even lionized by white civilians while in Europe, would not then be willing to submit themselves to imperial domination when they returned home at the end of the war. The German argument that the Allies were undermining the prestige and position of the entire white race was not only for domestic consumption but directed also at those in neutral countries, particularly the United States, who feared for the stability of the established racial hierarchy.
The official response of the German government to the colonial troops on the Western Front came in the summer of 1915, when the Foreign Office in Berlin issued the British and French governments with a memorandum of protest. Translated into English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, this Employment, Contrary to International Law, of Coloured Troops upon the European Arena of War by England and France was widely distributed. The opening passages set out Germany’s case. ‘In the present war,’ it complained:
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