In June 1926 France instituted a campaign medal for the Dardanelles: bronze, thirty millimetres, hung from a crescent, with DARDANELLES in the exergue on the reverse.1
The law made a single medal with two inscriptions. Formally it was the médaille commémorative d’Orient, and most of the men entitled to it received ‘ORIENT’, for service anywhere in the theatre the French called ‘the East’ – Macedonia, the Aegean islands, the Levant, Egypt, Palestine, the Hejaz. ‘DARDANELLES’ was reserved to those who had served on the peninsula.
No British or Dominion soldier received anything like it. A man who landed at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915 was awarded the 1914–15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal – the same three as a man who spent the war in a supply depot in France.
It was not for want of intention. Clasps were meant to be part of the British War Medal – sixty-eight proposed for the Navy, seventy-nine for the Army, with dated clasps for each six months abroad and about fifty for particular battles. The naval list was authorised in 1920. No clasp was ever issued, and in 1923 the scheme was abandoned: the estimate had run past eight million pieces, and the claims could not be checked. Clasps turn up on the market and on miniatures all the same. They are private work.2
Australians had an insignia. From August 1916 the Australian divisions made their own arrangements for men who had served on the peninsula to wear the letter A on the coloured cloth patches that identified their unit. AIF Order No. 937 of November 1917 authorised it for the whole force, prescribed a brass letter three-quarters of an inch high, and directed that it be supplied by Ordnance rather than out of regimental funds; later orders made wearing it compulsory. A further order in January 1918 extended entitlement to service on Lemnos, Imbros and Tenedos, on the transports and hospital ships at or off Gallipoli, and in the AIF line of communication units from Egypt.3 It was visible for as long as its wearer stayed in uniform.
There was also an attempt at a medal. In 1917 Birdwood proposed a decoration for the Australian and New Zealand troops who had served at Gallipoli, to be called the Anzac Star. R. K. Peacock designed the star and its ribbon, and George V approved it. British parliamentarians and newspapers then objected that a medal confined to the Anzac corps excluded the British and other Empire troops who made up the majority of the force. Approval was withdrawn in 1918, after the ribbon had been manufactured and shipped to Australia and New Zealand but before any medal was struck, and those entitled received the 1914–15 Star instead. The design was struck privately in 1990, and two hundred examples were presented to surviving Australian and New Zealand veterans for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the campaign.4
There is Turkish decoration commonly known in English as the Gallipoli Star. The Ottoman Harp Madalyası, to give it its proper name, was instituted on 1 March 1915, eight weeks before the landings, for bravery as well as war merit. It went to Ottoman troops, as well as those of the Central Powers, throughout the Ottoman theatres for the rest of the war. Nothing in it is particular to the peninsula.5
France’s part in the Gallipoli campaign may be the least remembered in English, but it is the only one that produced a campaign medal.
What the East meant to France
For Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Gallipoli was a campaign with a beginning and an end. The troops landed in April 1915, they were withdrawn in December and January, and the survivors went to France or to Egypt. The peninsula is remembered as a thing in itself.
For France it was the opening of something that ran to the armistice.
The Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient landed as one division – a metropolitan brigade of the 175th Infantry and the 1er Régiment de marche d’Afrique, itself made up of Zouaves and a battalion of the Foreign Legion, and a colonial brigade of two mixed regiments, each of one European and two Senegalese battalions – and a second division followed in May. The French held the right of the Allied line at Helles for the duration of the campaign. Between April 1915 and January 1916 they lost 27,049 men killed, missing or wounded.6 The figure excludes men lost to sickness.
When the peninsula was evacuated, most of those units did not go home. They went to Salonika, where the French had begun landing in October 1915, and the Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient became the Armée d’Orient. It fought on the Macedonian front for three more years, under Sarrail, then Guillaumat, then Franchet d’Espèrey, taking Monastir in 1916 and breaking the Bulgarian line at Dobro Pole in September 1918, three weeks before Bulgaria signed an armistice at Salonika.
