Despite such highly valued skills, great efforts were made at Erin and elsewhere to keep the Chinese segregated from other men and from local civilians. At Erin, the Chinese were housed in separate huts, away from the British workers. Even Chinese hospitals, like the one constructed at Noyelles-sur-Mer, from which many of the dead of the cemetery came, were sealed zones, surrounded by eight-feet-high barbed-wire fences, which were patrolled and guarded. The security was intended to keep the Chinese in and prevent contact between them and inquisitive civilians, with the Directorate of Labour requiring that ‘entry of all strangers to the camps… should be strictly forbidden’.35 Nevertheless, among evidence that the separation was not absolute are some vivid and compelling accounts from the pen of Pastor Van Walleghem in Dikkebus. In August 1917, after having spent three years living near the front lines, Van Walleghem suddenly reverted to the same tone of genuine astonishment that had characterized his diary entries of 1914 and early 1915, when he had first encountered British and French colonial soldiers. On 6 August 1917 he wrote:
Quite a lot of Chinese have arrived in the area. They are being put to work by the English. Where these men came from, I have no idea. Nor how they got here. Many of them look very young, little older than our boys of 10 or 11 years of age.
Recovering his composure – as well as finding again his judgemental tone – Van Walleghem went on to record that:
Their favourite activity is to stand staring into shop windows, particularly shops with cake, fruit, sweets, etc. If they see something they like, they all rush inside en masse, talking nineteen to the dozen. They are always careful to ask the price, but still always suspect that they are going to be cheated. So suspicious! Many of our shopkeepers have had enough of their antics, so that they sometimes make angry gestures for them to leave. You should see them scamper away: like rats up a drainpipe! They are yellow-skinned, with flat noses and slanted eyes. They always wear the same foolish grin on their lips and are continually looking around at anything and everything. It is a miracle that none of them have yet been knocked down on our busy roads.
In another entry he confidently asserted, despite having had only minimal contact with the Chinese, that they ‘have little understanding of what the war is really like. If they hear a shell coming, they simply stop and stare – instead of running for cover. And when it explodes, they all begin laughing and clapping. A number of them have already been killed by shellfire in Poperinghe – leaving their comrades doubly dumbfounded.’ The same insouciance in the face of gunfire, when exhibited by men of other races in many war memoirs and newspaper reports, was regarded, by contrast, as evidence of fatalistic courage or trench humour.
As Van Walleghem’s diary demonstrates, the Chinese Labour Corps near Ypres in the summer of 1917 was not being effectively segregated, as the authorities had hoped, even though, as the pastor noted, ‘they are billeted in camps surrounded by barbed wire’ and ‘an Englishman is attached to every company, to organize their work’. The pastor’s observations about the Chinese take up much of his diary, covering several pages across multiple entries that stretch on into 1918 and even 1919. He came to regard them as hard-working, but was alert to what (to his mind) seemed eccentricities or what we would think of today as minor culture clashes:
They are by no means lazy, and work every bit as well as our own people and the English soldiers. But they make a terrible racket all the time. Whenever they pass you in the street the noise is deafening, all talking together and each one trying to be the loudest. I prefer listening to them when they are singing; they are really quite good. They all know a few strange words of English, but most of them have trouble speaking them properly. I once passed a group of them shortly before noon, and they all started shouting ‘Watch? Watch?’ This was their way of asking the time. I suspect that their stomachs must have been rumbling, because when I showed them that there were only five minutes to go before twelve o’clock, they nodded with pleasure – and went off to fill up their bellies with their favourite food: rice. They don’t seem interested in anything else; it’s rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. And always eaten with those little wooden sticks of theirs. Not so long ago I came across a Chinaman who was wearing a watch on both wrists. How proud he was when he saw that I had noticed!’
