GERMANY AND BLACK TROOPS.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I do not know what depth of pigmentation Mrs. le Blond demands in coloured soldiers before she will allow them to be referred to as " black troops," but to the average Englishman her statement that " the last of these troops left in November, 1921," is entirely misleading. It is possible that the last regiment composed solely of coal black negroes left at that date—I cannot say—but it is quite certain that French troops of every shade from café au lait to café noir go to make up the French Army of the Rhine. The pretty little University town of Bonn, only three-quarters of an hour from Cologne, is full of gentlemen in French uniform who have been conscripted from the towns and villages of Northern Africa, some of whom are as dark as any nigger. Moroccans and Algerians are in every occupied village and town of the Rhineland and the Palatinate, and barbaric looking Spahis lord it over the inhabitants of the Trier district. Up to a few months ago, the guard over the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission—on which Great Britain is still represented, though perhaps " not so as you'd notice it "—was furnished by coal black negroes, the descendants of slaves of St. Pierre and Martinique. These simple creatures had divided the inhabitants of the world into two classes : Frenchmen (white and black), who were " bons " and Germans, who were " mechants," and were highly delighted to learn from an Englishman of the existence of a third category, the British whom they decided must be not wholly " bons " and not wholly " michants."
The only area in which yellow, brown and—shall we say ? —blackish natives are not armed and set in authority over white men is the Ruhr : a mixed black and white regiment did appear there for a short time, but was quickly withdrawn. As to the effect of coloured troops, German propaganda at one period foolishly exaggerated the number of sexual crimes committed by them. These were in any case bad enough, as is inevitable when native levies are torn away from their womenfolk and forced to live under unnatural conditions. Generally the coloured soldiers are peaceable in demeanour and are pitied rather than hated by the Rhineland peasants, until some terrible incident brings home to them that these men, simple and childlike though they be, are still savages. The mere sight of them armed with rifle and bayonet, with authority to turn white men into the gutter who approach
too near their posts, and the spectacle of a dusky soldier examining passports—frequently upside down, for he can often read them as well that way as any other—is repulsive to any Britisher : the feelings which 'these things arouse in Germans thus subjected to the authority of coloured troops can be imagined. May I suggest that the Friends of France could not show true friendship better than by urging on France , the necessity of putting an end to the degrading spectacle of coloured garrisons imposed on a highly civilized, though defeated, white race which every tourist can see in Rhineland to-day ?—I am, Sir, &c.,
A BRITISH. RESIDENT IN RHINELAND.
P.S.—It would be interesting to learn from the _British High Commissioner the opinion of those members of his staff who in recent months have been chased through the streets of Coblenz at night by armed coloured soldiers of the statement that the last black troops left Rhineland in November, 1921. It is possible also that the British Consul- General in Cologne might be able to furnish interesting information as to the experience of British residents in Bonn, Godesberg and Mehlen, some of whom had extremely un- pleasant encounters with French coloured troops only last summer.
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