Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson Page A

fortified positions of the Seventh German Army under General Hans von Boehn on the Chemin des Dames – the Ladies’ Road, so called after its use by the two daughters of Louis XV in the eighteenth century. In March 1814 Napoleon’s retreating soldiers had fought along the same road against the invading Austrian and Russian armies. It was the key to the German defensive position on the Western Front.
    The French commander General Robert Nivelle was confident that he would be the man who achieved the long-awaited breakthrough on the Western Front. The French built 300 miles of new railway lines to supply the offensive with 872 trainloads of munitions. Altogether more than a million men were massed in readiness for the assault, stretched along a 25-mile front. Days of artillery barrages were supposed to soften up the Germans. Then, at 6 a.m. on 16 April, the colonial troops advanced up hills that had become mudslides in the rain and sleet. Mangin had placed the Senegalese in the first wave of the attack. But he almost certainly had an ulterior motive: to spare French lives. According to Lieutenant Colonel Debieuvre, commander of the 58th Regiment of Colonial Infantry, the Africans were ‘finally and above all superb attack troops permitting the saving of the lives of whites, who behind them exploit their success and organize the positions they conquer’. 99
    From the German trenches, Captain Reinhold Eichacker watched in horror:
The black Senegal negroes, France’s cattle for the shambles. Hundreds of fighting eyes, fixed, threatening, deadly. And they came. First singly, at wide intervals. Feeling their way, like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish.Eager, grasping, like the claws of a mighty monster. Thus they rushed closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing in their cloud. Strong, wild fellows, showing their grinning teeth like panthers. Horrible their unnaturally wide-opened, burning, bloodshot eyes.
On they came, a solid, rolling black wall, rising and falling, swaying and heaving, impenetrable, endless.
‘Close range! Individual firing! Take careful aim!’ My orders rang out sharp and clear.
The first blacks fell headlong in full course in our wire entanglements, turning somersaults like the clowns in a circus. Whole groups melted away. Dismembered bodies, sticky earth, shattered rocks, were mixed in wild disorder. The black cloud halted, wavered, closed its ranks and rolled nearer and nearer, irresistible, crushing, devastating!
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. 100
     
    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, aftertheir commanding