Even the question of how, and where, the remains of the dead were laid to rest was not immune from the tendency. That this is so seems to cut across the grain of what we have come to associate with the First World War – a conflict seemingly heavy with the rituals of remembrance and respect for the fallen. It reminds us how forgetting rather than remembering characterized conflicts of an earlier era. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea that the ordinary soldier, killed on the field of battle, should be accorded the honour of an individual and named grave would have been surprising. Men went to ‘the wars’ and simply did not return. Their bodies were lost and were no more available to their families or honoured by their nations than the bodies of those lost at sea. The only exceptions were the rich or those of high military or aristocratic rank – the two usually went hand in hand – whose remains might be carried from the field of battle and buried with ceremony. The bodies of the common soldiers were, if buried at all, interred in mass graves.76 When the numbers were overwhelming, bodies were sometimes burnt too, as Sir Walter Scott noted on visiting the field of Waterloo not long after the battle in 1815. The human remains of the Napoleonic Wars even went on to provide economic benefits. In 1822 the London Observer was reporting how ‘a million of bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year’ from the old continental battlefields, so that ‘Yorkshire bone-grinders’ could reduce them ‘to a granularly state’ for farmers to ‘manure their lands’. As the newspaper summed it up wryly, ‘a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce’.77 Teeth, too, were wrenched from the skulls of dead soldiers; boiled and sorted, they were then mounted on ivory plates to produce luxury dentures known as ‘Waterloo Teeth’, supplying the market for decades until the dead of the American Civil War, shipped overseas by the barrel load, offered a new source.78
It was also during the American Civil War, however, that the principle of individual interment and remembrance was first established. By 1915 the nations of Europe, starting with France, were concluding that the present sacrifices were so vast, and the suffering so appalling, that each victim should be awarded an identifiable resting place.
The result was that the First World War has become a conflict in which the act of remembrance is intimately connected to the cemetery and the grave and the memorials to the missing. One of the powerful appeals of the beautifully tended cemeteries cared for by the British Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) – and its French, Belgian, American and German equivalents – is the notion of equality in death, that men of all ranks are remembered equally with the same simple headstones or crosses. (An even greater act of equality and magnanimity can be seen in the many cemeteries in which enemy soldiers are laid to rest, within the same sacred ground as ‘our own’.) In British war cemeteries in France and Belgium, it is common to see the graves of Indian soldiers alongside those of their comrades from Britain and the wider empire. In French cemeteries, the graves of Tirailleurs Sénégalais, along with those of men from French Indochina, North Africa, and Madagascar, are clustered together beneath the French Tricolour with their white comrades. The Muslim headstones, with their elegant Arabic designs and dedication in Arabic script, stand out from the rows of crosses. At the vast and humbling Douaumont Cemetery at Verdun, under the shadow of the austere ossuary in which the bones of the unknown dead are held, is a whole section of Muslim graves, each headstone orientated towards Mecca.
