The World's War Read online

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  www.headofzeus.com

  For Mrs Marion Olusoga, to whom I owe everything

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Chapter 1: ‘Weltkrieg’

  A new concept – the world’s war

  Chapter 2: ‘Across the Black Waters’

  India in Europe – the ‘martial races’

  Chapter 3: ‘No longer the agents of culture’

  Imperial dreams, African nightmares

  Chapter 4: ‘La Force Noire’

  Africa in Europe – the ‘races guerrires’

  Chapter 5: ‘Inflame the whole Mohammedan world’

  The Kaiser’s Jihad

  Chapter 6: ‘Our Enemies’

  Polyglot PoWs and German schemes

  Chapter 7: ‘Babylon of races’

  The Western Front – a global city

  Chapter 8: ‘What are you doing over here?

  Siam, segregation and the Harlem Hellfighters

  Chapter 9: ‘Your sons will remember your name’

  Remembering, resenting and forgetting

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About this Book

  Reviews

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  1. ‘The Empire Needs Men’ poster (1915) by Arthur Wardle / Library of Congress

  2. The First World War Deeds of Corporal Mike Mountain Horse / Collection of the Esplanade Museum, Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

  3. Encampment of the 3rd (Lahore) Division on Marseilles racecourse (1914), photographed by Horace Grant / Mirrorpix

  4. Indian soldier cooking / Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

  5. Lieutenant General Sir James Willcocks / Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

  6. Mir Dast on the terrace of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion Hospital (1915) / Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove

  7. Patients and staff beneath the dome of the Royal Pavilion Hospital, Brighton / Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove

  8. Gurkhas and Jats, all ranks, of the Indian Corps (23 July 1915) / Wikimedia (Government of India, 1915)

  9. Indian Corps troops in late 1915 / By kind permission of Dominique Faivre

  10. Alhaji Grunshi (1918) / Wikimedia Commons

  11. Colonial troops in Ebolowa, German Cameroon / Bain Col­lection (Library of Congress)

  12. Indian dead after the Battle of Tanga (1914) / Deutsches Bundesarchiv

  13. General J.C. Smuts / Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

  14. Carriers serving the Schutztruppe of German East Africa / Deutsches Bundesarchiv

  15. German colonial war funds poster depicting von Lettow-Vorbeck (1918) / Library of Congress

  16. Cover of the book Heia Safari! / By kind permission of Tim Kirby

  17. Poster for Journée de l’Armée d’Afrique et des Troupes Coloniales, by Lucien Jonas / Library of Congress

  18. La Tache Noire (1887), painting by Albert Bettanier / Wiki­media Commons

  19. La Force Noire (1910), book by Charles Mangin / BDIC

  20. Photo-portrait of General Charles Mangin / Wikimedia Com­­mons

  21. The 43rd Battalion, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, after the retaking of Douaumont / author’s collection

  22. Cover of Le Rire Rouge (17 February 1917) / author’s collection

  23. Wartime advertisment for Banania chocolate drink / Getty Images

  24. Cover of German magazine Lustige Blätter / By kind permission of Paul Van Damme

  25. Max von Oppenheim in the tent of Ibrahim Pasha (1899) / Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung / Hausarchiv Bank­haus Sal. Oppenheim Jr. & Cie., Cologne

  26. Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Sheikh ul-Islam, Sultan Mehmed V and Enver Pasha (1917) / Deutsches Bundesarchiv

