The next step to sergeant – the important climb out of the troupes and into the sous-officiers – was harder, and took at least two years even for the brightest of the French ex-Line NCOs in the ranks. (Minnaert’s exploit at Son Tay had earned him the Médaille Militaire and corporal’s stripes, but it still took him another seven years to make sergeant.) Getting – and keeping – a gold stripe depended on literacy, intelligence, sustained application, a clean conduct sheet, and the sheer luck of continuing physical fitness. However, despite the official need to tick the boxes, it was also the almost unique opportunities for active service that drew keen French ex-lignards into the Legion, whose culture gave almost as much weight to bravery on campaign as to paper qualifications. While discipline was always fierce, Legion officers took a more paternal view of their soldiers than was the case in the rigidly formal Line, and in the matter of the ‘clean’ conduct sheet men who had distinguished themselves in battle would be given some leeway. While it was harder to get and easier to lose your gold stripe in the Legion, it was also easier to get it back again than in the prissier environment of Line regiments; after all, what the Legion needed was men with a taste for taking risks. Progress beyond sergeant – to sergeant-major and warrant officer (adjudant) – was very much a case of the higher the rank, the fewer the numbers eligible, and was almost entirely limited to native French-speakers of superior literacy and administrative talents.25
Seen from the ranks, Legion NCOs were as mixed a group as might be expected in any army of the day. Martyn wrote that direct bribery for a specific favour was far rarer than the maintenance of a general atmosphere of relative goodwill by the occasional drink or packet of cigarettes; this was seen as simply an extension of the universal rule that any man in funds treated his mates. Manington recalled only a few NCOs as ‘objectionable’ – habitually picking on the men – and soldiers who kept themselves and their kit clean and were smart and obedient seldom had much to fear. Good NCOs made it clear what they wanted, barked once and then bit hard; bad ones were unpredictable, biting without warning.26 Unlike those of the British Army, sergeants could award formal punishments on the spot, though these had to be entered in a book reviewed daily by the company and battalion commanders. This could lead to petty tyrannies, but it also gave NCOs higher status and thus self-reliance when on campaign, which was valuable when officers fell.
New recruits unused to discipline might respond to an order or correction with a curse; once they had been taught the folly of such defiance, few except the hopelessly awkward or the hardest cases (who could be very hard indeed) got into trouble when sober – drink was the cause of nearly all crimes and misdemeanours. Except on campaign, punishments were identical in nature to those inflicted throughout the French Army, though sometimes more severe in degree. Manington wrote: ‘A regiment is not like a girls’ school, and it is impossible to maintain discipline in a corps composed . . . of so many hard cases unless a certain amount of severity is used.’ Nevertheless, the ex-British ranker Martyn was critical of the frequency of awards of punishment drill for trivial offences.27
The most banal penalty was extra fatigue duties and confinement to barracks; this might involve simply peaceful drudgery, or being run ragged by frequent and unpredictable blowing of the defaulters’ call, summoning them for fatigues. Salle de police meant performing normal daily duties but spending the nights in full kit on a plank sleeping-platform in the guard-house. ‘Ordinary’ arrest was a good deal more severe; it meant at least eight days in a bare cell, being brought out for six hours’ punishment drill daily – typically including spells of running round the square with a knapsack full of rocks or a rifle at arms’ stretch. A lower circle of purgatory was cellule – solitary confinement for 24 hours a day in an almost lightless cell on punishment rations; the maximum award was a month, which could drive a man without unusual inner resources half-crazy.
