Louis Bastien (Esperantist)

In 1895 the government of France sent him on a punitive campaign to Madagascar. Queen Ranavalona III had repudiated the Lambert Charter, an 1855 document which gave a French family the right to exploit Malagasy resources and which, after Britain renounced colonial claims to the island, effectively made the island a French protectorate. Bastien was responsible for telegraphic liaison, using Claude Chappe's optical telegraphic system, in which pairs of trained semaphore operators would relay messages from one tower to the next. The Chappe towers were spaced about 14 km apart between Mahajanga, where the troops had disembarked, and the position of the troops advancing on Antananarivo, the capital. Alone in a horse-drawn two-wheeled light cart, Bastien would survey the line of signal towers in the low and marshy areas between Mahajanga and Maevatanana, then follow the high plateaus along the Betsiboka River to Antananarivo.[1]

Most of the soldiers from France who died in the Madagascar campaign lost their lives not in war with the poorly armed and unorganized local population but from "paludal fever." In the belief that this fever (now known as malaria) was waterborne, soldiers were ordered to drink only boiled water.[1] It was not till three years later that Sir Ronald Ross conclusively determined that the cause of malaria is a parasite transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito.

One day Bastien stopped his horse and cart at one of the Chappe towers on his route and discovered one of the telegraph operators dying of malaria; the other operator had already died. Bastien gave what comfort he could to the dying soldier, then searched for the packet of messages they had received for transmission. He personally relayed the messages as required in both directions along the tower chain, then followed with his own message to headquarters: "Send two men to relieve the officer in Tower No. --." Relief operators did not arrive at once, of course, and Bastien spent many hours alone at the tower without food or drink.[1]

After Madagascar was proclaimed a French colony in 1896, Bastien returned to France, to be stationed at Amiens, where he completed his fr:Licence en droit (Bachelor of Laws) to qualify for l'Intendance (the Army's Supply Corps). He used to say: "Being a soldier in the army without a trade, I could only choose the least militaristic specialty." Bastien was accomplished in several fields — a man of letters, a mathematician, a thinker and administrator — everything but a warrior, though a dutiful patriot and a man of conscience. Admitted to l'École Supérieure de l'Intendance (now fr:École militaire supérieure d'administration et de management) and having received his fourth stripe as a Commandant (a rank equivalent to Major — every quartermaster is a senior officer), he followed a trajectory that led him through the ranks successively to Besançon, Lons-le-Saulnier, Épinal, Valenciennes, Commercy and Châlons-sur-Marne.[1]

When World War I broke out, Bastien was at Saint-Brieuc, and his five stripes indicated his rank of lieutenant-colonel. He followed the events of the war with a mixture of hope and anguish. By the end of the war, he was a Quartermaster-General, Second Class in Paris, and in 1919 he went to Strasbourg to serve as director of the Supply Corps for the Alsace district.[1]