A vivid, haunting and sharply witty history of a forgotten episode in Europe's colonial crusade.
At the end of the nineteenth century the Sahara was a vast arid waste that remained largely unexplored by Europeans. Those who tried usually ended up dead, the victims of thirst or the Touareg nomads who had dominated the area's trade routes for centuries. But France, which had seized Algeria in the 1830s, wanted to rule this hostile emptiness. Other countries had empires in Africa and she was determined to catch up.
'The Sword And The Cross' is the story of two fanatical adventurers who made the French conquest of the Sahara possible: Charles de Foucauld and Henri Laperrine. Friends and contemporaries, they were equally devoted to the nebulous concept of the glory of France. Foucauld was a sensualist and layabout who would eat foie gras from the tin with a silver spoon, while Laperrine was a dour perfectionist. Each of them found his vocation in Algeria.
For Foucauld it was religion - a mystical desire for self-negation so great that even the Trappist order was too comfortable for him. He became a priest and founded an order that, in his lifetime, never had a membership of more than one. He lived in a stone hut in the desert, surviving on a diet of barley and dates, walking for fifteen hours a day while saying his prayers aloud. His attempts to convert the Touareg were hopeless.
The plump gourmand had become a sunburnt scarecrow, thought by many to be a saint. Yet he remained a deeply committed imperialist, and even in his remote hermitage he continued to give military advice to his former colleagues, providing them with maps and information on the tribes whose submission was the key to the Sahara.
Laperrine, meanwhile, formed a camel corps for the long-range pursuit of the Touareg. His exploits were legendary and he demanded enormous efforts from his troops, pushing them through the most inhospitable terrain in Africa on a few litres of water and a few pounds of camel meat, sacrificing hundreds of animals and dozens of men in order to cow the desert tribes.
As Europe lurched towards war, the fragile peace in the Sahara began to crumble. In his tiny monastery in the desert mountains, Foucauld would pay a tragic price for his own blindness to what he was doing. Laperrine, by then recalled to France to fight on the Western Front, returned to the desert to avenge his friend.
This is a vivid, haunting and sharply witty history of a forgotten episode in Europe's colonial crusade, a narrative of self-sacrifice and cruelty, hatred and friendship, discovery and delusion.