Beyond these punishments at unit level, the battalion commander could sentence the most serious or persistent offenders to transfer for six months to the regimental section disciplinaire. This sentence could be extended, in theory almost indefinitely, since the slightest misdeanour set the clock back to zero – the time already endured was ‘rabio’ or extra (and the whole interlude was extra to a man’s five-year engagement). The final abyss was a divisional general court-martial at Oran, where a guilty verdict meant a sentence of many years’ hard labour or death by firing squad. A condemned man might be returned to his unit for execution; Private Silbermann recalled two German deserters who killed local Arabs being shot at Géryville in the presence of the local caids.28
The punishment platoons were based at remote desert camps, and provided labour gangs wherever they were needed. Silbermann did a spell of duty guarding the 2nd RE disciplinary camp at El Oussek; his memoir is somewhat sycophantic to authority throughout, but cannot hide the harshness of the regime in the punishment platoon. The guard detail lived in huts, the prisoners in eight-man bell-tents surrounded by drystone walls. Their days were mostly spent in hard labour under a burning sun – breaking rocks, road-building and other construction tasks – but alternating with drill, field exercises, lectures and inspections. Silbermann claimed that they got the same rations as the guards and normal pay, and were allowed access in rotation to a rudimentary dry canteen to make small purchases. Punishments included cellule in a one-man bivouac tent; but the NCOs in charge of such camps were often almost entirely unsupervised, and other Legion memoirs speak of men left all day under the desert sun in an open grave (le tombeau), without a waterbottle. One spell in the ‘Zephyrs’ was almost invariably enough to tame the most rebellious spirit.29
IN CORPORAL MARTYN’S OPINION, the opportunity for outstanding NCOs to seek commissions through the St Maixent academy was much superior to the British system, which denied them anything but a quartermaster’s commission.30 In 1890, ex-rankers still made up 55 per cent of subalterns in the Army as a whole, but in their promotions thereafter they naturally remained at a disadvantage compared with St Cyr graduates, who had between four and ten years’ start over former NCOs, as well as informal but important social connections. In the 1880s the average Army sub-lieutenant of any background took at least ten years to reach captain, and the average captain twelve years to reach major, at an average age of 43 years (these delays increased significantly during the 1890s and 1900s). The ex-NCOs’ late start up the ladder meant that they were even older for their ranks.31
The légionnaires took both kinds of officer – St Cyriens and ex-rankers – very much as they found them, but anyway had little contact with either sort except when in the field. A fair, considerate and (above all) brave and decisive officer was respected, sometimes idolized. One need not be too cynical about the motives of men who routinely risked and often lost their lives to bring in a wounded or dead officer; they did the same for their own comrades. One might imagine that ex-ranker officers were touchy about their new status, but again, this was not the British Army, and class background was much less of an issue. At least some St Maixent men profited by their experience of life in the ranks to show kindness and knowledgeable encouragement to their légionnaires.32
ONCE POSTED AWAY FROM THE DEPOTS, Algerian service in these years was hard and monotonous. (The ex-soldier Martyn denied that there was anything special about le cafard, the desperation that was said to drive men crazy in small posts. He judged it to be no different from the extreme boredom that made Tommies in India ‘fed up’, and that usually discharged its tension in a drunken brawl or some defiant spree.) In July 1890, Manington was posted to 9th Company, III/1st RE, and that September he was sent on manoeuvres in the Sud-Oranais. After alighting from trains at Mécheria, the battalion marched down to Ain Sefra, and thence into the true desert (see Map 3). After about ten days, an outbreak of typhoid fever swept through his unit – enteric or morbus campestris, the ancient scourge of armies and prisons everywhere.33 A delirious Manington survived a nightmare journey back to civilization, ini
tially being jolted about for many days in mule- and camel-litters. He wrote appreciatively of the battalion medical officer, Dr Aragon, and enthusiastically of the regime at the Legion’s convalescent camp at Arzew on the Mediterranean coast, where for three months he loafed, swam and rebuilt his strength with country strolls.34
In November 1891, each RE was ordered to be enlarged from four to five battalions (though this would take some time to achieve in practice). Considering the unrewarding monotony of Algerian duty, it is not surprising that what légionnaires at Sidi bel Abbès and Saida prayed for was a chance of active service. By 1892 Corporal Martyn had already done a tour in Tonkin, where he had survived the ravages of blackwater fever. In late July, spending an evening in a Sidi bel Abbès café after returning from his own rest-cure at Arzew (where men just off the boat from Haiphong were almost invariably sent), he saw a report in the Echo d’Oran that a Legion marching battalion was to be formed for active service in somewhere called Dahomey. Orders were posted in the barracks next morning, calling for volunteers and stating that preference would be given to Tonkin veterans, who were presumed to be ‘fever-proofed’.35
THE LEGION’S RIVALS of the Naval Troops had been pushing inland from the Atlantic coast of West Africa for the past twenty years, though such piecemeal advances were largely unplanned by Paris.36 In France these campaigns aroused an increasing public interest that was assiduously nourished by the colonial lobby, and a six-month Exposition Universelle in 1889 entranced le tout Paris with its artistically recreated native buildings and troupes of carefully groomed dancers. For years some visionaries nurtured hopes of driving a railway south-west from Algeria across the Sahara and as far as Dakar, to tie a single French net over the whole bulge of West Africa from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. (In the event this trans-Saharan route would prove impossible for any but small military expeditions, and was often lethal even for them.)