  27. Sherif of Medina preaching Jihad (1914) / World War I in Syria and Palestine album (Library of Congress)

  28. Turkish infantry column at rest (1915) / Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

  29. Senussi fighters riding to war in Egypt (1915) / Bain Col­lection (Library of Congress)

  30. The Afghan Expedition (1915–16): Six Pathans, including Mir Mast / www.Phototheca-Afghanica.ch

  31. The Afghan Expedition (1915–16): caravan in eastern Persia / www.Phototheca-Afghanica.ch

  32. The Afghan Expedition (1915–16): the German, Indian and Turkish delegation in Kabul / www.Phototheca-Afghanica.ch

  33. Poster for Journée de l’Armée d’Afrique et des Troupes Coloniales, by Lucien Jonas / Library of Congress

  34. Postcard of the Halbmondlager mosque (1916) / halfmoonfiles.de (presspack for ‘The Making of the Halfmoon Files’)

  35. Page from the Halbmondlager newspaper (1917) / Europeana 1914–1918 (Berlin State Library)

  36. Wounded Tirailleur Sénégalais in German captivity / Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

  37. Gurkha PoW recording his voice at the Halmondlager / halfmoonfiles.de (presspack for ‘The Making of the Halfmoon Files’)

  38. Kaiser Wilhelm II at Carl Hagenbeck’s zoo (1909) / Deutsches Bundesarchiv

  39. Prisoners of war at WŸnsdorf, Zossen / Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

  40. Algerian Tirailleur (1914) / Bain Collection (Library of Con­gress)

  41. Fijian Labour Corps volunteers (1917) / Wikimedia Commons

  42. Men of the South African Native Labour Corps queuing for bathroom (1917) / Imperial War Museum

  43. Chinese Labour Corps’ entertainments at Etaples (1918) / Wikimedia

  44. Chinese Labour Corps at work at the Tank Corp’s Central Workshop / Australian War Memorial

  45. Labourers from French Indochina / BDIC

  46. King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) of Siam (1915) / Getty Images

  47. Recruitment poster for the British West Indies Regiment / Library of Congress

  48. ‘True Sons of Freedom’, poster for encouraging African- American recruitment (1918) / Library of Congress

  49. Film poster for the release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) / Wikimedia Commons

  50. Postcard of African-American recruit / Gladstone Collection (Library of Congress)

  51. Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi (c. 1915) / Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

  52. W.E.B. Du Bois / Wikimedia Commons

  53. General John Pershing / Wikimedia Commons

  54. Sergeant Henry Johnson (1919) / Wikimedia Commons

  55. The 369th US Infantry in France (1918) / Wikimedia Com­mons (National Archives and Records Administration)

  56. Lieutenant Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck in Dar es Salaam after his surrender (1919) / Deutsches Bundesarchiv

  57. Askari relief by Walter von Ruckteschell / www.offene-kartierung.de/wiki/DerSogenannteTansaniaPark

  58. ‘Protest of German women against the coloured occupation on the Rhine’, poster (1920) / Library of Congress

  59. Karl Goetz’s medal ‘Die schwarze Schande’ (1920) / private collection

  60. US photojournalist Helen Johns Kirtland inspects a beached mine / Kirtland Collection (Library of Congress)

  61. The destroyed town of Lens after the war / Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

  62. James Reese Europe and the band of the 369th (15th) US Infantry returning to New York (1919) / Wikimedia Com­mons (National Archives and Records Administration)

  63.
Gurkha troops at London’s Victory Parade (1919) / Imperial War Museum

  Preface

  IN THE MIDDLE of the 1960s my parents, only recently married, journeyed to my father’s homeland of Nigeria on a ship called the MS General Mangin. Built at St Nazaire in 1953, the liner ran a service from Marseilles’s ancient harbour to Point-Noire on the coast of the former French Congo (now the Republic of Congo, or Congo-Brazzaville). By the 1960s, the passengers who filled her cabins were French, British and African, many of them the citizens of now-independent African nations. They were officials, expats, businessmen, students and entrepreneurs. To my mother, and indeed to most of the non-French passengers on board, the ship’s name meant nothing; but to the French passengers, veterans of the baccalaureate, the name of Charles Mangin was a familiar one. It was Mangin, the firebrand general, who had earned himself the nickname ‘the Butcher’ for his actions on the Western Front during the First World War; and it was Mangin who had, in the years leading up to 1914, convinced himself – and soon millions of his countrymen – that Africa was a vast reservoir of men, the human raw material from which France might forge new legions to help overcome the military might of Germany.