As is often the case, Van Walleghem’s observations shift from sympathetic curiosity, at times bordering on admiration, to the comfort of well-worn racial presumptions a few sentences later: the Chinese, he abruptly reassures himself in one entry, ‘are like big children and that’s the way they need to be treated. To keep them in order, it is more often necessary to use force than argument.’ It was for this reason that:
…their sergeants each carry a thin metal rod, which they sometimes use to ‘tickle’ the skin of their charges. Not that this causes any resentment. The offender smiles in that silly Chinese way – and then does what he is told. They also have other types of punishment. I recently passed one of their camps and saw one of them with an ox’s yoke around his neck and another with a large block attached to his neck by a chain. Weighed down in this manner, they were both forced to dig a ditch along with their comrades.
As well as offering his own characteristically contradictory opinions, Van Walleghem also charted the changing relationship between the men of the Chinese Labour Corps and the people of the villages around Ypres. At its core, that relationship was a commercial one. It might not be the kind of cross-cultural interaction that is often discussed in the context of a war zone, yet trade, barter and commerce have often been the defining relationship between armies and the local people of the nations in which they fight. It was the shopkeepers and innkeepers of the Ypres region who, in Van Walleghem’s account, had the most contact with the Chinese, as with all the international labour contingents, and therefore the most to say about them and their habits. Although soldiers and labourers of many nationalities tended to send a proportion of their wages home to families, many did also have money to spend, and those with some freedom of movement found themselves in a society that abounded with new temptations and unfamiliar products. The Chinese and others were consumers in their new environment, as well as being visitors or workers, and it was the café, the estaminet and the shop that became the main arenas of cultural exchange. In November 1917, after the Chinese had been in the area around Dikkebus for four months, Van Walleghem came to the conclusion that:
The Chinese are child-like but not stupid. They know the value of the goods they are buying and are not easily cheated. They always look for the best and most beautiful things, and will seldom buy cheap rubbish. They are reliable payers, but love to haggle over the price. The most expensive and most attractive shops are the ones that interest them most, and it is usually in these shops that they make their purchases. I don’t know how much they earn, but some of them seem to have plenty of money. They buy a lot of pocket watches and rings. Some of the shopkeepers have even learnt a little Chinese, to try and attract their custom. And it works!.36
In the same entry, Van Walleghem reported, with some degree of surprise, the news that:
An order has been issued to the Chinese forbidding them to enter shops. Civilians are no longer allowed to sell them anything at all. Nobody knows the reason why. Some people say that the Australians have been getting the Chinese drunk in the coffee houses, by slipping rum into their coffee. Others say that they have been giving away too much to the women and children, making the men-folk jealous.
In early January 1918, Pastor Van Walleghem wrote of an incredible coincidence, in a story set in a local shop, which suggested the earlier ordinance had been rescinded. It involved a local Flemish family, the Duriens, and it hinted at the level of global interconnectedness that existed in the pre-1914 world:
A few days ago the Durien family received a letter from their brother Florent, who is a missionary in China. A Chinaman just happened to be in their shop at the moment when the letter arrived and saw the envelope. With a b
ig smile on his face, he rushed off to tell his compatriots. Half an hour later another Chinaman came into the shop and claimed that he had lived for a number of weeks in the village from which the letter was sent, and that he had also seen the Catholic priest on a number of occasions. He even began to describe him, and it was indeed an accurate description of Florent. Wanting to be certain, the Duriens went to fetch photographs of a number of the missionaries active in China, and in less than a minute the Chinaman picked out Florent’s picture. Unbelievable – but true!37
