By the summer of 1917, the British Army, bolstered by contingents from the dominions and swelled by conscripts from within Britain itself, was approaching its maximum size. Over the course of the war, 5.4 million men would pass through its ranks on the Western Front alone. The British Army had never been bigger and, even at the height of the Second World War, it would never be so large again.5 The maintenance of so vast a force in France and Belgium, and engaged in operations in Africa and the Middle East, was one of the greatest logistical undertakings in British military history. The French Army of 1917, exhausted by the gargantuan effort of the Battle of Verdun the previous year, was a similarly complex organization and one as desperate for labour and logistical support as it was for fighting men. Despite the losses at Verdun, the French Army stood at around 2 million in 1917. To sustain armies of this scale over 475 miles of the Western Front, as well as in the other theatres of war, required the British and French to draw on the labour of hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest people. Peasants and villagers from Africa, Asia and remote islands were recruited to feed the war machine. Across the world, men who otherwise would never have left their villages, never mind their home countries, travelled across oceans. The Great European War – as it was then still being called – became the greatest employment opportunity in history, and hundreds of thousands of men, some of them from the most beautiful lands and islands on earth, descended upon Flanders and northern France, one of the most drab and featureless landscapes in Europe. They came from Bermuda, Macedonia, Malta, Greece, Arabia, Palestine, Singapore, Mauritius, Madagascar, Vietnam, Fiji, the Cook Islands, the Seychelles – anywhere that there were unemployed men who could find a ship to the war zones. They served not just in France and Belgium but across the world, transported to wherever they were needed.
Many came enthusiastically, inspired by notions of duty and motivated by a sense of belonging to a family of nations, represented by the British and French empires. Others were induced to serve only by the prospect of work and wages. The men of British-controlled Fiji actively pressured the colonial authorities to be allowed to leave their beautiful islands and serve in France. So strong was the determination of the Fijians to play a role in the defence of Britain and the empire that after their initial offers of assistance had been rejected in 1914, the Governor of Fiji, Sir E.B. Sweet-Escott, noted that there were great ‘difficulties in keeping them back from going “home” to England to serve’.6 The government finally relented, and in 1917 the first contingents of the Fijian Labour Corps arrived in Boulogne, after having sailed across the Pacific Ocean, travelled the whole length of Canada by train, and traversed the Atlantic on troop ships. After their epic journey, they were employed loading trucks. While in France, they experienced persistent racism and, as with most non-white labourers, were at times barred from entering certain facilities. There was also a concerted effort to keep them separated from Chinese labourers, who it was feared might undermine the status of Britain in the eyes of the men from Fiji.7
Among the Fijians was Lala Sukuna, the son of a chief, who had been studying at Oxford University in 1914, the first Fijian to attend a university. When war broke out, Sukuna presented himself for enlistment at a British recruiting station, but was rejected on the grounds of race. Undaunted, he joined the French Foreign Legion. Britain’s loss was France’s gain. Sukuna fought on the Western Front and was decorated for his service until being wounded in 1915. Repatriated to Fiji he then returned to France, despite his wounds, to serve in the Fijian Labour Corps. Although a decorated war hero, he was content to work on the docks at Calais. Sukuna went on to become one of the statesmen whose work led to Fijian independence in 1970.
Recruitment from the colonies often exposed the concealed workings of racial systems that operated behind platitudes of imperial brotherhood. In the British colony of Bermuda, white men formed the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps, which was welcomed into the ranks of the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment. Black Bermudans were only permitted to join another unit, the Bermuda Militia Artillery, which was commanded by white officers. Both units were sent to Europe, but the black men were relegated to labour duties in the ammunition dumps, a task that still exposed them to enemy shell-fire, which led to casualties. South Africa’s even more elaborate systems of racial segregation, although at this time prefiguring the full apparatus of apartheid in later years, demanded even greater degrees of racial separation. While black South Africans served in the South African Native Labour Corps, coloured men were recruited into the separate Cape Coloured Labour Battalion, which was also deployed to France and Belgium. White South Africans fought in their own units, in the trenches of France and Belgium, as well as against the Germans in German South West Africa and German East Africa.
The demand for labour on the Western Front was so great in 1917 that, long after the British had evacuated the two infantry divisions of the Indian Corps to Mesopotamia, partly in the belief that conditions in France and Belgium were too cold for them, the men of the Indian Labour Corps were deployed to these same cold regions. The Indian Labour Corps was partly made up of Nagas and Kukis – minority peoples of the Raj. That the war was able to stretch its tentacles into the remote homelands of the Naga, a tribal people who lived in the hills on the India–Burma border, illustrates both the vastness of the British Empire and the enormity of the need for labour. Five-thousand miles from the Western Front, British officials in 1916 travelled the Naga Hills demanding that every village make available a number of men to work as labourers in a war that must have seemed inconceivably remote to them.