There is, however, emerging evidence that the great cultural shift towards individual remembrance was not universally applied when it came to non-Europeans. They were, at times, treated as differently in death as they had been in life. First, there is the question of omission. In the French case, there is a disturbing discrepancy between the numbers of French colonial soldiers recorded as killed and the number of graves in the nearby war cemeteries. The Belgian historian Piet Chielens has raised the question about a series of clashes in 1914 around the town of Dixmude. In a desperate encounter on 10 November, two units of Tirailleurs Sénégalais were almost entirely wiped out. The French commander Pierre Alexis Ronarc’h recorded in his memoirs that of the 2,000 Tirailleurs Sénégalais under his command, only 600 survived. However, as Chielens points out, in the nearby cemeteries of the Westhoek district of Belgium, in which these devastating clashes took place, ‘we barely find fourteen Senegalese graves from this period. It is highly unlikely that they were repatriated.’79 There is other evidence that when France did seek to recognize the service of its colonial soldiers, through memorials as opposed to individual graves, other considerations came into play. It is testimony to French good intentions that several monuments to the Tirailleurs Sénégalais and other colonial units were erected across the nation after the war, and most still survive despite the destruction of some by the Nazis. Yet, as historian Daniel Sherman has written, the French were concerned that ‘Too much recognition of colonial troops as a distinct category… risked raising uncomfortable questions about their subordinate status within the French empire.’80
The British record in this area has been examined by Michèle Barrett, who has sifted through the archives of the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC), as the CWGC was originally called. What Professor Barrett has uncovered is a disturbing tale of how, within years of its foundation, the IWGC and British colonial authorities allowed race to become a factor that determined not only how the dead were memorialized, but even which men were remembered and which forgotten. The founder of the IWGC, Fabian Ware, was determined that for those who had fallen in the war there was to ‘be no distinction made on account of military or civil rank, race or creed’, overturning the earlier practice of memorials only containing officers’ names.81 Officers and men were to be remembered together, with the same simple headstones and within the same cemeteries. Each British headstone was to be cut from the same Portland stone and engraved with the name and regiment of the fallen soldier, along with other simple details and dedications, and the wealthy were not to be permitted to build grand tombs or obelisks that might overshadow the graves of men of lesser wealth who had made the same sacrifice. Although these principles were, at the time, regarded as controversial, they were strictly adhered to for almost a century afterwards, across the hundreds of cemeteries that the modern CWGC cares for. Yet tragically, when it came to ‘race and creed’, the IWGC, influenced and pressured by British colonial authorities, did not always live up to its founding principles.
It was in Africa where the ideals of the Commission collided with prevailing racial attitudes, and where the differential treatment of the victims of the war on grounds of race became systemized and routine. In Africa, the general policy was that while the remains of white men killed in the war were to be sought out, exhumed and given proper burials and individual headstones, the remains of ‘natives’ were not to be searched for. Even where the location of war graves of identified individuals was known and recorded, the remains of those men were not to be transferred to official war cemeteries, nor were the African dead to be given individual headstones or have their field graves designated formally as war graves. When it was proposed that black African victims of the war should be exhumed and identified, these proposals were dismissed as excessive and ‘unnecessary’ on repeated occasions. It was in 1922 that the British governor of what was by then known as Tanganyika Territory – formerly German East Africa – wrote to officials at the IWGC, stating his opinion that it was ‘a waste of Public money’ to remember the dead of the Carrier Corps with individual graves, and who is recorded as not caring ‘to contemplate the statistics of the native African lives lost in trying to overcome the transportation difficulties’ of the East African campaign.82 The unavoidable implication of his view, that the existing Carrier Corps cemeteries should be ‘allowed to revert to nature’, was that the dead would eventually – and inevitably – become the missing.
The repeated refrain used by the colonial authorities, on whom the IWGC were dependent, was that things could only be done insofar
as ‘local circumstances permit’. There were two general justifications offered as to why black Africans were undeserving of individual headstones or even of their names being recorded on war memorials. The first was that as ‘pagans’, Africans did not understand the significance of graves and would therefore not be able to appreciate them. The second was that Africans were not ‘sufficiently civilized to justify the inclusion of their names’ on graves or memorials.83 One other reason also emerged in the correspondence with the IWGC: cost. While it was deemed to be worth expending large sums disinterring the remains of white soldiers, British colonial administrators baulked at the lesser costs of engraving African names into war memorials.
Among the many documents unearthed by Professor Barrett, perhaps the most revealing is the correspondence between Sir Hugh Clifford, the British Governor of Nigeria, and Arthur Browne – Principal Assistant Secretary of the IWGC. In 1923 Browne wrote:
According to our records there are in Nigeria some 37 graves of European and 292 of native soldiers. It is proposed that the graves of European officers and men should be treated on the usual lines as far as local conditions permit. As regards natives, conditions are somewhat different. In Kenya, Tanganyikaland etc. African natives are not being individually commemorated by headstones on their graves, chiefly owing to the fact that no proper records were kept of their places of burial but also because it was realized that the stage of civilization reached by most of the East African tribes was not such as would enable them to appreciate commemoration in this manner. It has therefore been decided to commemorate the native troops and followers in East Africa by central memorials of a general kind with suitable inscriptions.84
As Browne informs the governor, the locations of the graves of the men of the Nigeria Regiment were known to the colonial authorities, and therefore the process of providing them with individual headstones would have been relatively straightforward. The decision from Sir Hugh Clifford in Lagos was that the graves were to be abandoned because ‘the erection of individual memorials to African soldiers is unnecessary’, and a memorial would suffice.
