Civilization: The West and the Rest (34 page)

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!

Like an invisible hand they swept over the men and hurled them to earth, mangling and tearing them to pieces! Singly, in files, in rows and heaps, the blacks fell. Next to each other, behind each other, on top of each other.
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Eleven days before the battle, the Germans had in fact obtained detailed plans of the attack from a captured French NCO. They were well protected from the French bombardment by a complex of deep quarries known as the Dragon’s Grotto, which they used as bomb shelters. And when the infantry advanced, the Germans were ready with state-of-the-art mobile machine guns. On the first day alone, the attacking forces suffered 40,000 casualties. By 10 May, one in five French soldiers had been either killed or wounded. For Demba Mboup, who was disabled by shrapnel, it was a revelation of the distinctly uncivilized reality of European life in time of total war. So disillusioned were the Africans that some of them joined in the massive mutiny that subsequently swept through the French ranks and forced the government to replace Nivelle. In August, 200 men of the 61st Battalion of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais – known as the Battalion Malafosse, after
their commanding officer – refused to take up positions along the Chemin des Dames. As one of them succinctly put it: ‘Battalion Malafosse has no good. No rest, always make war, always kill blacks.’
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Several of the mutineers were court-martialled, and four sentenced to death, though none of the sentences was actually carried out.

Though Blaise Diagne protested about the wasteful use of his countrymen, he was soon back in Senegal in search of fresh recruits, this time armed with a guarantee that fighting meant not just citizenship but a Croix de Guerre. On 18 February 1918 Clemenceau defended the resumption of military recruitment before a group of senators, making clear exactly how the French saw the Senegalese:

Although I have infinite respect for these brave blacks, I would much prefer to have ten blacks killed than a single Frenchman, because I think that enough Frenchmen have been killed and that it is necessary to sacrifice them as little as possible.
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In all more than 33,000 West Africans died in the war, one in five of those who joined up. The comparable figure for French soldiers was less than 17 per cent. By contrast, the mortality rate among British Indian troops was half that for soldiers from the United Kingdom.
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War is hell. When the bard of empire Rudyard Kipling visited a French section of the Western Front in 1915 – not long before his own son’s death at the Battle of Loos – he encountered the reality of the great war for civilization:

‘The same work. Always the same work!’ [one] officer said. ‘And you could walk from here to the sea or to Switzerland in that ditch – and you’ll find the same work going on everywhere. It isn’t war.’

‘It’s better than that,’ said another. ‘It’s the eating-up of a people. They come and fill the trenches and they die, and they die; and they send more and
those
die. We do the same, of course, but – look!’

He pointed to the large deliberate smoke-heads renewing themselves along that yellowed beach. ‘That is the frontier of civilization. They have all civilization against them – those brutes yonder [meaning the Germans]. It’s not the local victories of the old wars that we’re after. It’s the barbarian – all the barbarian [
sic
]. Now you’ve seen the whole thing in little.’
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Yet war can also be a driver of human progress. As we have seen, the impressive advances of the Scientific Revolution were helped not hindered by the incessant feuding of the European states. The same was true of the clash of empires between 1914 and 1918. The slaughterhouse of the Western Front was like a vast and terrifying laboratory for medical science, producing significant advances in surgery, not to mention psychiatry. The skin graft and antiseptic irrigation of wounds were invented. The earliest blood transfusions were attempted. For the first time, all British soldiers were vaccinated against typhoid, and wounded soldiers were routinely given anti-tetanus shots.
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Not that these advances helped the tirailleurs, however. If they were not killed in the trenches, they died in enormous numbers from pneumonia. Why? According to French doctors, they had a racial predisposition to the disease.

Europeans had come to Africa claiming that they would civilize it. But even the French, with all their good intentions, failed to implant more than a very limited version of Western civilization there. Elsewhere, the challenges of inhospitable terrain and tribal resistance brought out the destructive worst in Europeans, most obviously but by no means uniquely in the German colonies. Methods of total warfare first tried out on the likes of the Herero were then imported back to Europe and combined to devastating effect with the next generation of industrialized weaponry. And in a final bitter twist, Africans were lured to Europe and sacrificed in one of the war’s stupidest offensives.

