Pastor Van Walleghem was in many ways the perfect diarist. Thirty-five-years old in 1914, he was a man who, by both profession and nature, was entwined in the grapevine of chatter, rumour and village news. Inquisitive to the point of rudeness, and a figure who was trusted with sensitive information, he was evidently an incorrigible gossip. Van Walleghem’s diary runs to 1,240 pages, contained in 13 separate notebooks, all written in the same neat, consistent script. It is the diary of an unworldly man struggling to make sense of the extraordinary times in which he found himself.13 It presents the First World War as seen from behind net curtains, and it contains not only his own voice, opinions and prejudices, it also acts as a conduit for the voices, experiences and stories of local farmers, shopkeepers and villagers. Through Van Walleghem, who stood at the heart of his community, we hear second-hand its views and learn of the strategies that were developed as the people of a tiny, inward-looking rural region adapted to their strange new lives in a global war.
Throughout Van Walleghem’s diary we are also privy to the gossip and rumours of the soldiers and officers of many nationalities who passed through his region. The pastor, a man well within the age range for conscription (but from which his vocation exempted him), was fascinated by the troops from Britain and France and the men from Britain’s white dominions. In late August 1916, on a trip to nearby Poperinghe, he had the opportunity to compare the British with their Australian cousins, and found he much preferred the men from Down Under. ‘The town is full of Australian soldiers,’ he reported. ‘The Australians always have lots of money; little wonder that they are so popular with the local people. What’s more, they seem more decent than the English. Above all, they are politer and less pretentious.’14 It was, however, the sudden and repeated appearances, in rural Flanders, of men of other races that most captivated him. His diary abounds with stories of a rural population entranced by the arrival of peoples only previously seen on postcards or in books. Many of his observations are tainted by his own unthinking racial assumptions; yet at other times he reveals himself willing to be surprised and a man capable of recognizing the qualities of men of other races and cultures.
In December 1914, the pastor was witness to what must have been among the most sobering sights of the first months of the war. On 9 December, the depleted and exhausted Allied armies that had survived the First Battle of Ypres were rotated out of the lines and sent behind to rest and to be reorganized. The men who marched through the Ypres Salient, through Dikkebus and the other villages, had witnessed the birth of the Western Front. ‘The soldiers coming from the trenches look terrible,’ Van Walleghem wrote:
…covered in mud from head to toe. In some places the trenches are full of water. Many of the men have frozen feet from the constant cold and wet. How pitiable they are! In general, the local people have a good deal of sympathy for them. However, because many of the soldiers are angry, and sometimes behave badly, this sympathy is perhaps less than it once was. I suppose we have to take the good with the bad.
That day also represented Van Walleghem’s first encounter with troops from beyond Europe, and it was perhaps his first indication that the area around Ypres was rapidly becoming the encampment of an international army. ‘At the moment we have all different kinds of troops around the village,’ he noted:
…including plenty of zouaves, with their wide red trousers, short tunics and Turkish caps. There are also lots of Tirailleurs Algériens, men with brown-black faces and dressed in grey trousers and a hooded cape. (These Algerians are half savage and it is not safe to leave them alone; there has been more than one complaint about their wild antics.) We have not yet seen much cavalry around here, although several different types have passed through; mainly chasseurs and hussars, but also some dragoons and cuirassiers, and even a few spahis (Algerian cavalrymen).15
Van Walleghem was quick to believe rumour and often overly eager to fall back on comforting racial stereotypes, but his insatiable curiosity also made him, at times, a sympathetic observer. He first encountered the Indian Corps in 1915, when they were rushed to the Ypres sector to stem the German onslaught (with poison gas) at the Second Battle of Ypres. In the summer of 1916, the pastor met another contingent of Indian troops, probably cavalry units. On 6 June he commented on the ‘new troop movements in the streets of the village’. To his confusion, units of Scottish Highlanders, who had until recently been encamped nearby, disappeared and suddenly:
…there are currently quite a lot of Indian troops in the parish, most of them out towards Vlamertinge. Dark-skinned, but otherwise dressed as English soldiers, apart from their distinctive turbans, wrapped elegantly around their heads from a single cloth. They speak English and some of them also know a few words of French. They are very curious by nature and ask questions all the time.