The two commitments were different in size. Reporting to the Chamber of Deputies in 1926, Humbert Ricolfi described the veterans of the East as ten times more numerous than the men who had served at the Dardanelles.7
When the War Ministry came to define who qualified, it listed the Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient and the Corps expéditionnaire des Dardanelles, the Armée d’Orient, the staff of the Allied commander-in-chief in the East, the French troops of the Levant, the military missions in Egypt including the Suez base and the detachments sent to the Hejaz, the French detachments in Palestine and Palestine-Syria, the Légion d’Orient and the base at Port Said.8 The Navy Ministry defined its own share as operations east of the twenty-first degree of longitude, and named naval bases at Mudros, Tenedos, Thasos, Milos, Salonika and Port Iero (Mytilene).9
All of that was ‘the East’. The Dardanelles was about eight months at the start of it, and any medal covering the theatre would be worn overwhelmingly by men who had never seen the peninsula.
The first attempt, 1917
The first request came from a serving officer sitting as a deputy. On 23 July 1917 Lieutenant-Colonel Girod tabled a proposition de résolution asking the government to grant the médaille coloniale to personnel engaged in the East. He asked not for a new decoration but for an existing one to be extended.10
It was referred to the commission de l’armée, subject to the commission du budget. Three days later the budget commission named Albert Noël as its rapporteur pour avis, the substance remaining with the army commission.11
Nothing further seems to have followed. No report by either commission has been found, and no document produced in 1924, 1925 or 1926 refers to the 1917 resolution.
The veterans organise, 1920
Dardanelles ex-servicemen held a gathering on 13 March 1920 to form an association. General Bailloud and Admiral Guépratte, both present, became honorary presidents. Edmond Weil, a former captain who had commanded the trench mortar battery of the 1st Division of the Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient, became its president. It grew into a federation of local groups – l’Association nationale des groupements d’anciens combattants des Dardanelles, the national association of Dardanelles ex-servicemen’s groups – with branches in Paris, Marseille, Nîmes, Toulon, Algiers, Oran, Constantine and Tunis.12
The association’s volume – Les Dardanelles 1915–1930 – records what followed. Both service ministries agreed that serving personnel could join: the Minister of the Navy, Landry, granted the authorisation on 4 May 1920 in reply to a request forwarded by Guépratte, and the War Ministry followed on 28 August 1920 by circular no. 10.841 K.
During the same year Generals d’Amade, Gouraud and Brulard each accepted the title of honorary president. Gouraud, who had commanded the Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient, replied from headquarters at Beirut on 20 July 1920 that he kept too fond a memory of his comrades-in-arms at the Dardanelles not to be moved by the offer, and urged them to band together in remembrance.
The association gives its membership as 125 on 9 May 1920, 187 by the end of September, and 317 by May 1921. By the beginning of 1931 it numbered about three thousand.
The demand takes shape, November 1920
The association held its first annual general meeting on 6 November 1920. It elected a permanent committee with Weil as president and Pierre Ducas as vice-president, and Ducas presented a report on the creation of a commemorative medal specifically for those who had served at the Dardanelles. The full text was printed in the association’s bulletin, Le Souvenir des Dardanelles, no. 3.
That report has not been traced, and no later document in the Chamber cites Ducas. But by November 1920 the demand for a distinction reserved to the Dardanelles men existed in writing, made by the men themselves.
The demand reaches the Chamber, 1924–1925
The first proposal in the Chamber came from Georges Barthélemy, socialist deputy for the Pas-de-Calais, who had flown as an airman in Lorraine and in the East and been wounded twice.13 What is known about it comes at second hand, from the two deputies who revived it in 1924. They record that Barthélemy asked the government to grant a commemorative medal to the men who had fought at the Dardanelles and in the East under Generals Sarrail, Guillaumat and Franchet d’Espèrey, that his resolution went to the commission de l’armée, and that it was never discussed. The text itself has not been traced; neither its date nor its number is known.14 Barthélemy left the Chamber at the 1924 election.
