The World's War

by David Olusoga

  There are other objects that have a similar capacity to challenge our impressions of the First World War and the men who fought in it. In Belgium and France a handful of specialist collectors and eagle-eyed experts have unearthed brass shell-casings that were engraved with dragons and ancient poetry by the Chinese men who came to Europe to work as labourers on the Western Front. Far removed from these collectors’ pieces is a simple concrete dug-out, which is slowly subsiding under its own weight in the corner of a cow-field in Belgian Flanders. Inside is an Arabic arch, on which an inscription from the Koran has been carefully engraved: ‘There is no greater God than Allah. If you believe in Allah you will be Victorious like the Victory of Tadmor and Namar.’ Behind the walls of the bunker, Muslim soldiers once sheltered from the thunderous guns that were the masters of the Western Front. We know almost nothing about these men – who they were or where they came from. They might have been subjects of the British Raj or just as plausibly North Africans from the French colonies, or even Muslim troops from French Senegal. All we know is that they were here, and that they found a way to leave behind the mark of their faith. On the outskirts of the Côte d’Azur town of Fréjus is a mosque built in the Malian style, from red, ferrous mud. It was constructed for West African soldiers who served in the French Army and were stationed here during the winter months of the war. It now stands closed and padlocked to protect it from vandals, a mute victim of the swirling ethnic tensions of twenty-first-century France. That this place of worship was built for men who fought and died for France a century ago seems to little deter today’s ‘culture warriors’, who see it as the unwelcome intrusion of an alien culture; in March 2014, Fréjus became one of only two French towns to vote in a mayor from Marine Le Pen’s Front National party.

  In 2005 the historian Santanu Das came across another treasure of the war in the National Archives in Delhi. In an envelope marked ‘His Majesty’s Office’, which had not been opened since it was deposited with the archivists long ago, Das discovered the trench notebook of Jemadar Mir Mast, the brother of the heroic Mir Dast. Mir Mast’s notebook was the tool of a resourceful man, an experienced soldier who had, in just a matter of weeks, been transported from a world he knew and understood in India and thrust into a war on another continent – a war that was incomprehensible to him, as it was to much of the rest of the world. Caught between empires, cultures and languages, as well as between life and death, Mir Mast clearly struggled to make sense of the Western Front. Alongside maps and sketches on one page of the notebook is a long list of Urdu words with their English equivalents – the words Mir Mast felt were worth remembering. Many are clearly practical: ‘haversack’, blanket’, ‘hungry’, or ‘please’. Others like ‘testacles’ [sic], ‘breasts’, ‘nephew’ and ‘honeymoon’ have no obvious relevance to the battlefield. As Santanu Das has pointed out, the trench notebook raises more questions than it answers. Why those words? An Indian Urdu-speaking soldier, whose units had been thrown into battle alongside English soldiers, was he adjusting to the rough argot of the English Tommies he fought alongside? How much contact did he and other Indian soldiers have with French and Belgium civilians, and with women? Mir Mast left behind him a paper trail matched by few other colonial soldiers, and he is to re-surface repeatedly in the story that follows, in the most unexpected ways. And yet, despite leaving so large an archival footprint, we know little about who he was or what the war meant to him, and in that respect he is like most of the men who came from distant lands to fight in the World’s War.

  There had been other, so-called ‘world wars’. Both the Seven Years War (1754–63) and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were – as many historians have pointed out – global conflicts, fought out in Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas. Likewise, England’s earlier confrontation with Hapsburg Spain took place on the shipping lanes of the English Channel, on the fields of the Netherlands, off the jagged coast of Ireland and in the harbours and on the islands of the New World. However, while they ranged over vast areas, none of these earlier conflicts were ‘world wars’ in the sense that emerged in the early twentieth century. In these previous struggles, great powers and empires had fought one another across distant continents and over open oceans, but they had involved the indigenous peoples of those territories only marginally. In a purely geographic sense, they were world wars. But in the demographic sense they were better understood as European quarrels writ large across the globe.

  The Great War of 1914–18 was the first true world war in that it was the first in which peoples and nations from across the globe fought and laboured alongside one another, rarely in equality other than equality of suffering. Yet, even in the years and months leading up to the conflict, few in Europe were capable of envisaging that the coming war would bring black and brown peoples from the European empires, and the citizens and subjects of independent non-white nations, into Europe itself. Even those who took it upon themselves to speculate as to the shape of future conflicts got it wrong. Military planners, in Britain, Germany and to a lesser extent France, largely failed to foresee this, just as they failed to grasp that profound changes in military technology had silently made wars of sweeping movements and great cavalry manoeuvres almost obsolete. To most, the idea that armies of black Africans, and Asians from the Indian subcontinent and beyond, would march en masse to war in France and Belgium was just as unimaginable as the tank or poisoned gas.