With his customary lack of self-awareness, Van Walleghem went on to demonstrate that his own curiosity put that of the Indians to shame. ‘They are quite prepared to walk for half an hour to find milk,’ he was surprised to note, ‘and then watch everything around them while they are being served’:
They are very suspicious of everyone. Yet they themselves are not to be trusted, and if you give them half a chance to run off without paying, they will be gone in a flash! And if they do pay, they offer their own Indian money, rupees, and are angry when the local people refuse to accept them. They don’t understand – or they pretend not to understand – the value of our money, and when they try to exchange it they always want to get back more than they give! Our people prefer not to do business with them.
Towards the end of this entry, Van Walleghem felt compelled to point out that the Indians were:
…in general… friendly and polite. But their curiosity continually gets the better of them, and they will examine you from head to foot right in front of your very own eyes. And they just love looking through the windows of houses! They bake what look like pancakes and they also eat a very strong-tasting seed. It seems that they will be here for a number of weeks.16
Pastor Van Walleghem may well have been among the first residents of West Flanders to have sampled Indian food.
The Belgian historian Dominiek Dendooven has worked most closely with Van Walleghem’s long diary, and he has demonstrated that many of the events described by the pastor’s accounts can be substantiated by official records or the accounts of other diarists. While the pomposity of his tone and his tendency to regurgitate simplistic stereotypes grates on the modern reader, Van Walleghem’s constant curiosity has been a boon for modern historians exploring life behind the Western Front. While Van Walleghem never questioned, or thought to question, his belief in the innate supremacy of European culture and values over all others, he was able to recognize the virtues of the colonial soldiers and labourers who passed by his door and through his community. In his tendency to vacillate between judgemental racism one moment and universalist sympathy the next, Van Walleghem was not unusual. Jozef Ghesquiere, a Belgian schoolteacher, describing a battalion of Tirailleurs Sénégalais on the march in Flanders, reveals how people caught in extraordinary times similarly lurched between the same extremes:
There are about eight hundred of them. On their heads they wear a red fez with a black tassel. With their tanned faces, their jet-black hair, black moustache and eyebrows, they look quite scary. They are looked at with a degree of fear. And yet they smile at the bystanders in a friendly manner and the fear soon dwindles away. Indeed, they have come to help liberate our country. Poor boys! So far from their home country. How many will never see it again?.17
Maurice Duwez, a doctor in the Belgian Army, wrote another account of life behind the lines and was witness to the great influx of the armies of empires and beyond into the tiny corner of his nation that remained under Allied control. He described one group of French North Africans, which he encountered in 1915, as a ‘strange mix of races. Arabs and Jews with tanned skins, black beards and the profile of an eagle.’ As with many of the Belgian population, Duwez be
came adept at guessing the origins of the armies he saw marching past him – although he was confused upon encountering a group of men he took to be the Chinese Labour Corps, but who turned out to be Japanese Canadians of the Canadian Corps.