In September 1917, the British archaeologist Sir Henry Balfour encountered a group of Naga labourers in Eastern France, who were working on the repair of a road. They were within artillery range and appeared to Balfour ‘to be quite at home and unperturbed’. Later he speculated: ‘One wonders what impression remains with them from their sudden contact with higher civilisation at war. Possibly they are reflecting that, after what they have seen, the White Man’s condemnation of the relatively innocuous headhunting of the Nagas savours of hypocrisy.’8
Most Indian labourers served not in France, though, but in Mesopotamia. The British were so desperate for labour to support the Indian Army fighting the Turks in that theatre that, in October 1916, they formed the ‘Jail Porter and Labour Corps’, which consisted of 16,000 prisoners who had been flushed out of the Indian prison system and put to work in gangs.9 These convicts laboured alongside men from Persia, Arabs from Egypt, and Mauritians from that tiny island in the Indian Ocean. When even this great phalanx of men was not enough, local Iraqi women, displaced by the fighting, were put to work.
In every theatre of war there was never any shortage of work for these armies of labourers to do. The historian Paul Fussell estimated that the total miles of trenches on the Western Front dug by the British alone – which included front-line trenches, communications trenches and reserve trenches – reached almost 6,000 miles by the end of the war. Between them, the warring sides dug perhaps 25,000 miles of trenches. It was possible, in theory, to walk from the English Channel all the way to the village of Pfetterhouse on the Swiss frontier, where the lines ended, and remain below ground-level for the whole 475 miles. Every mile of this great labyrinth of trenches, strong-points, saps, and dug-outs had not only to be dug by hand but then maintained – shored-up in winter, and drained during heavy rains. While much of this work was done by soldiers, a vast amount was carried out by men of the labour battalions. And the actual trenches were only part of what made up the Western Front. From north to south, from the front-line fighting trenches to the rear rest areas, the Western Front was in effect a great linear city, one with its own railways, roads and logistics systems, post offices, police forces and health services. By 1916 the cost of all this for the British alone had reached £5 million per day. The Western Front had its own slums and ghettos too, with generals lodging in elegant châteaux far behind the lines, troops huddled together in the cold of th
e trenches, and the poorest non-white labourers living under canvas and behind barbed wire. It was a city with a disparate population of millions, and to feed and supply it was an enormous and constant undertaking. The repair of those roads, the building of the railways and the supplying of ammunition and artillery shells for daily use and periodic offensives was an epic task. It took labourers deep into the fighting zones, within the reach of enemy artillery. Thousands of them were killed; thousands more died of disease.
In a newspaper article of 1914, Georges Clemenceau had described France as ‘nothing more or less than a great battlefield’. What in 1914 had been something of an exaggeration had, by 1917, become a concrete reality. While the battle zone itself, known after the war by the French as the Zone Rouge, was a narrow strip of intensive destruction within the range of the guns, the infrastructure required for what was effectively total-siege warfare ranged across much of France. To hold the line, and launch the great attacks to free France of the invader, required the militarization of much of the nation and much of the nation’s industrial production. Factory towns became dormitory towns, in which thousands of foreign workers were housed. To meet the demands of war, large numbers of other Europeans migrated to France to work in industry, munitions, food production and supply. They came from impoverished Spain, Greece and Portugal, as well as from Italy, which, from 1915, was an ally of the Entente powers. These guest-workers laboured side-by-side with almost 200,000 workers who arrived from France’s colonies, including 5,000 from Madagascar and around 50,000 from French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). By far the largest contingent consisted of North Africans, men from the same colonies from which the fighting men of the Spahis and Goumiers had come – Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Around 130,000 North Africans worked in industry during the conflict as every sinew of France’s industrial strength was strained by the unnatural effort of total war.
One effect of the great mixing of men on the Western Front, in Africa and the Middle East, and in the factories of the industrial zones of France, was that the First World War enabled colonial peoples to see their rulers in ways that would never have been possible, or permissible, under normal circumstances. The British and French authorities in Paris and London, and in the colonies themselves, fretted endlessly about the unforeseeable consequences of allowing the subjects of empire to see their colonial masters in a struggle against an enemy who was equal to them in strength. They feared that men who had tasted new freedoms in Europe, and seen that continent in a new light, would never again submit to being dominated once they returned home. The concocted racial mystique that was a central element of colonial rule risked being exposed for what it was. In May 1916, a letter from a Frenchman living in French Indochina was cited in a report by the Marseilles postal censor’s office. He spoke for many when he expressed his fear that the service of colonial men might help save France but in the process sow the seeds for the destruction of its colonial empire. ‘At this moment,’ he wrote:
…they are recruiting Annamite volunteers. 50,000 more are needed. I do not know where they will find them, nor what will result from this… certainly nothing good, without a doubt; this will eventually create malcontents and revolutionaries, as well as the upsetting of our beautiful colony. They will no longer feel like planting rice in their fields after they have seen in France a number of things that one must not let them see or hear. This will be terrible, and this is not only my humble opinion, but that of all who know their race well.10
One way of addressing these concerns was to attempt to limit the extent to which colonial soldiers and labourers could interact with European soldiers and civilians. Various schemes of segregation and separation were attempted, with varying degrees of success. Some of the methods of recruitment, employment and segregation were imported into the war zones and the industrial areas from the colonial world. When the opportunity arose, men from the colonies were placed in barracks and isolated from their French co-workers and the French public. In places they were housed in conditions more akin to those endured by PoWs or inmates in a forced-labour camp than those of civilian, volunteer labourers who had signed contracts of employment. While the stated aim of the British and French authorities was to avoid ‘spoiling’ or corrupting their colonial subjects, there was also a desire, especially among the French, to avoid interaction. There were fears that contact would lead to racial violence between local peoples and colonial soldiers and labourers. And there was concern about the inevitable sexual contact between French women and the huge number of male colonial subjects living and working in France, a nation whose own young men were away at the front.