  Writers of fiction fared little better. However, the term ‘world war’ first emerged not in the reports of the pre-war military but as the title of a rather trashy German novel. Written in 1904, Der Weltkrieg: Deutsche Träume (‘The World War: German Dreams’) was the dubious work of August Wilhelm Otto Niemann, a German nationalist. Niemann’s novel accurately predicted how, a decade later, the alliance system would drive Europe into two armed camps, and that when war broke out the conflict would range across the world. While he envisaged rebellions of Indian soldiers in the British Indian Army, he failed to make the imaginative leap that Britain, in the event of war with Germany, would transport 850,000 men from that army to France, Africa and the Middle East to fight against Germany and its allies.

  What was inconceivable in 1904 became almost instantly necessary in 1914. Within forty-eight hours of Britain’s declaration of war on 4 August 1914, the War Cabinet made the decision to dispatch two divisions of Indian troops first to the Middle East, but with an eye to deploying them in Europe. By November 1914, Indian soldiers were aiming their brand new Mark III Lee-Enfield rifles at the grey enemy figures in Pickelhauben who emerged through the late-summer fields around the small Belgian city of Ypres. Alongside them were thirty-seven battalions of French troops from Senegal, Algeria and Morocco, who had taken up their positions in the emerging front. By the time the manoeuvrings of 1914 had fizzled out and the Western Front had stabilized, the fantasy of a ‘white man’s war’ had, like all the other assurances about the war (that it would be short and decisive, decided by rapid advances, and ‘all over by Christmas’), been exposed as naive.

  From the comfortable viewpoint of a century later it seems obvious that it was always going to be a global conflict, and also one inevitably fought for imperial gain. Four decades before 1914, during the final stages of the Franco-Prussian War in February 1871, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli prophesied in the House of Commons as to what the emergence of a unified Germany would mean for Europe. The Franco-Prussian conflict, he warned:

  …represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of last century… Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope… The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.19


  In 1907, the nature of that great change was frankly summarized by Viscount Esher, then a member of the British Committee of Imperial Defence. He too reached for the metaphor of revolutionary France, warning that:

  The German prestige, steadily rising on the continent of Europe, is more formidable to us than Napoleon at his apogee. Germany is going to contest with us the Command of the Sea, and our commercial position. She wants sea-power and the carrying trade of the world. Her geographical grievance has got to be redressed. She must obtain control of ports at the mouths of the great rivers which tap the middle of Europe. She must get a coastline from which she can draw sailors to her fleets, naval and mercantile. She must have an outlet for her teeming population, and vast acres where Germans can live and remain Germans. These acres only exist within the confines of our Empire. Therefore, l’Ennemi c’est l’Allemagne.20

  The colonies, and particularly those in Africa, were in the late nineteenth century regarded by the more optimistic observers as Europe’s safety-valve, an arena in which international tensions might be defused, thereby avoiding the risk of military confrontations breaking out between the great powers in Europe itself. The colonial world was a great repository of territories, coaling-stations, spheres of influence, trade concessions and treaty-ports, which Europeans diplomats could use to sweeten any deal or appease any disgruntled nation. More cautious voices, however, had long understood that the age of empire could easily end in war, and probably would once the available stock of unclaimed colonial real estate has been exhausted. The nations who had done poorly in the scramble for territory would seek to redraft the map of the world, while those who had done well – most notably Britain – would seek to preserve their empires and maintain the status quo.21 In 1914 the British Empire – the greatest of them all – ruled over 400 million subjects and covered a quarter of the land surface of the Earth. The French Empire had over 200 million subjects. Germany, the colonial late-comer, had an empire that although territorially vast was, in economic and strategic terms, in no way commensurate with the country’s growing military and economic power. The enormous extent of colonial possessions held in Africa by tiny Belgium and by chaotic, near bankrupt Portugal, were regarded by some in Berlin as almost a standing insult to German prestige and power.

  Despite all these tensions it was not in the end colonial rivalries that took Europe to war in 1914 but rather the continent’s own internal divisions, both ancient and modern. Amplified by the alliance system, as well as by accident and miscommunication, a Balkans crisis mutated into a global war in a way, and at a velocity, that even a century later remains hardly credible. However, the Balkan conflict that began with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, on 28 July 1914, became a world war not on 3 August when Germany marched into Belgium, but on 4 August when Britain entered the fray. If there had ever been realistic hopes that the world outside Europe might have been largely spared involvement, they were dashed by London’s declaration of war. At that moment, farmers in Bengal and the Punjab, Pashtuns from the North-West Frontier, Hausas and Yoruba from the villages of Nigeria, along with the Ashanti and Fante of the Gold Coast, the Boers, Zulus, San and Shona of southern Africa, and the peoples of New Zealand, Canada and Australia (ancient Aboriginals to the newest arrivals) – all became subjects of an empire at war: ‘My empire… united calm and resolute, and trusting in God’, as King George V proclaimed it to be in early August 1914.22