Three important leaders of West African kingdoms were successively defeated during the 1880s and early 1890s: Mahmadou Lamine, Ahmadou of Segou, and Samory Touré – a remarkable soldier who himself built by conquest an empire in southern Mali, northern Guinea and northern Ivory Coast.37 The Naval Troops officers who led these campaigns became celebrated, but the columns they led were made up almost entirely of locally recruited Senegalese Skirmishers with only small white cadres.38 Their eventual success depended absolutely upon the black troops’ relative resistance to malaria, yellow fever and other natural scourges, and upon the use of African porters to carry all equipment and supplies. By 1892 these campaigns in West Africa had left one particular unresolved space on French maps – Dahomey, lying between the narrow finger of German Togo and the great expanse of coastal Nigeria then administered for Britain by the Royal Niger Company.
THE SHEER GEOGRAPHICAL ARTIFICIALITY of Europe’s African colonies can hardly be more obvious anywhere than along the southern coast of West Africa, where a series of strips of territory ran inland from the Gulf of Guinea like the keys of a piano. In the nineteenth century the regions between Cape Palmas in the west and the Niger river delta in the east were known to Europeans by the names of their historic commodities: the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, the latter embracing roughly the present-day states of Togo, Benin and western Nigeria.
In Dahomey, now the southern part of Benin, a unified kingdom had been born during the seventeenth century when the Fon people of the inland plateau banded together in self defence against Yoruba slave-raiders from the east. By the late eighteenth century the Fon kingdom had expanded, conquering the southern coast and the lucrative western slave-port of Ouidah; the Fon kings became enthusiastic slave-traders themselves, and advertised the fact by adopting a flag showing a European ship. (There was, of course, slaving in West Africa long before the Atlantic trade began and long after it was abolished. Powerful leaders had a pyramid of dependants, and might choose to sell those from the lowest levels into slavery. The coastal kingdoms, fenced in by the jungles to the north, were not densely populated; working people were a scarcer commodity than land, and their ownership served as a symbol of wealth and a repository of value.)39
The most desirable of the white men’s trade goods were firearms; the first great flow of muskets into West Africa began as early as 1660, and by 1700 the Dutch alone were shipping 20,000 tons of gunpowder to the coast each year. The original trade currency of elephant ivory and gold dust was replaced by slaves, who were easier for local monarchs to obtain and more profitable to sell. Slave-raiding became a central activity of West African kings, who exchanged their captives for more guns, which enabled them to capture yet more slaves; by 1750 hundreds of thousands of flintlock muskets had transformed the military potential and the economy of local kingdoms. Dahomey alone is reckoned to have imported more than 2,000 muskets annually even during the 1690s, and to have been exporting some 30,000 slaves a year from Ouidah by 1704. In 1682 a slave fetched only two Dutch muskets, but the Africans bargained shrewdly with the slaving captains of rival nations, and by 1717 they were charging twenty-five English or thirty Dutch muskets for each male slave. The customers for firearms had firm preferences and were far from naïve about the qualities of the weapons offered them; during the eighteenth century British arms factories eventually secured about half the total trade, producing a range of types keenly priced at profit margins as low as 7 per cent.