On 1 December 1924, two deputies of the new Chamber, Louis Antériou, a veteran of the campaign,15 and Auguste Brunet, who sat for Réunion, tabled the request again. Their exposé des motifs – the statement of reasons that precedes the text of a French bill or resolution – states why: knowing what disillusionment the neglect of the earlier proposal had caused among their comrades, they considered it their duty to take it up, and to ask Parliament to show its gratitude at last to a category of soldiers forgotten until then.16
They quoted Barthélemy directly. ‘We would remind you,’ Barthélemy had written, ‘that all these brave men, after crossing seas infested with predatory submarines and sown with drifting mines, lived long months far from la douce France, beneath torrid skies, under the constant threat of a pitiless malaria, without news of their own and without leave, and that – in spite of all this – their stoic courage opened, with the taking of Monastir, the era of the deliverance of the invaded territories.’17
The operative text asked the government to grant a commemorative medal, with distinct clasps, to French soldiers or those originating from the French colonies who had fought at the Dardanelles and in the East. The distinction between the two theatres was part of the demand from the outset, and so was the inclusion of colonial troops.
The Chamber adopted the resolution at its second sitting on 27 March 1925.18
The government’s bill, July 1925
The government answered the resolution three months later. On 7 July 1925 a projet de loi was laid before the Chamber in the name of Gaston Doumergue, President of the Republic, by Paul Painlevé, président du conseil and ministre de la guerre, and by Émile Borel, ministre de la marine. It was referred to the commission de l’armée.19
The exposé des motifs begins with the objection the government had to answer. When the Great War commemorative medal (médaille commémorative de la guerre 1914–1918) and the inter-allied victory medal (médaille commémorative interalliée de la guerre, dite « Médaille de la Victoire ») were created after the war, it had been accepted that those two distinctions should honour all mobilised men uniformly, without distinguishing between the operations they had been called on to take part in. A medal for one theatre ran against that principle.
The government argued that special reasons applied to the veterans of the Corps expéditionnaire des Dardanelles and the Armée d’Orient, and gave the same four as Barthélemy had: malaria, the distance from home, the scarcity of leave, and a sea infested with submarines.
The government then turned to the colonial medal. Men who had served outside France and Algeria and taken part in operations in Morocco, Cameroon, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Tonkin or southern Tunisia received the médaille coloniale in addition to the commemorative medals. It therefore seemed equitable, the government concluded, to create a special medal for the troops who had fought in the East. Naval personnel who had cooperated in the operations would be entitled to it as well.
The exposé des motifs also settled who would pay. By analogy with the arrangements for the Great War commemorative medal and the interallied victory medal, the entitled or their families would procure the insignia at their own expense. This was standing French practice for commemorative medals rather than a condition imposed on these men in particular.
On one point the bill departed from the resolution the Chamber had adopted in March. Article 3 provided for a single medal bearing the words ‘Dardanelles-Orient’ in exergue, suspended from a bélière in the form of a crescent, on one ribbon: blue, 36 millimetres wide, with three yellow stripes running lengthwise, the centre one 5 millimetres and those at the edges 2 millimetres. There were no distinct clasps, and no separate ribbon. Articles 4 and 5, providing that no diploma would be issued and that no one convicted of a crime during the campaign could wear the medal, were already in the form they would keep.
The objection, January 1926
The commission de l’armée reported six months later, at the sitting of 19 January 1926. Its rapporteur was Humbert Ricolfi.20
Ricolfi began by making the case for the medal, and then stated the objection. Adopting the government’s bill in full would raise no objection at all, he wrote, but for the exergue ‘Dardanelles-Orient’, which raised the delicate question of assimilating the two campaigns.