  In one sense the German High Command was alert to the likelihood that Britain’s entry would globalize the conflict – perhaps more aware than many in London. In the early hours of 31 July 1914, which was Germany’s own deadline for either mobilizing or standing down its army, Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke – a man perhaps already on the brink of some sort of nervous breakdown – was awoken by his adjutant Hans von Haeften. Appraised of the situation and of new rumours of full Russian mobilization, Moltke, standing on the precipice of a fateful decision, warned with remarkable prescience and insight: ‘This war will turn into a world war in which England will also intervene. Few can have an idea of the extent, the duration and the end of this war. Nobody today can have a notion of how it will end.’23 The British saw the threat of a ‘world war’ rather differently. Their empire was still, memorably, a vast swathe of intercontinental pink on most maps – a substitute for British scarlet, against which the names of cities, rivers and mountains might become illegible – all held to the motherland by thick black shipping lines. Indeed, the British Empire appeared, in some respects, all the greater for the geographical distortions produced by the favoured Mercator Projection used by cartographers. In what the historian Linda Colley has described as this ‘single, insufficiently examined image’, whole territories in Africa, appearing as solid blocks of pink, concealed the reality that on the ground British influence gradually faded away with each mile travelled from the coast or away from the British centres of colonial power. This map, which was famously hung in every school classroom in Britain, disguised the ‘territorial fragility’ of the whole complex, unlikely structure. It exaggerated both the real extent and the global reach of British power, distortions and vulnerabilities to which Britain’s ruling elite was fully awake when war came.

  The two armed blocks of Europe in 1914 both sought a globalization of the war, but in diametrically opposite ways. France went to war for its territories lost to Germany in 1871, for revenge, and for national security; Britain fought now in order to avoid having to confront a victorious, expanded Germany at some later date. But when it came to empires, both were fighting to maintain the status quo. Neither went to war in order to expand their colonies at the expense of Germany. However, both the British and the French did seek to draw men, money and resources from the 600 million peoples of their combined empires. France more energetically and enthusiastically than Britain aimed to deploy colonial manpower in Europe – men who were to serve as both soldiers and labourers. Both allies set out to exploit the wealth and natural resources of the colonies in the war effort. But they had no ambitions to see the war spread to the theatres outside Europe, beyond the necessary campaigns to capture the German colonial holdings in Asia and Africa and to neutralize the German navy. Germany’s leaders sought the exact opposite: genuinely and viscerally resenting the deployment of colonial soldiers of ‘non-European stock’ on the Western Front, they expended huge sums of money and vast amounts of energy attempting to spread the war into the lands from which those combatants had been drawn. Germany sought to turn the British Empire into the British Achilles heel, forcing Britain to deploy men and resources to maintain its colonial grip around the world, and to this end Germany drafted strategic plans to globalize the war. The German alliance with Ottoman Turkey was intended, in large part, to achieve exactly that. This was part of a wider global strategy of using revolution and religious discord as weapons to change the balance of power in a post-war world.

  These divergences of perspective and strategy were summed up in the war’s nomenclature. While the British and French called the war of 1914 the ‘Great War’ and ‘La Grande Guerre’ respectively, the Germans almost from the start called it by the name echoed in the country’s Official History of the conflict: the Weltkrieg.24

  While the British did not go to war in order to seize German colonial territories, they were quite happy to do so when the opportunity arose. The far bigger concern was the defence of the pre-war empire in the face of the German and Ottoman efforts to stoke the fires of nationalism, anti-British sentiment and religious unity. Yet, the outbreak of war was met with a genuine and hugely appreciated wave of pro-British, pro-imperial sentiment. The empire of the ‘white dominions’ and India was perhaps never so united as in August and September 1914. Indian nationalists, including Gandhi (who was then in London), passionately advocated support for the British war effort, partly in the hope that loyalty in the moment of crisis would lead to the granting of greater autonomy once the danger had passed. The South African Native
National Congress – precursor of the African National Congress – made the same calculation. However, local tensions between Boer and Briton in South Africa led to a muted reaction among the white population there. Africans in the dependencies had no power and therefore no choice as to whether to support the war or not, while white British settler communities tended to support the war with great impromptu demonstrations of nationalism and support for the ideals of empire as they perceived them.

  British propagandists built on this moment by painting a picture of the empire as a great family of peoples, paternally led by Britain and joined together in some supposedly moral mission for civilization. Wartime propaganda used the image of the Indian and African soldier, fighting in a war against Germany, as firm evidence of the superiority of the British Empire. The hierarchies of race that underpinned and informed imperial rule were encoded into wartime propaganda posters. Thus, white troops from the dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand were given centre stage, alongside the British, with Indians behind them, and black Africans positioned usually in the background – an imperial, but not an equal, community. While a few wartime writers repeated the old mantras of the nineteenth century, which claimed the British to be a race of born rulers (‘God’s chosen people’ echoed the words of one 1916 writer), others followed the official line that presented the empire as a brotherhood of humanity, one that was being brought closer together by the shared experience of war.25 In his religious tract Brothers All: The War and the Race Question, Edwyn Bevan, the Christian philosopher and classicist, began his opening chapter ‘The Meeting of the Races’ with a simple statement: