Hell Hath No Fury (11 page)

The presence of the armed women was, at this stage in Dahomey's history, more a symbol than a real threat to Dahomey's neighbors. The tables were turned, however, when one of them, the king of Oyo, took to the field against the Dahomeans with a raiding party of eight hundred women to enforce a claim of female tribute he had leveled against King Adahoonzou. It was left to the all-male Dahomean army to defeat the Oyan Amazons.

By the time of King Ghezo (1818–58), Dahomey's royal court consisted of some eight thousand people, the majority of them women, many of whom existed in a minutely graded pyramid of concubinage, at the top of which were the so-called Wives of the Leopard, the women who bore the ruler's children. One of the functions of the armed female element of the court, all of whom were recruited in their early teenage years, seems to have been the capture and execution of women from rival tribes. All the “Amazons” carried giant folding razors, with blades over two feet long, which were apparently used to decapitate female enemies and castrate male foes.

From the late 1830s Ghezo seems to have used members of his predominantly female court in battle against neighboring tribes. It is possible that he deployed four thousand female warriors in an army totaling sixteen thousand. When in 1851 he laid siege to the city of Abeokuta, the siege was repulsed with losses of some three thousand, of whom two thirds were women. A French account of the engagement describes their officers standing in the front line, “recognisable by the riches of their dress” and carrying themselves with “a proud and resolute air.” Nevertheless, these women warriors occupied an inferior and ambivalent position in the hierarchy of the Dahomean court and, significantly, referred to themselves as men in their war cries and battle chants.

Far from discouraging Ghezo, this setback spurred him on to include more women in his army. They seem to have been divided into a regular corps of well-trained and highly disciplined “Amazons” armed with muskets and machete-like swords, who also formed an elite personal bodyguard, and a rather less satisfactory reserve, armed with cutlasses, clubs, and bows and arrows, who were more interested in rum than rigorous military discipline. In peacetime the “Amazon” corps was wholly segregated from men, and outside the confines of the royal palace its approach was signaled by the ringing of bells, upon which civilians had to turn their backs and males had to move away.

There were several practical reasons for Ghezo's use of women in battle. Dahomey was exceptionally warlike, and lost many men on campaign, while simultaneously depending for its wealth on a slave trade that favored the disposal to slavers of a large proportion of its able-bodied male population. At its peak strength in the early 1860s, the Dahomean army was approximately fifty thousand strong—one-fifth the total population—of which the female element numbered ten thousand, a quarter of their number consisting of the “Amazons.”

It has been suggested that many of the women, as well as some of the men in the Dahomean army, went to war as camp followers, much in the manner of the
soldaderas
who marched with Mexican armies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapter 5). The Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, who saw them in 1863, likewise poured derision on “the fighting Amazons.” “Mostly elderly and all of them hideous,” he ruminated with all the authority of the European white male, “the officers decidedly chosen for the size of their bottoms…they manoeuvre with the precision of a flock of sheep.” But he also noted that this army, then some 2,500 strong, was well armed and effective in battle. Nor could all of them have been old and hideous, since all 2,500 were official wives of the king.

In spite of the dread in which they were held, the “Amazons” were no match for small but well-armed colonial armies. In a series of engagements in 1892, the male and female Dahomean warriors were defeated by a French army, and the kingdom became a colony of France. The victorious French commander commended the women warriors on their speed and boldness and installed a puppet ruler who was permitted a few token women in his bodyguard. A troupe of so-called Amazons from Dahomey formed part of a display at the recently erected Eiffel Tower, under which they danced and drilled.

Reference: Stanley B. Alpern,
Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey,
1998.

DUROVA, NADEZHDA

Russian Cavalry Officer, b. 1783, d. 1866

Very few of the women who disguised themselves as men to become soldiers in the past have told their own life stories. Perhaps the best known of those who have given us an insight into this secret world is Nadezhda Durova, a member of the minor Russian aristocracy who fought in the Napoleonic Wars.