The survivors of the men who landed on the narrow strip of the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915 and held it at the cost of frightful losses had protested against the word ‘Dardanelles’ going to soldiers who were never called on to share the sufferings of that expedition. They had not asked for a medal commemorating the Dardanelles campaign, Ricolfi recorded; they would be glad and proud to wear one, but only on condition that it was distinct from the medal intended for the veterans of the Armée d’Orient.
By this time the association’s presidency had passed from Weil to Lieutenant-Colonel Weisweiller,21 who put two arguments on the veterans’ behalf.
The first was from precedent. On the same theatre of operations, or in neighbouring regions, several clasps were often created: the clasp ‘Oudjda’ was reserved to men who took part in the capture of Oudjda, while those who came to Morocco afterwards wore only the clasp ‘Maroc’. He asked for a special clasp ‘Dardanelles’ for his comrades.
The second argument was practical. Most of the future holders of this medal were civilians who had returned home after the war, and they would wear their award as a ribbon. Weisweiller therefore pressed for a ribbon of a distinct colour to be reserved to them. Colonial practice had been the opposite – different clasps on an identical ribbon – and that practice, he pointed out, had made sense because most recipients of colonial medals were career soldiers who wore them on the uniform.
General Gouraud, who had been the association’s honorary president since 1920, supported his old soldiers in writing. Ricolfi quoted him: for his part, having had the honour of commanding them on that isolated tongue of land, without a town, without a village, beaten on two sides by Turkish guns, he considered their request properly justified.22
Ricolfi concluded that such an authoritative appeal could not be rejected without risking injustice to soldiers and sailors who had suffered in particular circumstances, and that extending to all their comrades of the East an insignia which in fairness only the survivors of the Dardanelles expedition deserved was not possible. Each of the two categories should be able to claim exclusively what belonged to it. The veterans of the Armée d’Orient, he added, were present enough in French memory for the word ‘Orient’ alone to call up the gratitude and respect due to them.
The commission’s amended bill made two changes to the government’s text and no others. Article 3 now gave the medal the word ‘Orient’ in exergue, with a further paragraph providing that military and civilian personnel of land and sea who had taken part in the Dardanelles expedition would receive the same medal with the word ‘Dardanelles’. And the ribbon for the Dardanelles veterans was to be distinct from the Orient ribbon, and determined by the competent authority.
Passed without debate
The bill reached the floor of the Chamber four weeks later. The order paper for 14 February 1926 lists it as documents 1867 and 2430, Ricolfi reporting, and adds that it was set down on condition that there be no debate, under articles 97 to 99 of the standing orders.23
At the sitting of 15 February the president said as much, put the passage to the articles, and articles 1 to 5 were carried one after another, each recorded as adopted. Nobody spoke.24
The Senate received the text on 25 February and referred it to its own commission de l’armée, printing it as document no. 102.25 The comte de Bertier, who had been the French liaison officer at Hamilton’s headquarters,26 deposited his report for the commission on 3 June.27
The Senate took it on 8 June, under the heading ‘Adoption of a bill instituting a Dardanelles medal’. The president read out a decree of 27 January 1926 designating an officer of the War Ministry as commissaire du Gouvernement. Bertier then asked, in agreement with the government, that urgency be declared. Urgency was declared, nobody asked to speak in the general discussion, and the articles and the whole were carried.28
The law was promulgated on 15 June 1926 and published four days later. It was countersigned by Painlevé as ministre de la guerre and by Georges Leygues as ministre de la marine.29
Five and a half years after Ducas read his report to the association’s first annual meeting, the medal existed in law. The ribbon that would distinguish the Dardanelles men from the rest had still to be settled.
The ribbon, and why it is green
Article 3 had left the Dardanelles ribbon to the competent authority, which reported three weeks later.
