spahis

According to Wikipedia, a Spahi is a "light cavalry regiments of the French army recruited primarily from the indigenous populations of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spahi)

I think this is actually Le Francport, a small village in the vicinity of the other October, 1914 French battle pictures in the Bain Collection. Also sometimes written as Le Franc-Port. (It was ultimately the site of the armistice in 1918 and the surrender of Germany after World War II). I cannot find a "Frane Le Port" (as in the negative caption) or a "France Le Port" (the Flickr caption). However, there is a picture in the Bibliotheque National de France's Gallica online photo collection of Moroccan Spahis at Le Franc-Port: gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9041734x

retired at last and artolog: Thank you for finding the date on the negative. bior: thank you for the information about the Spahi regiments. There seem to be quite a few images of the Spahi soldiers in the Bain News Service Collection. It seems probable, artolog, that this image shows Francport as you say, and not "Frane Le Port" which appears in the caption. It looks like some of the French language place names were not correctly written by the Bain captioners. Thank you for helping us fix them.

Other Bain/LOC photos of Spahis:

"Spahis (French pronunciation: ​[spa.i]) were light cavalry regiments of the French army recruited primarily from the indigenous populations of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. The modern French Army retains one regiment of Spahis as an armoured unit, with personnel now recruited in mainland France. [...] Spahis were sent to France at the outbreak of war in August 1914. They saw service during the opening period of mobile warfare but inevitably their role diminished with the advent of trench warfare. By 1918 all seven Spahi regiments then in existence had seen service on the Western Front. In addition a detached squadron had served in Palestine against the Ottoman Empire. During World War I the number of units increased with the creation of Moroccan Spahi regiments and the expansion of the Algerian arm."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spahi

See notes under

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spahi - Light cavalry regiments in the French Army.

Hi, George!

Bain collection has two copies of this same Agence Meurisse photo. Here is the other one:


From Meurisse photo at Gallica site (pub. date 1914), caption is:
"les Spahis Marocains traversant la forêt de Compiègne"
[Moroccan Spahis crossing the forest of Compiègne ]

gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90418526

artolog: Thanks for linking us to the other copy of this image, and to the original caption and date. We'll include some of this info next time we update.