Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Days of Glory is in many ways a conventional war movie.  We see young recruits transform from ordinary young men into seasoned fighters and eventually into heroes who are willing to lay down their lives for their comrades and their country.

What sets Days of Glory apart is that we are surprised by the country these men are fighting for.  They are North Africans fighting for France—and it is France that they claim as their country.  The opening scene has a crowd going through town calling for volunteers, saying “We must liberate France.”  One of the soldiers, in reflecting on why he has joined, says, “I free a country; it’s my country.  A country I have never seen before, it’s my country.”

Algeria was controlled by the French for some time by the time World War II came.  Their identity was that they were a part of France.  When France fell to the Nazis, the people of Northern Africa felt it their patriotic duty to help liberate their nation.

Watching the Africans who joined the army is not much different than watching an American movie about the farm hands and city boys who entered the armed forces.  They have no background in military service, but they grow into the important job that is before them.  In early battles they are fearful and tentative.  Some still hold on to ways we might consider less civilized.  But as they move though the war, they become the soldiers they need to be.

Their faith gets them through hard times in the same ways that we see it in films of American soldiers.  We often see them at prayer, and hear one use the Shahadah (“There is no god but God”) in much the same way as films often show soldiers reciting Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”).

However, the men portrayed in this move were a minority group, and like many other minority groups, were not considered to be of equal status to the majority.  In America, African American soldiers experienced various forms of injustice.  The African troops of the French army were also treated with less respect than they deserved.  They were not treated the same when it came to rations.  They were passed over for promotions, even if they had shown better leadership.  And after the war, when their nations were seeking independence, the soldiers were stripped of their pensions.

In one of the scenes that highlight the injustice, one of the soldiers says that the Nazi bullets don’t pick and choose who gets hit.  The point being that in battle, both French and African face the same peril.  They are facing death together and dying beside one another.

That is seen when we see graveyards for the soldiers.  In one, a field burial of the fallen, there are crosses for French and upright stones for the Muslim dead.  They are mixed together side by side.  But at the end of the film when we see a more formal cemetery for the fallen, the Muslims have been separated out to their own area.  The first set of graves represents the reality of war; the second represents how society sees a difference where in fact there is none.

How unfortunate that nations often cannot learn to value the contributions of all parts of their society.  The patriotic fervor of the African soldiers and their desire to earn their way into the society’s mainstream was overlooked and disdained.  In time, the Africans turned away from the French and sought their independence with violence and bloodshed.  How quickly they moved from Days of Glory to The Battle of Algiers (an excellent film about the Algerian war of independence).  If only France had valued the effort of these brave men, perhaps things could have been different.

Of course the same is true for America and its African American soldiers, its Japanese soldiers, and many other minority groups.  It took time for us to recognize their contributions and we are still struggling with the racism that underlies it all.