Despite charming stories such as this, and the wealth of cultural observations in his diary, the overall picture Van Walleghem painted of his environment in the latter two years of war was that of a military frontier – a violent, all-male, drink-sodden zone, in which the Chinese were merely one of many ethnic ‘tribes’ who were often in conflict with one another. Van Walleghem’s diaries, and other wartime memoirs, describe local communities that were enormously outnumbered by transient military populations, in which regular outbreaks of violence, between groups of men who were ostensibly allies, were the norm. This violence could, and did, have fatal consequences. There are graves in war cemeteries across Flanders of men killed in bar-room fights, or in disturbances in camps. Thousands of men, many of whom were psychologically damaged by the experiences of battle, found themselves living in close proximity and sharing facilities. Despite official attempts at segregation, racial antipathies, national rivalries, regimental pride and personal differences fused with a cocktail of testosterone, alcohol and shell-shock (what we today would diagnose as post-traumatic stress disorder) to create a combustible mix. In late November 1917, Pastor Van Walleghem described ‘a riot in one of the Chinese camps near Poperinghe’, in which ‘An English officer was badly manhandled by the Chinese. English soldiers fired into the crowd, killing three of the rioters. Or that, at least, is what they are saying here.’ A month later, he wrote that in some of the camps:
…the Chinese are starting to get quite rebellious. Yesterday, they stabbed an English officer. Today, there were 30 of them at Busseboom who refused to work. They just lay on the ground, waiting to be hit. Better a few lashes of the sergeant’s rod than a broken skull. I passed by the camp at Verhaeghe’s and saw three of them tied with arms wide stretched to the wire of the perimeter fence. One of them also had his legs tied. It can’t have been pleasant, particularly in this wintry weather. Today it has been freezing hard.38
There were other well-documented accounts of fights between the Chinese and Arab labourers. Some of the Chinese, having never left rural China, had been previously unaware of the full range of physical racial differences and struggled to understand why some of their fellow workers had dark skins. They seem to have adopted skin-colour racism easily, taking a particular dislike to the Moroccans. In one incident, three Arabs were killed in a fight with Chinese. On Christmas Day 1917, a serious incident between the Chinese and troops from New Zealand took place in Reninglest, near Dikkebus, under the eye of Pastor Van Walleghem. The pastor’s entry for that day reveals that:
…it was the New Zealanders who drank, laughed, whirled, twirled, screamed and shouted the day away. When they were drunk, they started making trouble with the Chinese. These Orientals are getting more and more bitter. They split off into small conspiratorial groups, and later in the afternoon and evening fights broke out at several places. What wild men they are! We later learnt that thefts had been reported at various locations throughout the night.39
The conclusion was dramatic and violent. The British sent troops to ‘the Chink camp’ to put down what they described as a mutiny. Nine Chinese men were wounded when the troops opened fire, and two were killed. Three Chinese men – Zhang Hongan, Wu Enlu and Zhang Zhide – who were all involved in the incident were later executed. They are buried in Westouter British War Cemetery.40
THE WESTERN FRONT, DECEMBER 1917. The Times of London has sent one of its correspondents on a tour through the zones behind the Western Front. Under the headline ‘An Army of Labour, Workers from Distant Shores’, he will present an extended portrait of life behind the lines. ‘All the nations seem to have their encampments among the rustling copses and damp green pastures of Picardy and Artois,’ he begins, continuing:
It is strange to drive for an hour or two along the winding roads past the quiet villages – quieter than ever now, for nearly all the men are away – and the red-roofed farmsteads and to come suddenly upon a scene that carries you half the world away from the clouded northern skies and the Channel mists. Perhaps it may be a group of Punjab coolies sitting on their heels round the thin smoke of a wood fire on which the chapattis are baking; perhaps a squad of Chinamen in blue or terra-cotta blouses and flat hats, hauling logs or loading trucks always with that inscrutable smile of the Far East upon their smooth yellow faces; perhaps a party of sturdy negroes or Kaffirs, singing and chattering as they march back from their work for the midday rest and meal: perhaps some squat and swarthy Nagas with their long black hair bunched fantastically above their bullet heads, gazing in childlike wonderment at a train of great Army lorries grinding by… It is like a cinema show for the village children, who will dream of it, one fancies when they are old, and remember how men came from Asia and Africa to work for France in her dire need under the English.41
There are also among the encampments and work sites:
…men of various tribes Zulus from Natal and the Transvaal, Cape Kaffirs, Basutos, Swazis, some Mashona, and others… Many, perhaps most, have worked under white overseers before in the Natal plantations, on Boer-farms, at the mines, or the Durban docks. They have been enlisted in South Africa by arrangement with the Union Government. And they bring with them their own officers, who understand the native and know how to deal with him.