Just as with the Indian hospitals on England’s south coast, the military hospitals of France and Belgium had became another zone of intimate contact between non-white soldiers and European civilians. Jane de Launoy, a nurse at the L’Océan Hospital in De Panne, southern Belgium, recorded her experiences in a diary that was published after the war. Walking in the sand dunes by the sea, in between shifts in late 1914, she found herself transported, in her mind, to Arabia when coming across a group of Spahis – Algerian horsemen of the French Army: ‘An Arabian fantasy on the beach. At least fifty horses in a row take off at a gallop in various successive waves. With their bright uniforms it is indeed a fabulous spectacle.’18 Two days later, on Christmas Day 1914, her diary recorded how North African soldiers had propositioned other nurses and even an ‘honourable lady’. De Launoy confided to her private pages that she ‘probably did not look kind enough, as no one has propositioned me’. But by the end of the year she had concluded that ‘On the whole Muslims have great respect for women in uniform.’ In a truly remarkable passage, she admitted to her own attraction to one of the North African soldiers with whom she had been having innocent, but sensual, liaisons:
For the past few nights a beautiful Goumier has asked me for coffee at one o’clock in the morning. Shrouded in his burnouse he enters from outdoors and comes up to my office. I am not easily unnerved but when this large devil with his dammed seductive eyes appeared before me I was not at ease. He enjoyed his coffee, muttered a few words and looked at me like a sacred object, incomprehensibly taboo.19
The opposite perspective is less well known. What did the non-white troops and labourers think of communities like that of Pastor Van Walleghem in which they found themselves? Many, but not all, will have come to war with some notion of what Europe would be like. How different was the reality from those expectations? The effects of total war presented them with a distorted picture. The nations into which colonial troops and labourers arrived were societies in shock – culturally, economically and demographically disfigured by war. Vast numbers of young Frenchmen were at the front, while women performed new tasks and were employed in unfamiliar roles. The evidence is that non-Europeans were repeatedly astonished at both how hard French and Belgian women worked and the level of independence they enjoyed. Many of the freedoms and economic opportunities available to women in France were, unbeknownst to the outsiders, novel, often temporary wartime exigencies, which would be contested after the war when the men returned to their homes and jobs.
Colonial arrivals in the encampments and billets behind the Western Front also encountered individual trauma as well as collective, societal shock. One Indian soldier wrote, in a letter of 1915, of how a well-born middle-class French lady, in whose home he had been billeted, took on the role of surrogate mother, as her own boys were all in the front:
…she comforted me to such an extent that I cannot describe her kindness. Of her own free will she washed my clothes, arranged my bed, polished my boots, and washed my bedroom daily with warm water. Every morning she gave me a tray with bread, milk, butter and coffee… When we left the village, the old lady wept on my shoulder and gave me five Francs.20
There were units working behind the lines in France and Belgium that were comprised of men who had volunteered to fight rather than labour, but for reasons of race were not permitted to do so. Just as in London and Delhi, the outbreak of war in 1914 had been greeted with enormous enthusiasm in the British West Indies. The people of Jamaica, British Honduras (Belize), Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, British Guiana (now Guyana), the Bahamas, Grenada, the Leeward Islands, St Vincent and St Lucia regarded themselves as subjects of the empire, and the general feeling that prevailed was that the islands and their people should do their bit. There were immediate calls for a new regiment of men from the Caribbean to be raised and sent to France. The men of Jamaica were asked somewhat insensitively, at one public meeting, if they were going ‘to sit down and be slaves’ or take part in the war as men and soldiers.21 At war rallies on that island and others, the image of Britain as the emancipator of the enslaved Africans – the cornerstone of the limited history education on offer to pupils in Caribbean schools – became the call of the many self-appointed recruiting sergeants who emerged. The young black men of the Caribbean were asked if they were willing to defend the nation that had emancipated their ancestors. That it had been the same nation that enslaved them was left unsaid.
The clamour among some to come to Europe and fight for the British Empire got under way even before the war rallies had been organized or the fiery speeches delivered. ‘War fever’ was so strong that there were Caribbean men who sold their belongings to pay for passage to Britain, where they hoped to enlist. Others, who could not afford a ticket, stowed away on ships bound for Europe. Patriotism and the war fever of 1914 fused in the Caribbean with the suffocating poverty under which most islanders were forced to live. On islands like Jamaica in the early years of the century, there were precious few opportunities. Thousands of Jamaicans had left their island looking for work in Panama and Cuba, where work on sugar plantations offered a meagre income, if not a way out of poverty. The First World War represented an outlet for the skills and energies of a dynamic people who had for too long been denied work and hope.
