In the Footsteps of Captain Cam - Méhariste of the Interwar Years

Camille Mathieu entered the army by entering the war. At the age of 20. He had intended to go into teaching, but from the very first engagements of 1914–1918, amid the thunder of shells and bombs, his military vocation imposed itself upon him.

He took part in, among other engagements, the Second Battle of Champagne on 25 September 1915. Wounded twice. Exhausted by the hardships endured, he was hospitalised on several occasions. Unable to continue the fight, he was posted to North Africa as an officer of the Affaires indigènes.

For nearly twenty years, at the foot of the Grand Erg oriental, in his bordj at Bir-Kecira beaten by sun and heat, he served in the Goum saharien de Tunisie, of which he would become the commanding officer, devoting himself entirely to sovereign duties — from the rezzous he pursued to the surveillance of Habib Bourguiba, the future president of Tunisia.

In the first weeks of the Second World War, having returned to the metropolitan mainland two and a half years earlier and promoted to battalion commander, he was engaged in May 1940 with the 14th Zouave Regiment in the Battle of Lille. Having resisted to the last cartridge against the enemy's assaults, he was forced to lay down his arms. Deported to an Oflag in northern Germany, Commandant Mathieu met his death in 1945 following a bombing.