Matrix Games

Their superb conditioning, hair-trigger discipline, lethal marksmanship, and near-savage appetite for hand-to-hand grappling resulted in a permanent, if slow-acting, tilt of the balance in North Africa. By 1858, to all outward appearances at least, 90 per cent of Algeria was "pacified" and thousands of French colonists flocked to the new land, where a man of modest resources could buy good land on favorable terms, where the soil was rich and the climate more like that of the Cote d'Azur than the sub-Saharan wastelands closer to the equator. Rather than fight to the death in a now hopeless struggle, most of the former Arab guerrillas came to terms with the new realities and made some kind of accommodation with the European authorities. Racial and religious antagonisms were far from extinct, of course; they were merely lying dormant beneath an appealing façade of normalcy. And when the embers of nationalism burst into flame after World War Two, the result would be an anti-colonial insurrection of unexcelled savagery, duration, and bitterness, once which came close to tearing France in half. But in the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, large-scale fighting in Algeria had ceased, the French were masters of a vast and seemingly prosperous new colony, and the colorful, victorious Zouaves were the heroes of the hour. It is estimated that during the decades between between 1831 and 1851, the French Armee d'Afrique fought 330 engagements in which the Zuoaves played either a major role or fought entirely on their own. Roughly ten per-cent of those battles resulted in French defeats (even the Zouaves sometimes got it wrong), another twenty per-cent were adjudged draws (almost as good as a victory, provided the native enemy suffered a majority of the casualties), and the remainder were clear-cut French victories. Even for a self-proclaimed "elite" force, that's a remarkable accomplishment.

The ingredients that eventually provided a French victory were intensely studied by foreign military observers, and the exploits of the Zouaves were recounted in lurid hyperbole in the popular press. America’s young cadets, at West Point and V.M.I., devoured this sub-genre eagerly – here was the kind of bold and brave soldiering most of them had dreamed of participating in! Across the nation, in state after state, many militia organizations began to imitate the style, if not the hard-won substance, of the “Zouave Method”, adopting not only their colorful garb but attempting – with varying degrees of seriousness – to revise their drill along North African lines. For a nation but two or three generations removed from a frontier mentality, the free-spirited Zouave doctrines, with their emphasis on individual initiative, imaginative action, and deadly marksmanship, seemed almost tailor-made for the American national spirit. At least, that’s what many of America’s weekend warriors liked to believe. Col. Robert E. Colston, a professor of French language and history at V.M.I. who wrote numerous polemical articles under the coy disguise of a pen-name composed of his own initials (!) had this to say about the Zouave drill-and-maneuver system, in an article entitled “Modern Tactics” (which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in the summer of 1858):

(This) new system is especially suited to the genius of the American people. It is in fact [closely related to] the bush-fighting of the American rifleman, rendered ten times more effective by the regularity of action which discipline produces, and by improved weaponry [the Springfield, Enfield, and other Minie-type weapons] and its bayonet. If the French have attained such [victories in Algeria] from using this new system, what could not be expected from Americans trained in the same way?

There were a host of new or expanded miltia units – in both North and South – who were learning the new Zouave drills and hoped to demonstrate their prowess in such a way as to give a strong, patriotic answer to Colston’s rhetorical question. Goatees, balloon trousers, and sporty (if rather impractical) little vests soon began to replace the dull conformist tunics of previous years, and companies either found wealthy patrons to provide new “Costumes d’Afrique” or pooled their own funds and commissioned the best local tailors to outfit them in suitably dashing style. A keen sense of competition swept from region to region, to see which militia company could out-Zouave its neighbors!

Determined to command a force that was the acme of fashion and the acknowledged masters of the new tactics, a rigidly moralistic colonel named E.E. Elsworth, contributing a great deal of his personal wealth and putting the glad-hand into the pockets of numerous like-minded conservative businessmen, reorganized a large segment of the Illinois militia into “The Zouave Cadets of Chicago”, a hard-drilling outfit that immodestly advertised itself as the elite of the elite and worked very hard to earn that recognition.