On 8 July 1926 the ministre de la guerre and the ministre de la marine submitted a report to the President of the Republic. It named one consideration: the new ribbon had to be unlike the ribbon of any decoration already in existence. Their proposal followed from it – keep the arrangement of the Great War commemorative medal, and put green where the red had been.30
The decree of the same date sets out the result. The ribbon of the commemorative medal awarded to veterans who took part in the Dardanelles expedition is 36 millimetres wide, divided lengthwise into eleven alternating stripes of white and dark green: six white stripes 3.5 millimetres wide and five green stripes 3 millimetres wide.
Who qualified, and what they received
The War Ministry issued its instruction on 20 August 1926.31
Entitlement carried no minimum length of service. For the Dardanelles medal, a man had to have embarked between 22 February 1915 and 5 January 1916 inclusive for the Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient or the Corps expéditionnaire des Dardanelles, and to have taken effective part in the operations – the attempt to force the straits, Kum Kale, Sedd el Bahr, Krithia and the rest.
The instruction reached well beyond the fighting troops. Civilians who had never served as soldiers were provided for by name, including those attached to the sanitary formations and those who had worked with the Foyers du soldat and similar organisations – equivalent to YMCA and soldiers’ canteens – under French command. Entitlement was granted posthumously to men killed, dead or lost at sea, and their families could claim in a fixed order of succession: the eldest son, failing him the eldest daughter, the unremarried widow, the father, the mother, the eldest brother, failing him the eldest sister.
The Navy Ministry issued its own instruction on 25 November 1926, signed by Georges Leygues.32 It covered the merchant marine as well as the military navy, together with civilians under French command, for operations east of the twenty-first degree of longitude. For the Dardanelles it named the Division de complément de l’armée navale from 23 September 1914 to 14 May 1915, and the Escadre des Dardanelles from 14 May 1915 to 8 February 1916, along with the Mission Goliath (or, Groupe Goliath-Shamrock, two vessels that gave logistical support, and evacuated the wounded at Helles), the air centres at Tenedos and Mudros, and the transports.
What a man received was a printed form. Two models were annexed to the War Ministry’s instruction, and they differ in only two respects.33 Both are headed Médaille commémorative d’Orient. Both carry the number of the army corps, the place of issue, a registration number in a special register, a space for the corps or service, and a single line for the holder, with a footnote directing that his name, forenames, rank and the unit he served with during the campaign be entered there. Both end with the signature of the authority qualified to issue the authorisation, and its stamp. What differs is the inscription – ‘ORIENT’ on the first, ‘DARDANELLES’ on the second – and the ribbon, set out in full in brackets after it so the holder would know what to buy. At the foot of each, a note records that under article 4 of the law of 15 June 1926 no diploma is issued, and that it falls to the entitled or their families to obtain the insignia at their own expense. The purchase rule was not new; as the government had explained in 1925, it followed the practice of the Great War commemorative medal and the interallied victory medal.
The association may have helped with a second recognition two years later. The carte du combattant was a status card carrying pension and welfare entitlements, but eligibility was more strict. On 5 May 1928 the Office National du Combattant agreed to accept applications from former members of the Corps expéditionnaire des Dardanelles who had served three months at Sedd el Bahr, whatever their unit, in view of the exceptional circumstances in which they had served.34
The crescent is not Ottoman
A crescent on the Dardanelles medal invites an obvious reading, but the statute book does not support it.
The crescent entered French commemorative practice at least as early as 1909. Article 2 of the law of 22 July 1909 required the médaille commémorative du Maroc to hang from a bélière – the shaped suspender that carries the ribbon – in the form of a crescent, on a green ribbon of 36 millimetres cut lengthwise by three white stripes.35 Morocco had never been Ottoman.
The 1909 medal was a model for those that followed. The médaille commémorative de Syrie-Cilicie, created by the law of 18 July 1922 for the Army of the Levant, took the Maroc pattern and its crescent.36 The law of 15 June 1926 creating the médaille commémorative d’Orient then took Syrie-Cilicie, article by article: the same bronze medal of thirty millimetres, the same effigy of the Republic, the same military attributes and lettered flags on the reverse, the same sentence prescribing a bélière in the form of a crescent. Only the word in the exergue changed – Maroc, then Levant, then Orient. The Dardanelles medal as struck adds two flanking palms, which appear on the object but in none of the three statutes.
