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

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.’ 101 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. 102
     
    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. 103
    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.’ 104
     
    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. 105
    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