None of this delighted the War Office, whose officials looked upon the prospect of black men arriving in Britain en masse, intending to enter the ranks of the volunteer army, with deep antipathy. In late 1914, the War Office set out to prevent Caribbean men from enlisting and threatened to repatriate all those who arrived in Britain. In May 1915, nine men from Barbados, who had hidden aboard the SS Danube, were found in the London docks. Before they could make their way to a recruiting office, they were arrested. When they appeared at West Ham Police Court they were mocked by the magistrate, who then had them sent home. Other West Indians who made it as far as the recruiting offices were simply rejected. Unwanted and penniless, they then found themselves destitute in a ‘mother country’ about which, they discovered, they knew little, and in which they had no friends and few prospects. There were deep concerns, though, within the Colonial Office at how the wholesale rejection of earnest and honest offers of service by the men of the Caribbean, on grounds of race, would be interpreted by the peoples of the islands. Fearful of causing deep and damaging offence, the Colonial Office intervened and – with the support of King George V himself – they approved the establishment of the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) as a new infantry formation within the British Army. The first contingent arrived in Seaford training camp, in Sussex, in September 1915.22 Twelve battalions were raised and ultimately almost 16,000 men served in the new regiment. However, when they were deployed on the continent, the men of the BWIR were segregated from white British troops and reduced to the status of labourers, despite being armed and trained for combat. In the few tiny snippets of film footage held by the Imperial War Museum in London that show the regiment in France and Belgium, they are busy transporting ammunition in a field depot. This was important work; but their exclusion from active service was understood as a racial slur, and it was deeply resented.
In 1916, long after the initial wave of war fever had subsided, in the Caribbean islands support for the war and enthusiasm for local men playing an active role in it was catastrophically undermined by an incident that is still remembered with anger today. In March of that year, 1,140 men left Jamaica bound for Britain on the SS Verdala. Diverted away from her normal route by German U-boats, the ship headed to Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the freezing northern waters, the unheated Verdala was battered by blizzards from the Arctic. The Jamaican troops, wearing only their tropical uniforms, began to freeze. By the time they reached Halifax, five had died of hypothermia and six-hundred men were suffer
ing from frostbite and exposure. The reaction in the Caribbean was one of outrage. Recruitment in Jamaica was immediately halted, and faith in Britain and the war was permanently damaged. When a conscription law was passed in Jamaica, the authorities never dared seriously enforce it for fear of stoking resentment over what islanders called the ‘Halifax Incident’.
In May 1917, Pastor Van Walleghem of Dikkebus came across a unit of British troops, most likely members of the BWIR. ‘A number of negroes have come to work at Alouis Adriaen’s farm and the Drie Goen,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They are from Jamaica, in the West Indies. They are dressed like English soldiers, are polite and speak softly.’ Despite their politeness, Van Walleghem explained that among the local people the Jamaicans were ‘not very popular, because of their long fingers. In general, the local people prefer to see the back of them rather than the front, because if they drop in somewhere, say for a cup of coffee, they are just as likely to stay for a few hours as for a few minutes!’ Pastor Van Walleghem himself seems to have taken a more favourable view of the Jamaicans, despite the supposed length of their fingers. He was pleased to discover that ‘Many of them are Catholic,’ and was extremely taken by a letter he found, ‘belonging to one of the blacks, written to him by his mother. Such fine, upright and Christian motherly feelings! None of our mothers could write any better.’23 Always alert to the little cultural differences between the men he encountered, Van Walleghem was interested to note that the Jamaicans, men from an island that produced tobacco, ‘like to smoke cigars, whereas most soldiers prefer cigarettes’.24 In his entry for 27 May 1917, the day after he had first come across the men from the Caribbean, Van Walleghem reported that:
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