Although the Royal Navy began to suppress the transatlantic slave trade with some vigour after 1807, from about 1820 the Fon kings of Dahomey – whose major export was now palm oil – became even more conspicuous importers of firearms, since they pursued a singularly belligerent policy by means of a unique standing army. Their human export trade might have dried up, but the kings’ hunger for captives had not; they needed slaves to work the royal plantations that produced the palm oil for export, as gifts to reward their loyal chiefs, as pressed soldiers in their army – and for human sacrifice.40
Although it was also practised by the neighbouring Ashanti and Yoruba, Dahomey became notorious for mass human sacrifice. When King Agaja-Dosu conquered Save and Ouidah in 1777 he is said to have sacrificed 4,000 captives, and such ritual slaughters were a feature not only of especially happy public occasions but of routine annual ceremonies at Kana, the centre of the kingdom’s fetish-worship. These bloodbaths were often witnessed by Europeans, whom the kings insisted attend in order to remind the white men of their unchallenged powers. The tolerant Sir Richard Burton judged these grisly ‘Grand Customs’ to be a ‘deplorably mistaken, but perfectly sincere’ religious observance, believed by all to be essential for the continued wellbeing of the kingdom; others took a less ecumenical view, perhaps influenced by the prominence of human skulls and festoons of jawbones in the royal regalia and the decor of the palace.41 Some of the victims were local criminals, but most were prisoners taken in annual campaigns launched specifically to feed both the slave economy and the blood-rites. Most of them were beheaded, some by the king in person and his male and female executioners; others – bound inside baskets with their heads protruding – were thrown into the hysterical crowd, who competed to bring heads to the king for prizes of cowrie-shell money. In 1892, Corporal Martyn of the Legion was told by a local headman of African porters about a Grand Custom in which hundreds of men were sacrificed, 60 of them by being buried alive.42
THE MILITARY MACHINE that enabled ‘this West African Prussia’ to prey upon its neighbours was unique in two respects, of which the first was its degree of organization. In the nineteenth century the kingdom extended only some 125 miles inland, with an area of about 10,000 square miles and a total population of perhaps 200,000 people. It is therefore remarkable that its kings were able to field armies up to 12,000 strong, with a core of perhaps 4,000 – 5,000 ‘regular’ warriors all armed with state-supplied flintlocks, supported at need by a more lightly armed levée en masse of villagers.
Permanently based around the inland capital, Abomey, and in provincial and frontier garrisons, the s
tanding army was divided into two ‘wings’ each of two divisions, commanded by four officers who doubled as the chief and deputy ministers of the kingdom. The divisions were made up of separate units that were distinguished by names and ‘uniform’ clothing or insignia (for example, in the 1870s the traveller J. A. Skertchly described one named the Tower Gun Company, armed with old British ‘Brown Bess’ muskets and distinguished by dark grey sleeveless tunics with cowrie shells sewn along the seams, and by red tassels on their belly-bandoliers).43 The army’s second unique feature was its inclusion of women warriors, inevitably called ‘Amazons’ by European travellers; the Dahomeyans called them ahosi (‘the king’s wives’) or kposi (‘wives of the panther’). Originally a small royal bodyguard but greatly expanded during the long reign of the warlike King Gezo (1818 – 58), they numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 in the late nineteenth century. They, too, were organized in separate companies (for example, the Blunderbuss Women, and the Elephant-Huntresses); they were distinguished by special clothing and hairstyles, and also by a legendary ferocity in battle.
Although many percussion-lock muzzle-loading rifles had reached the surplus market by the 1880s, the difficulty of obtaining percussion caps apparently persuaded Dahomeyans to stick to their old British, Danish and French flintlock smoothbores, for which ammunition was in easier supply. Male and female soldiers were armed with muskets decorated with paint, cowrie shells and tassels, carrying gunpowder in rows of cartridge tubes on hide waist-bandoliers protected by flap covers, and bullets in decorated leather bags. For close work they carried broad, scimitar-like machetes, long knives or ironwood clubs. Men and women alike were trained for assaulting villages by charging barefoot and without flinching through a succession of lacerating thorn-hedges.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 24