The green has an equally domestic explanation. The ministers wanted a ribbon distinct from every decoration already in use, and got there by keeping the arrangement of the Great War commemorative medal and putting green where the red had been.
French practice kept the crescent. The Free French commemorative medal of the Levant, created in 1942, used a crescent above two laurel branches, and so did the French medal for the Middle East operations of 1956 – struck for a campaign against Egypt.
Across more than thirty years and three régimes, the crescent marked French service in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.
What the law did not provide
The state authorised the medal but left production to manufacturers, so what survives varies. Two features often seen on surviving examples were never part of the official issue: a gilt clasp reading ‘DARDANELLES’, with oriental ornament, turns up on many despite no clasp ever having been sanctioned – Weisweiller asked for one and was refused.
Handsome diplomas survive too, although article 4 provided that none would be issued. The Association nationale des groupements d’anciens combattants des Dardanelles supplied its own. One printed in Paris in 1929 sets a crescent above a view of the peninsula, with the names of key French positions running round the border – Sedd-ul-Bahr, Kum Kale, Kéréves Déré, Le Haricot, the Ravin Vermeersch – and the dates 23 April 1915 to 9 January 1916 along the foot. It is signed by the president of the national association and by the president of the holder’s regional group, and stamped with the association’s address at 20 rue de l’Arcade.
At the gates of the Dardanelles: a note on the cover
Readers who have seen our edition of the headquarters war diary of the French expeditionary force, At the Gates of the Dardanelles, translated by Thomas Iredale, will recognise the ribbon on its cover.
We drew it from the decree of 8 July 1926, which sets eleven stripes across 36 millimetres: six white at 3.5 and five dark green at 3. The cover holds those proportions at a larger scale. That seemed right for a book that gives the daily record of the men the ribbon was made for.
—Bernard de Broglio
Sources
Principal sources are from the Journal officiel de la République française, the French government gazette, cited as JO. Three of its series are used here: Lois et décrets carries laws, decrees and ministerial instructions; Débats parlementaires records what was said in the Chamber and the Senate; Documents parlementaires prints the bills and committee reports laid before them. All three are digitised by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and can be read on Gallica.
Loi du 15 juin 1926 tendant à instituer une médaille commémorative en faveur des militaires et marins ayant pris part aux opérations exécutées aux Dardanelles et en Orient au cours de la guerre de 1914–1918, Journal officiel de la République française. Lois et décrets, 19 June 1926, p. 6730. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6509877h/f2.item
↩British War Medal 1914–20 with five specimen battle clasps by Wright & Son of Edgware, Imperial War Museum, object 30011544. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30011544
↩Australian War Memorial, Encyclopedia: the Anzac badge ‘A’. Citing AIF Orders nos 937, 994 and 1012 (1917) and 1084 (1918). https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/anzac/badge/history
↩Australian War Memorial, specimen Gallipoli Star, REL:18632. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C95344
↩M. Demir Erman, Harp Madalyası – The Turkish War Medal (2012).
↩Les Dardanelles 1915-1930, 2nd edn (Paris: Association nationale des groupements d’anciens combattants des Dardanelles, 20 rue de l’Arcade, 1933), p. 64. The campaign account is by Chef de bataillon Tournyol du Clos of the Historical Service of the Army General Staff. He gives 3,738 killed, 6,136 missing and 17,175 wounded between 25 April 1915 and 9 January 1916.
↩JO, Documents parlementaires, Chambre des députés, annexe no. 2430, 19 January 1926, p. 58. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3982919s/f80.item Humbert Jean Joseph Frédéric Ricolfi (1886–1959), a barrister at the Nice bar and a member of its council in 1919. Though he had been declared unfit for service, he volunteered on 2 August 1914, served through the whole war and ended it as a captain – wounded three times, mentioned in dispatches eight times, and decorated with the Legion of Honour. He was deputy for the Alpes-Maritimes from 1919 to 1932, and sat on the commission de l’armée from his first term. Marc Ortolani, ‘Humbert Ricolfi: l’engagement politique de la “génération du feu”’, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, no. 55, 1997, pp. 77–91.