The legacy of the war in Africa was as profound in Europe as it was in Africa. General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, who had played his part in the genocide against the Herero, also led the campaign against British forces in East Africa. With the end of the war, Lettow-Vorbeck returned to Germany, but it was not long before he and his veterans saw action again. As their fatherland descended into revolution, they marched into Hamburg to snuff out the threat of a German soviet republic. Civil war raged not only in the big German cities but also along Germany’s eastern frontier, where so-called Freikorps led by veterans like Franz Xavier Ritter von Epp and Hermann Ehrhardt waged war on the Bolsheviks and Slav nationalists as if they were
African tribes in all but the colour of their skins. For Epp and Ehrhardt this came naturally; both had been officers in the wars against the Herero and Nama.
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Although the racial theorist Eugen Fischer ended up on the losing side, the First World War proved surprisingly fruitful for his chosen field. As colonial troops found their way into German prisoner-of-war camps, they furnished racial science experts like Otto Reche with a convenient new supply of specimens.
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Fischer’s
Human Heredity and Race Hygiene
, co-authored with Erwin Baur and Fritz Lens and published in 1921, swiftly became a standard work in the rapidly expanding field of eugenics. Adolf Hitler read it while he was imprisoned after the failed Munich coup of 1923 and referred to it in
Mein Kampf
. For Hitler, few ideas were more horrific than that Senegalese soldiers stationed in the Rhineland after the war had impregnated German women. This was the notorious ‘Black Shame’ that produced the ‘Rhineland Bastards’ – fresh evidence of the conspiracy to pollute the blood of the Aryan race. Given that he was now director of the new Kaiser William Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, founded in Berlin in 1927, Fischer’s influence was as far-reaching as it was malign. He later served as one of the scientists on the Gestapo’s Special Commission Number Three that planned and carried out the forced sterilization of the ‘Rhineland Bastards’. Among his students was Josef Mengele, responsible for the notoriously inhuman experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz.
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For the many ex-colonial soldiers who joined the ranks of the Nazi Party – their old uniforms provided the SA with their first brown shirts – it was entirely natural that the theories born in the concentration camps of Africa should be carried over to the Nazi ‘colonization’ of Eastern Europe and the murderous racial policies that produced the Holocaust. It was no mere coincidence that the Reichsmarschall in charge of the Luftwaffe was the son of the Reichskommissar of South-West Africa. It was no coincidence that Hans Grimm, the author of
People without Space
(1926), had spent fourteen years in southern Africa. It was no coincidence that the man Hitler appointed as provincial governor of Posen in 1939, Viktor Böttcher, had been a civil
servant in the German Cameroons. He was one of many Nazi functionaries who sought ‘to perform now in the East of the Reich the constructive work they had once carried out in Africa’. The Nazis always intended to regard the territories they annexed in Eastern Europe ‘from a colonial viewpoint’, to be ‘exploited economically with colonial methods’.
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The main difference that most struck contemporaries was that, in Eastern Europe, the colonized were the same colour as the colonizers. ‘No nation belonging to the white race has ever before had such conditions forced upon it,’ wrote Eugene Erdely, one of the earliest commentators on Nazi imperial rule. Yet the Nazis had no difficulty with that, thanks to the warped ingenuity of their own racial theories. To Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, the Slavic peoples were all ‘Mongol types’ who had to be replaced with ‘Aryans’ in order to create a new ‘blond province’ in the East. To Hitler, Russians could easily be equated with ‘Redskins’. If Auschwitz marked the culmination of state violence against racially defined alien populations, the war against the Herero and Nama was surely the first step in that direction.

Some empires are worse than others. It is a simple point that blanket critiques of imperialism nearly always overlook. To get a flavour of the French Empire’s mode of operation in the inter-war era it is worth watching
La Croisière noire
, a documentary made in the 1920s by the Citroën car company. When Georges-Marie Haardt and Louis Audoin-Dubreuil set off in halftrack automobiles on the Expédition Citroën Centre-Afrique on October 1924, they were not just trying to sell more cars. This was a bid to publicize France’s benign rule in Africa, extending even into ‘l’inconnu de la forêt équatoriale’. A celebration of ‘civilization’s conquests’, the film juxtaposes scenes of ‘white sorcerers’ amazing Africans with their technical prowess with glimpses of the ‘strange little gnomes’ (pygmies) in the forest. It ends with the
tricolore
flying proudly over the entire African continent, from Algiers to Dakar, from Brazzaville to Madagascar. It would not be hard to mock this classic expression of French imperial aspiration.
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Yet that aspiration was not without its results. In Senegal, as we have seen, colonial rule was associated with a sustained improvement in life expectancy of around ten years, from thirty to forty.
Algeria and Tunisia also saw comparable improvements.
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Better medical care – in particular reduced infant mortality and premature infertility – was the reason why populations in French Africa began to grow so rapidly after 1945.
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In Indo-China it was the French who constructed 20,000 miles of road and 2,000 of railways, opened coal, tin and zinc mines and established rubber plantations.
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In 1922 around 20,000 Vietnamese were granted French citizenship – still a tiny minority in a population of 3 million, but not a trivial number.
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In French West Africa the franchise was extended to a million Africans in 1946 and a further 3 million five years later.
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Sleeping sickness, which had been the scourge of Cameroon under German rule, was largely eradicated under French rule.
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The Timing and Pace of Health Transitions in the French Empire