By this time, almost a year after the sinking of the Mendi, thousands of South Africans were labouring in France as part of the South African Native Labour Corps. They came from a nation whose leaders resolutely believed that they and they alone truly knew ‘how to deal’ with black Africans. The partial breakdown of the barriers of race in the military and industrial areas of France and Belgium that was necessitated by the war vexed men in London and Paris; but nowhere was it looked upon with more apprehension and hostility than in white South Africa. When, in August 1914, news had reached South Africa that Britain had ordered the deployment of an Indian Corps to the Western Front, the East Rand Express warned:
If Indians are used against the Germans they will return to India disabused of the respect they should bear for the white race. The empire must uphold the principle that a coloured man must not raise his hand against a white man, if there is not to be any law or order in either India, Africa, or any part of the Empire where the white man rules over a large concourse of coloured people. In South Africa it will mean that Natives will secure pictures of whites chased by coloured men, and who knows what harm such pictures may do.42
In the racial climate of South Africa, there was no prospect whatsoever that the Union would permit black South Africans to play an active role in the war. The government in Pretoria planned to limit their involvement to working as cheap labour in support of South Africa’s all-white army in its campaigns against the German colonies in Africa. When the deadly mining war began on the Western Front, in which both sides dug tunnels beneath the trenches of the enemy to plant explosives and destroy their positions, it was suggested in London that experienced black South Africans might be brought to France from the gold mines of the Transvaal and their specialized skills put to use. That plan was quickly and comprehensively extinguished by the Union government.43 By the summer of 1916, when the true scale of Britain’s labour shortage in France and Belgium had became apparent, and the British had accepted Chinese offers of labour battalions, the Imperial War Council again suggested that black men from South Africa and other parts of British-ruled Africa be recruited as labourers.
White opposition to the creation of a corps of South African labourers coalesc
ed around a fear that if black men were sent to France they might, through some unseen eventuality or emergency, end up being thrown into battle. Even if this worst-case scenario were avoided, there was still the deeply held concern that the ‘kaffir’ would return home after the war in military uniform as well as with what one member of the South African Parliament had no compunction in describing as ‘ideas above his station’.44 Nevertheless, General Louis Botha, who was at the time both South Africa’s prime minister and Minister for Native Affairs, accepted that the exigencies of war made the labour situation critical; by August 1916, General Haig had increased his estimate of the labour shortfall on the Western Front to sixty-thousand. Botha therefore agreed to London’s requests, but with several pre-conditions.
Botha’s list of conditions was intended to prevent the labourers from gaining any significant access to European society or developing any delusions that their service and sacrifice would lead to any change or improvement in their material conditions or political status at home. Colonel Pritchard, the South African officer appointed to lead the South African Native Labour Corps, was dispatched to Europe to lay out the requirements of the South African government and the Department of Native Affairs. At a conference of 1916, he demanded that black South Africans ‘should be employed elsewhere than in the fighting zone’. On no condition were black South Africans to be permitted to take part in the fighting or receive any military training. Next, he wanted to ensure that all ‘Natives should be segregated’ and that ‘they should be administered in accordance with military law under the Army Act by officers appointed by that Government’. By this he meant that the camps in which the black labourers lived were to be subject to the military law of the South African Army. Pritchard also stipulated that the South African labourers were to be placed under the command of white South Africans. The South African government expressed its unease at the thought of black men being commanded by men who did not ‘know the native’ and many of the officers themselves were former mine compound managers or officials from the Department of Native Affairs.
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