↩JO, Lois et décrets, 25 August 1926, p. 9643. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6524250s/f27.item
↩JO, Lois et décrets, 29 November 1926, p. 12585. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6517068f/f25.item
↩JO, Débats parlementaires, Chambre des députés, 23 July 1917, p. 1933, sommaire, item 15; the resolution was printed as annexe no. 3622. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6410876b/f1.item
↩JO, Débats parlementaires, Chambre des députés, 26 July 1917, p. 2059. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k64250201/f31.item
↩Les Dardanelles 1915–1930, pp. 9–13. Its account of the association’s founding draws on the association’s own bulletin, Le Souvenir des Dardanelles, nos 1–3.
↩Georges Barthélemy (1882–1933), socialist deputy for the Pas-de-Calais from 16 November 1919 to 31 May 1924. He served in the colonies from 1907 and took part in the pacification of Upper Volta, then returned to the Ministry of Colonies and by 1914 was working in Paris as a publicist – syndic de la presse coloniale, political director of the Gazette coloniale and of l’Empire français, and founder of the Fédération française des anciens coloniaux. He served through the war as an aviator, in Lorraine and then in the East, and was wounded twice, though his air service cannot be traced in military records and he may have flown as an observer. In the Chamber he spoke chiefly for the devastated departments he represented and for war pensions. Jean Jolly (ed.), Dictionnaire des parlementaires français … de 1889 à 1940 (Paris: PUF, 1960–77), reproduced at Assemblée nationale, base Sycomore, fiche 447 https://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/sycomore/fiche?num_dept=447; Archives nationales, base Léonore, matricule no. 143471, notice no. 19355 https://www.leonore.archives-nationales.culture.gouv.fr/ui/notice/19355.
↩JO, Documents parlementaires, Chambre des députés, 13e législature, session extraordinaire, 1re séance du 1er décembre 1924, annexe no. 791, p. 215. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3992046v/f215.item
↩Louis Antériou (1887–1931). He served at the Dardanelles as a caporal in the 15th section of the commis et ouvriers d’administration, the army’s administrative clerks and storemen, and was severely wounded in the head by shrapnel at Sedd el Bahr, undergoing trepanation. He refused a medical discharge, returned to duty, and served until chronic malaria contracted in Macedonia forced his evacuation. Elected to the Chamber in 1919, he was twice Minister of Pensions, in 1925 and again from 1928 to 1929, and drew on his own service in reshaping veterans’ care: he secured increases in pension rates and extended state disability provision to conditions until then excluded, among them cranial injury, severe facial disfigurement – the gueules cassées – and malaria. Journal des mutilés, réformés et blessés de guerre, 15 March 1931, p. 1. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57504258
↩JO, Documents parlementaires, Chambre des députés, annexe no. 791, p. 215. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3992046v/f215.item
↩Annexe no. 791, as above. The French reads: ‘Nous vous rappelons – écrivait M. Georges-Barthélemy – que tous ces braves, après avoir traversé des mers infestées de sous-marins vigilants, semées de mines errantes, ont vécu de longs mois loin de la douce France, sous des cieux torrides, sous la menace constante d’un paludisme impitoyable, sans nouvelles des leurs, sans permissions, et qu’ils ont su, malgré cela, par leur stoïque courage, ouvrir, par la prise de Monastir, l’ère de la délivrance des territoires envahis.’
↩Recorded in the exposé des motifs of annexe no. 1867, cited below.