There developed an enormous gulf between French attitudes towards non-white labourers and non-white soldiers. There is ample evidence of the routine racism to which African and Asian soldiers in the French army were subjected. However, there was never any question that the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, or the North African or South-East Asian troops, were sharing in the privations of the war and risking their lives in the defence of France. The non-white labourers were less readily comprehended. Their work in industry, although essential, was regarded by many as work taken away from Frenchmen. It was possible to imagine the colonial worker as an alien, who was exploiting rather than defending France, someone benefitting from the war and doing so in safety, far behind the lines and away from the dangers faced by the troops. That these outsiders were sleeping in beds (albeit ones in barracks or dormitories), while the sons of France slept in the trenches, rankled with some. To those inclined to view them as such, the foreign non-white worker joined the ranks of the shirker or the war profiteer: living off France while its own sons were dying at the front in horrific numbers. That the colonial workers were paid lower wages and were used to break strikes further antagonized white workers and their unions.
The spring of 1917 saw these tensions erupt into a wave of racial attacks and even race riots. At a moment when France suffered defeats on the battlefield that threatened to tip over into a national crisis, non-white labourers were attacked by both French civilians and French front-line soldiers home on leave. Events were, in part, motivated by tensions over inter-racial relationships. In the wartime factories, two groups – African men and white women – who had both been largely excluded from the French industrial economy, and separated from one another by distance and convention, were suddenly brought together. The factory – the peacetime preserve of the white man – became both a feminized zone and a place of racial interaction, ‘manned’ by non-whites from Africa and Asia and by French women enjoying new freedoms (although accompanied by the burdens of long hours and hard, sometimes dangerous, work). Not only was it believed that colonial workers were taking French jobs, and thereby lowering industrial wages, it was now clear that some were having relationships with French women. The fear was made all the more acute by the fact that French women and colonial workers laboured, in some cases, literally side-by-side in the factories, to the amazement of men from Africa and Asia, for whom white women were normally off-limits. A labourer from Madagascar working in Toulouse, perhaps unaware that wartime opportunities available to French women were exceptional, expressed some of this shock when he wrote to a friend: ‘Would you believe that white women, who at home love to have us serve them, here work as much as men. They are very numerous in the workshops and labor with the same ardor as men.’11
Official fears of miscegenation were realized when French women met and married men from the colonies and had mixed-race children. The outright refusal of French authorities to even contemplate recruiting non-white women from the colonies for war work in France helped ensure that the racial mixing they were so eager to avoid took place on an even larger scale. In effect, they created a situation that was in many ways the inverse of that in the colonies, where mainly white colonists routinely had relationships – and children – with local women.12
In the factories and in the military zones behind the line, the sheer numbers of foreign soldiers
and labourers meant that it proved impossible to prevent an unprecedented mixing of peoples and races. There were efforts made by both the British and French authorities, partially successful in some cases, to limit the contact between civilians and non-Europeans, but a complete separation was never fully practical, and efforts at segregation (for reasons of expediency) focused primarily on groups about which the British or French had particular concerns.
The soldiers and labourers from all over the world were young men who, no matter what their role, were engaged in what was unquestionably a great adventure. They were travellers in a world turned upside down, in which old rules had been set aside and the barriers of distance and race temporarily breached or at least lowered. New experiences, sights, relationships, and opportunities were possible, at least for some. But most of the contacts between French and Belgian civilians and the armies of exotic foreigners who had come to their nations went unrecorded. We know very little about what the visitors themselves made of Europe, the only real sources being the censored letters of Indian and African troops augmented by a handful of war memoirs and the efforts of post-war oral historians. Similarly, there are only a tiny number of European diarists who were in the right locations at the right time, and had the right mindset to offer historians a broad picture of what this strange invasion meant to local peoples, and how it affected their lives. The most compelling and expansive of the few accounts that do exist is that that of Pastor Achiel Van Walleghem, a priest in the Belgian village of Dikkebus, just three miles from Ypres. Dikkebus and much of the surrounding region fell within German artillery range, and whole communities were engulfed within a world of billets, encampments, depots and rest posts.
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