Ellsworth seems to have idealized the real-life Zouaves quite beyond reason, viewing them as morally upright paladins who not only fought gloriously for all the noble, traditional values of white Christian European cultures, but who, in between combats, lived pious and upright lives based on scrupulous cleanliness of mind and body – in some of his more extreme panegyrics, the French Zouaves are depicted as though they were an idealized amalgam of the Knights Templar, the Boy Scouts, and the Waffen SS. While the real-life Zouaves might have been flattered by Col. Ellsworth’s hyperbole, they would surely have laughed themselves into convulsions at his sanitized and wholly imaginary depiction of their off-duty life styles, which supposedly consisted of many hours spent helping the sick and elderly, voluntarily constructing schools and libraries, and improving their minds by organizing Bible-study seminars. Although their high standard of discipline may have motivated the off-duty Zouaves to behave less abusively to the indigenous civilian population than their comrades in the regular French Army (to say nothing of those gaunt, hard-bitten, half-mad anchorites who had mortgaged theirs souls to a seven-year hitch in the Foreign Legion, at the end of which purgatorial period they would be rewarded with a “new start” in life and a piece of paper declaring them to be French citizens; for many a desperate man, the bargain seemed a fair exchange…), the average Zouave spent his free time more or less the same way every other off-duty French soldier did: by swilling down liter after liter of cheap, rancid vin ordinaire, gambling away his paycheck in marathon games of cards, or playing Venus Routlette in the notoriously rococo brothels of Algiers, where anyone with the right combination of cash and curiosity could explore a wide variety of erotic depravities, some of them so specialized that the good Colonel Ellsworth likely had no idea of their existence.

Indeed, on the whole topic of “manly purity”, Col. Ellsworth seems to have been something of a nut-case. The one sin he wholly approved of, though, was vanity, and he spared no expense to insure that HIS Zouaves were the best-dressed, most colorful, most elegantly appointed, and most brilliantly barbered of all the Zouaves in North America. The young men who passed the required physical (and moral!) examinations tended to be splendid physical specimens, much concerned with sportsmanship, honor, and high standards of decency. In other words, jocks, prigs and Bible-thumpers; the kind of young men attracted to Col. Ellsworth’s Cadet Corps did not mind the fact that in exchange for being able to wear those strutting-peacock uniforms, they would have to put in more hours of physical conditioning and close-order drill than any other militia unit in the state of Illinois. Like their commander, they seemed to believe that a little mortification of the flesh was good for more Zoom Points in the Heavenly ledger book. I don’t want to read TOO much into all this “strength-through-joy” athleticism – Freud was still in high school, after all – but its hard to study accounts of the Zouave Cadets’ spartan, almost monastic regimen, and not get the feeling that some of these young fellows used the mind-numbing but body-toughening rigors of prolonged drill as a means of suppressing or at least tamping-down the urgent “impurities” of thought and deed suggested by their own unruly hormones, rather like those geeky guys down at the end of the dorm, during your sophomore year, who routinely took three or four cold showers every day, until they never, ever smelled of perspiration, but instead exuded a faint and somehow disturbing odor of minerals. Aliens in our midst!

As the organization grew – rapidly expanding from a company to a regiment! – the Chicago Zouaves attracted much attention. The morally upright citizens felt that Ellsworth and his “clockwork boys” (as one skeptical editorial writer labeled them) were a credit to Chicago and a paradigm of physical vigor and the sort of manly wholesomeness usually not associated with young men in uniform. Other, more worldly spectators thought there was something freakish about seeing hundreds of young automatons, dressed in outfits that had at least SOME design elements in common with female bloomers, tossing rifles back and forth, counting elaborate cadences, writhing on the parade-ground like six-foot serpents, all to the synchronized barks of a middle-aged man who appeared to have no form of social life that did not at least tangentially involve the company of athletic young men. What Ellsworth’s cadets were doing, of course, was practicing the new and complex field drill required for real Zouave training, and while some of the movements may have looked decidedly odd in comparison to the stiff regularity of the Prussian-style drill with which most Americans were familiar, all of those contortionist gyrations had been carefully evolved to serve real military purposes. From a column-of-two, a battalion of Zouaves could form a square against charging cavalry with six fewer moves and in about ninety seconds’ less time than a battalion trained in the old conventional style drill. When preparing “to receive” a force of charging hostile ninety extra seconds can make a lot of difference in both attitude and steadiness-of-aim.

Whatever his innermost motives (and Ellsworth himself, like many proper Victorian gentlemen, almost certainly wouldn’t have known the subtler forms of homo-erotic attraction if they had propositioned him in broad daylight near the gates of Buckingham Palace) (*), the good Colonel treated his young ubermenschen with respect as well as firmness, and had he called upon them to follow him into battle, they would have done so without hesitation. When the teasing and heckling became so loud that it interfered with weekly drill, the normally quiet-spoken Ellsworth finally lost his temper.
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(*) His counterpart in the British Army, however – provided he had pulled a tour or two in India – would have been far more knowledgeable and blasé about such matters. Near every sizable British army base on the sub-continent, you could always find a gaggle of smooth-skinned, rather effeminate, mostly toothless young boys who eked out a meager living by prowling near the cantonments by night and offering certain quick and perfunctory sexual services to passing British soldiers in return for a few rupees. Every barracks knew about them, but few soldiers were indelicate enough to mention such activities in their letters back to Old Blighty or crude enough to refer to the accommodating toothless lads by the common-soldiers’ designation of “gobble-wallahs”…
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Buying prominent ad space in all the major northeastern cities, Ellsworth publicly challenged every other militia unit in America to complete against the Chicago Cadets in what one-supposes could be called a “drill-off”. He would put up a substantial prize and invite French officers from the real Chasseurs d’Afrique to judge which militia unit truly deserved to be called “Zouaves” and which were just day-tripping for the sake of the rakish uniforms.

There were no challengers. Most of the so-called “Zouave” companies really WERE doing it for the uniform, the “look”, if you will, and although many such outfits were now at least starting to learn the complex and physically demanding Zouave drills and maneuvers, there was no other unit in the country that had mastered these esoteric skills to the degree shown by the Chicago Cadets. Vindicated now by the silencing of the hecklers, Ellsworth was highly receptive when a would-be theatrical agent suggested that a public tour by the Chicago Cadets might be the entertainment sensation of 1859.

And so it proved to be! Starting on June 20, in Detroit, and continuing for two months throughout the whole of North Eastern America and even into Canada, Ellsworth and his Zouave Cadets (and what the advertising fliers described as their “EXCITING EXHIBITION OF ATHLETIC SOLDIERSHIP!!”) drew large and wildly enthusiastic crowds, climaxing their tour with a New York City display outside City Hall that attracted more than ten thousand cheering, shouting, clapping spectators. Visually, the complicated yet snappy-looking maneuvers, executed with such hair-trigger precision and zest, were infinitely more entertaining to watch that the HUP-two-three-fo’ patterns familiar from Hardee’s Book of Tactics.

Thanks to this extended tour by Col. Ellsworth and his dashing young Cadets, many thousands of young American males got a good long look at the battlefield tactics of the near-future. The thing to remember here is not the swashbuckling dash of the Zouaves’ uniforms (the balloon-legged pantaloons and lightweight “Arabian Nights” booties which had proven so comfortable and well-ventilated on the sand dunes of North Africa would prove to be almost worthless in the briar thickets of tidewater Virginia, and it would not take most Zouave units long to trade in their sashes and fez caps for regulation trousers and brogans, packing the North African-style gear into their trunks or mailing it home. The last major engagement which saw Zouave uniforms actually worn in combat in large numbers, was probably Fredericksburg, where their flashiness drew so much attention from Confederate sharpshooters that the percentage of Zouaves killed-in-action was too high to be coincidental.

But even though the influence of Zouave tactics on Civil War combat techniques is a thing which by its very nature cannot be quantified, a consensus is growing among historians that the “Zouave Factor” generally played a greater role than earlier generations of scholars had discerned.

No other historian has described this subtle process more cogently than Brent Nosworthy, whose 2003 classic The Bloody Crucible of Courage – Fighting Methods and Combat Experience in the Civil War is both the most exhaustive and the most readable book ever devoted to the subject of Civil War ordnance, tactics, and training. Nosworthy is the first historian I know of who has dealt with the “Zouave influence” in the context the entire Civil War, and he’s done it to such a nicety that I’ll let him bring this segment to a close in his own words:

But the audience [for Ellsworth’s Cadets] was not simply impressed by precision. As Colston had mentioned, the new style of tactics was naturalistic and meshed with the audience’s sensibilities. Instead of standing upright in formations like European troops, the Chicago Zouaves often lay on the ground. Once they fired, they rolled over on their backs to reload, before turning back onto their stomachs to fire again. Once the [Civil War] started, the Zouave methods of fighting weren’t completely adopted …but the custom of rolling over prone to reload was often employed. It was so natural, once it was adopted, that few later would remember how it had been first introduced among American soldiers.

Stay tuned for next month's installment...