↩JO, Documents parlementaires, Chambre des députés, 13e législature, session ordinaire, séance du 7 juillet 1925, annexe no. 1867, pp. 1351–2. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k39933481/f1371.item
↩JO, Documents parlementaires, Chambre des députés, 13e législature, session ordinaire, séance du 19 janvier 1926, annexe no. 2430, pp. 57–8. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3982919s/f79.item
↩Jacques Weisweiller (1875–1936). Served at the Dardanelles in 1915 with the 175th Infantry Regiment, was liaison officer with the Serbian army at Salonika in 1916, and afterwards served on that front with the 2e régiment bis de zouaves. He was president of the Association nationale des groupements d’anciens combattants des Dardanelles from 1924. https://dardanelles-orient-levant.assoconnect.com/articles/198736-hommage-au-lt-colonel-weisweiller
↩The French reads: ‘Pour moi, qui ai eu l’honneur de les commander sur cette langue de terre isolée, sans une ville, sans un village, battue des deux côtés par le canon turc, j’estime que leur demande est hautement justifiée.’
↩JO, Débats parlementaires, Chambre des députés, 14 February 1926, p. 797. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6410831r/f29.item
↩JO, Débats parlementaires, Chambre des députés, 15 February 1926, pp. 819–20. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k64108325/f13.item
↩JO, Débats parlementaires, Sénat, 25 February 1926, p. 269. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k63547088/f35.item
↩Marie René Jean de Bertier de Sauvigny (1877–1926), senator for the Moselle from a by-election in February 1922 until his death. Saint-Cyr, then the cavalry school at Saumur, commissioned 1899, and a staff brevet from the École supérieure de guerre. He campaigned in Morocco from 1909 to 1911 and was French military attaché in Washington when war broke out, returning at his own urgent request. He served as liaison officer between the French and British armies in the Saint-Omer sector and then at the Dardanelles, where Orlo Williams noticed him in Inside GHQ (Little Gully Publishing, 2025, p. 376) https://littlegully.com/books/inside-ghq-the-gallipoli-diary-of-captain-orlo-williams/; recalled to France as chef d’escadron in the 8th Hussars, he was wounded near Noyon in September 1917 and received five citations. Mayor of Manom from November 1919, he sat in the Senate on the commissions for social welfare, for the army, and for national awards. Jean Jolly (ed.), Dictionnaire des parlementaires français … de 1889 à 1940, reproduced at Sénat, anciens sénateurs de la IIIe République https://www.senat.fr/senateur-3eme-republique/de_bertier_de_sauvigny_jean_marie0704r3.html.
↩JO, Débats parlementaires, Sénat, 3 June 1926, p. 1106. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6354738d/f2.item
↩JO, Débats parlementaires, Sénat, 8 June 1926, pp. 1150–1. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6354740g/f6.item
↩JO, Lois et décrets, 19 June 1926, p. 6730. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6509877h/f2.item
↩JO, Lois et décrets, 11 July 1926, pp. 7685–6. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65172862/f54.item
↩Models 1 and 2 of the authorisation to be issued, annexed to the instruction of 25 August 1926, JO, Lois et décrets, p. 9644. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6524250s/f28.item
↩JO, Lois et décrets, 29 November 1926, p. 12585. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6517068f/f25.item
↩Models 1 and 2 of the authorisation to be issued, annexed to the instruction of 25 August 1926, JO, Lois et décrets, p. 9644. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6524250s/f28.item
↩Les Dardanelles 1915-1930, cited above.
↩Loi accordant une médaille commémorative aux militaires de tous grades, européens et indigènes, ainsi qu’aux fonctionnaires civils qui ont pris part aux opérations effectuées au Maroc, art. 2, JO, 27 July 1909, pp. 8081–8082. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62489115/f1.item
↩Loi du 18 juillet 1922 instituant une médaille spéciale en faveur des militaires et marins ayant pris part aux opérations exécutées en Syrie et en Cilicie, JO, 19 July 1922, p. 7527; décret du 12 septembre 1922, JO, 18 September 1922, p. 9417.
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