Her father, a captain in a regiment of Hussars, brought her up to a military life, as her mother was neglectful and hostile to her little girl. In her early childhood Nadezhda became familiar with drilling, marching, and the world of military encampments. She declined to take up girlish pursuits, taught herself to ride, and subjected imaginary formations to punishing drill exercises and bloodcurdling battlefield maneuvers.

At the age of eighteen she submitted to an unhappy marriage and bore her husband a child. But she chafed at her dependent status and yearned to become “a warrior and a son to my father and to part company forever from the sex whose sad lot…had begun to terrify me.” She ran away, cut her hair short and, assuming the name of Alexander Vasilevich Sokolov, enlisted in a Polish cavalry regiment. There she found that she enjoyed training and reveled in the new feeling of independence. Later she wrote: “You, young woman, only you can comprehend my rapture, only you can value my happiness! You, who must account for every step, who cannot go 15 feet without supervision and correction…only you can comprehend the joyous sensations that filled my heart.”

For the next seven years, Durova fought in the wars against the emperor Napoleon's Grande Armée. She underwent her baptism of fire near Guttstadt in Germany, where her conduct later won her a silver St. George's Cross for saving a wounded officer, and fought at Friedland (1807) and Borodino (1812), two of the bloodiest battles of the era of Napoleonic warfare. Paradoxically she was happiest when in battle; when the bullets were not flying, she was forced to remain aloof from her fellow soldiers to avoid exposure. She seems to have been fearless in combat but otherwise was timid, frightened of the dark, fretful about her inability to grow a mustache, and, on one occasion, alarmed by the innocent advances of her colonel's amorous daughter. In her memoirs she claimed never to have killed anyone.

Eventually she made the mistake of writing a letter to her father in an attempt to reassure him. He immediately took the matter up with the Russian minister of war, whom he urged to find his daughter. In 1807 Durova was summoned to St. Petersburg to be interviewed by Tsar Alexander I, who proposed to send her home with honor, a prospect that horrified her.

She succeeded in being returned to her regiment with a commission but thereafter was treated more like a military mascot than a serving soldier. In 1812 she was introduced to Marshal Kutuzov, the Russian commander-in-chief and hero of Borodino, who told her archly that he knew exactly who she was and was delighted to meet her. She finally left the army as a captain in 1816 to tend to her ailing father.

Reference: Durova, Nadezhda,
The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars,
trans. Mary Fleming Zirin, 1989.

JOAN OF ARC

Jeanne d'Arc, Medieval French Soldier, b. 1412, d. 1431

The legendary heroine of the bitter wars of the Middle Ages between England and France, Joan of Arc has inspired generations of schoolgirls as the embodiment of female courage and patriotism, going into battle in shining armor at the head of her troops. In reality, her value to the French rested more on her usefulness for propaganda purposes than on any military prowess (see
Lynch, Jessica,
Chapter 7), and her war career ended without her dispatching even one of the enemy.

Almost all the concrete details we possess of the real-life Jeanne d'Arc come from the records of the two trials she underwent—one at the end of her life and the other after her death. In the first, orchestrated by the English but presided over by French judges, the aim was to prove the English claim that she was a witch, the most hated form of female life at the time (between the ninth century and the nineteenth, many thousands of women were hanged or burned as witches, with the persecution reaching its peak in the early fifteenth century). During the second, posthumous process, which was held for the benefit of the king of France, the judges were under a different kind of pressure, to rehabilitate her as a divinely inspired national savior and embryo saint.

Jeanne was born to a prosperous peasant family of Domremy in Lorraine and led an apparently unremarkable life until she was thirteen. In that year, which may have coincided with the onset of puberty, she claimed that she had had visions of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, all of whom told her that she had been chosen to free France from the English and ensure the coronation of the dauphin (heir apparent), Charles, later Charles VII. However, it was not until four years later, in 1429, that she succeeded in persuading the commander of the local castle in the neighboring town of Vaucouleurs to escort her to Charles at Chinon.