  When the General Mangin landed in Lagos in 1966 to deposit my parents, there were still millions of men and women on the African continent who remembered the First World War, people who had seen the French recruiting parties scour the villages of West Africa for men to serve, turning Mangin’s theories into reality. In the port town of Dakar, in Senegal, where the General Mangin had earlier called, lived the last of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Mangin’s army of West African soldiers, who could count among their honours the titanic battles at Verdun, Ypres and the Chemin des Dames. Other Africans, in East and Central Africa, could recall the suffering and hunger that befell their communities when the war against the German colonial forces swept through their fields, towns and villages. In Nigeria there were still veterans of the West African Frontier Force, men who had fought against other Africans recruited by the Germans to defend the Second Reich’s colonies of Cameroon and German East Africa.

  In the same years that my parents set up their home in Africa, historians in Europe – pioneers in the burgeoning field of oral history – were embarking on the great task of recording the voices and experiences of veterans of the First World War. Yet, in this great trawl of the collective memory of the war generation, the veterans of Africa were largely ignored. Just half a century after the conflict had come to an end, their service and the suffering wrought by the war upon the continent of my birth had already been marginalized and forgotten.

  As a resident of Lagos in the late 1960s, my mother, by then the parent of mixed-race children, was astonished one day to come across a war memorial which at that time stood on Lagos Island, in the heart of what was still the capital of recently independent Nigeria. It had been erected between the wars and was dedicated to the thousands of Nigerians who had fought and laboured in the First World War. My mother was well read, multilingual and a product of a fine British grammar school; but her education had taught her nothing of the participation of non-white, non-European peoples in that war.

  Twenty years later, and living in the North-East of England, I learnt of the ‘Great War’, in part through the story of my local regiment – back when young boys in England had ‘local’ regiments with which to associate. Visits to the little museum of the Durham Light Infantry inspired a fascination with the First World War that has endured for a third of a century. The most powerful moment for me, in a lifetime of reading about the 1914–18 conflict, was when I came across a trench map of a section of the Western Front that had been manned by ‘my’ regiment. Men who, seventy years earlier, had sat in the same classrooms of the same Victorian red-brick schools that I was attending had, during the war, named their stretches of the line after the streets of our shared home-town of Gateshead – ‘Bensham Bank’ and ‘Coatsworth Road’, streets that I, an immigrant child from Africa, now played in. For many of the soldiers of the Durham Light Infantry, their first encounter with people like me, people from Africa, would have been in the zones behind the Western Front into which were drawn millions of men – the soldiers and labourers from the colonial worlds of the early twentieth century.

  This book is an attempt, although an inevitably incomplete one, to explore that moment of encounter and to describe the experiences of the often forgotten armies who came from beyond the borders of Europe to fight and labour in the First World War. It aims also to examine some of the forces – political, ideological, religious, economic and demographic – that drew these disparate multiracial cohorts into the world’s first truly global conflict. Limits of time and space have resulted in painful omissions. There was no space for an exploration of the multi-ethnic struggle fought on the Gallipoli peninsula, nor the far greater conflagration that swept across the deserts of Mesopotamia, a ‘side show’ of the First World War that now seems more important than ever, as the lines drawn in the sands of Arabia in 1919 begin to disintegrate. Likewise, the contributions of the Maoris of New Zealand, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and the soldiers and labourers who came from North Africa and French Indochina are mentioned only in passing.

  No book can ever hope to cover everything, but I hope that this book will, like the television series that it accompanies, play a small part in the slow process of historical rediscovery, the engine of which has been the pioneering efforts of the many scholars whose work I refer to and cite throughout.