Dressed in male attire—she later explained that “for a virgin, male and female clothes are equally suitable”—she was able to pick Charles out of the crowd at Chinon (he had made a deliberate attempt to disguise himself ), and after careful inspection, her virginity was confirmed. Charles decided that the striking young woman might prove useful and had a suit of armor made for her, complete with lance and shield. An excellent horsewoman, she quickly mastered the basics of combat.

Under the watchful eyes of two marshals of France, she was assigned to the French army as it struggled to lift the English siege of Orléans, the key to Charles's continuing hold on territory south of the Loire River. Jeanne's role was to dispatch threatening letters to the city's English besiegers, to participate in councils of war, and to play a part in skirmishing, where her powerful voice could be heard over the din of fighting in which she was twice wounded. Although she had no official standing with the French troops, her bravery and coolness—remarkable for an uneducated peasant girl—earned her instant respect. The siege was lifted after nine days of fighting, and Jeanne was present at Charles's coronation at Rheims.

When the French launched an unsuccessful bid to regain Paris in August and September of 1429, Jeanne was wounded a third time. By the time she joined the attempt to relieve Compiègne, which had been besieged by the Burgundians, she was famous throughout France and rode into battle in a sumptuous cloak of red and gold. But this proved her last moment of glory. She was captured in a skirmish by the Burgundians and treacherously ransomed to the English. Her captors imprisoned her in Bouvreuil castle and subjected her to a lengthy interrogation, after which she was tried for witchcraft and fraud by an ecclesiastical court whose task was to show that her mission was inspired not by God but by the Devil himself.

Jeanne bore her captivity with equanimity, remained calm when threatened with torture, made a bold, physically grueling, but unsuccessful attempt to escape, and declined parole on the condition that she would not try to escape again. She also refused to promise her captors that she would not wear men's clothes or take up arms again. She was eventually convicted only of wearing men's clothes, an offense against the Church.

Jeanne then signed an “abjuration” but recanted two days later, which meant she could be convicted as a relapsed heretic of having fallen into “various errors and crimes of heresy, idolatry [and] invocation of demons.” She was burned at the stake in Rouen marketplace on May 30, 1431. She died of smoke inhalation, and her body was burned a second time. A third fire was required to reduce her organs to ash, which was reportedly thrown into the Seine. Her active career had lasted barely eighteen months, and although she had seen action, she confessed before she died that she had never killed anyone.

In 1456 the judgment was reversed by an ecclesiastical court, and her legend began to grow. She was dubbed “d'Arc” in the sixteenth century and became a French national heroine in the nineteenth century. In 1920 she was canonized. During World War II, both Vichy France and the French Resistance (see
Special Operations Executive,
Chapter 11) claimed her as a symbol of their cause. In the spring of 2007, scientific tests on the supposed remains of Jeanne, rescued from the ashes and later housed in a Chinon museum, revealed that the “holy relics” were part of an Egyptian mummy at least 2,000 years old. Their age was confirmed by carbon dating.

Reference: Marina Warner,
Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism,
1981. There have been many movies about Joan of Arc, the most memorable being the 1928 silent classic
The Passion of Joan of Arc,
starring Maria Falconetti in the title role and directed by the Danish master Carl Dreyer. George Bernard Shaw's play
Saint Joan
is a superb examination of the complexities and contradictions inherent in the legend of Joan of Arc.

MICHEL, LOUISE

“The Red Virgin,” Heroine of the Paris Commune, b. 1830, d. 1905

One of the most tempestuous and celebrated female Communards, Michel was dubbed “the Red Virgin” for her fiery temperament, not for any aversion to men. Her funeral in Paris brought traffic to a standstill and produced crowds to rival the tribute paid to Victor Hugo when he was laid to rest in 1885.

She was born in a castle in the region of Haute-Marne, the illegitimate daughter of the son of the house and a housemaid, and was brought up by her grandfather. In 1856 she moved to Paris, where she rapidly acquired a reputation as a radical opponent of the emperor Napoléon III and a fanatical member of republican clubs.