  David Olusoga

  Chapter 1

  ‘Weltkrieg’

  A new concept – the world’s war

  THE ENVIRONS OF YPRES, FLANDERS, 22 APRIL 1915. It is, in the words of the British Official History of the First World War, ‘a glorious spring day’ on the West Flanders Plain. Reports coming in from reconnaissance planes flying missions over the great arc of trenches to the east of Ypres describe considerable ‘liveliness behind the German lines’ but nothing that is particularly out of the ordinary.1

  At about 4pm, German artillery begins shelling British and French lines, but then at 5pm exactly, a sudden and ferocious bombardment opens up against the small villages in front of Ypres, which up until now have largely escaped the attentions of the enemy guns. At that same moment, all along a four-mile stretch of the German front line, thousands of hands scrabble to open thousands of taps that are attached to rows of metal canisters. Each canister weighs 90 pounds, and 6,000 of them have recently been hauled into place behind the German parapets. Their collective contents weigh 160 tons. The artillery bombardment stops abruptly at 5.10pm, and it is around now that troops from the French 45th and 78th divisions – Algerians and Moroccans, including both white colonialists and North Africans – notice two strange clouds moving inexorably towards their trenches. Some men also report hearing a ‘hissing’ noise coming from the German lines. The clouds will later be described as being ‘green’, ‘yellowish-green’ or ‘grey green’. British observers, who are watching from their own lines to the south, report that from a distance they resemble a ‘bluish white mist, such as is seen over water meadows on a frosty night’. The Daily Mail, in a dispatch published four days later, will tell its readers that the clouds looked ‘like a yellow low wall’, which advanced slowly across no man’s land, pushed by the prevailing winds.2

  Even as the clouds approach, the French and African soldiers remain in their positions. Interpreting the clouds as smoke to cover an impending German assault, the troops peer through mist, looking for the silhouettes of attackers. They do not realize that the vapour itself is their most deadly enemy. As the miasma reaches the French lines, being heavier than air it slides down the sides of their trenches and snakes around the boots of the now panicking soldiers. There is an acrid smell in the air. Men notice a metallic taste at the back of their throats. Then the gargled screams and desperate splutters begin.

  On this day, many of the 6,000 French casualties of this, the first poison gas attack on th
e Western Front, simply collapse, slipping beneath the sea of green at the bottom of their trenches. Others cough up a burning yellow fluid – as one Canadian captain observes, they ‘literally cough their lungs out’.3 The membranes of their eyes are similarly damaged, resulting in temporary blindness. The weapon they have been attacked with is chlorine gas. On contact with the moisture of the lungs, it forms hydrochloric acid and hypochlorous acid, which burn the soft membranes and tissue. What is left of the victims’ lungs rapidly fills with fluid. Frothing at the mouth, the afflicted men begin to drown, literally, in their own bodily fluids.

  The French and North African troops who leave their trenches to escape this new weapon are struck down by old ones – machine guns and rifles. The Germans have carefully halted their own artillery fire to avoid blast waves from the explosions disrupting the westward progress of the gas clouds, and they now pour bullets into the stumbling panicked men, many of them already rendered sightless and choking. There is, by now, a great flight of men rushing backwards through the gas and the hail of bullets. Ian Sinclair, a Canadian lieutenant colonel whose lines are behind those subsumed by the gas clouds, later reports that Algerian troops ‘started to pour into our trench coughing and bleeding and dying all over the place, and then we realised what it was’.4 The British, still watching from their positions to the south of the French lines, suddenly see French North African troops fleeing into the areas behind their lines. Those who have been hit the hardest are in terrible distress. Desperate and insensible, they struggle to communicate in broken French and in their own languages. They are without officers, and many are without weapons. In uncharacteristically vivid terms, the British Official History later describes how:

  It was impossible to understand what the Africans said, but from the way they coughed and pointed to their throats, it was evident, if not suffering from the effects of gas, they were thoroughly scared. Teams and wagons of the French field artillery next appeared retiring, and the throng of fugitives soon became thicker and more disordered, some individuals running.5