The previous year, H. Milner, a Clerk of Works at the IWGC, had drafted a report on his work in Kenya, disinterring the remains of men who had died fighting the Germans at Salaita Hill. He wrote:
Amongst these remains were one skull with top set of false teeth, one skull with gold stoppings in 3 back teeth of lower jaw, and two skulls had each one gold tooth in the front of the upper jaws, 6 skulls had very low foreheads, apparently of a different race from the remainder but quite unlike African Native skulls. I feel sure that at least 14 of these remains are those of European soldiers.85
From these rough skull measurements – a macabre echo of the craniological measurements undertaken by German anthropologists on their PoWs – Milner decided which races the men belonged to and thus which of them would receive individual graves and which should be interred in mass graves. When drawing the colour line, the British authorities categorized both Africans and Indians as ‘natives’ but coloured South Africans as white. Indians were accorded more respect, because they followed recognized religions. On occasion, the Christianity of an African soldier was enough to compensate for his status as a ‘native’ and to earn him a proper grave.
Across British Africa, the hardships and the sacrifices endured by Africans were to be remembered though collective memorials only, not in individual graves. One memorial used to stand in Lagos, not far from where Clifford had his residence. That memorial has now been removed. The most well-known of the First World War memorials in Africa are in the shape of monuments in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. The former ‘Askari Monument’ consists of a life-size statue of an African soldier, with rifle and bayonet pressed forward as if charging into a hail of gun fire. The dedication, cast in bronze on a plaque attached to the plinth, was written by Rudyard Kipling, who was employed by the IWGC as a literary adviser. It reads:
This is to the memory of the native African troops who fought: to the carriers who were the feet and hands of the army: and to all other men who served and died for their king and country in East Africa in the Great War, 1914–1918. If you fight for your country even if you die your sons will remember your name.
The same inscription appears on the monument on Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi. In both cases, Kipling’s eloquent words conceal an ugly truth. The monuments do not affirm an official intent to remember the African dead; they are, in reality, the opposite of that: a physical manifestation of the decision to remember Africans only as a mass of indistinguishable humanity rather than as individuals with names and families, hopes and ambitions.
If the individual black African troops and carriers of the First World War in Africa had no one to remember their names other than their sons and their families, it was because the official position, taken by the colonial authorities, and adhered to by the organization established for the purpose of remembering the dead, was to de-individualize Africans – to leave their names off memorials and, worst of all, to abandon known war graves thereby consigning men whose identities were known to the endless ranks of the ‘missing’. It is perhaps fitting that it was Kipling, the ‘poet of empire’ who characterized Africans as ‘Half-devil and Half-child’, who drafted the prose behind which the final great betrayal of the First World War was so neatly concealed.
On Christmas Day 1914, in that bizarre and never to be repeated truce on the Western Front, when German soldiers, singing carols, clambered out of their trenches to share schnapps and cigars with the enemy, they encountered from the British lines men from the Indian subcontinent.86 In the very first British offensive of the war in March 1915, at Neuve Chapelle, almost half of the attackers were Indians. At Ypres in April 1915, North Africans were some of the first victims of poison gas; they were relieved by British troops, but also by Indian units and a Canadian army that contained Albert Mountain Horse, the Blood Indian from Alberta, whose brother Mike would later come to avenge Albert’s death. A million Africans carried and fought for the British in Africa, while hundreds of thousands more were subsumed into Lettow-Vorbeck’s deadly and futile war. One-hundred-and-forty-thousand Chinese men travelled across oceans and continents to France and Belgium, to dig trenches and repair the great lumbering tanks, and – although ostensibly working behind the lines – four-thousand of them never returned. These stories have been largely forgotten, along with so many others – the tragedy of the Mendi, the Battle of Tanga, the Ottoman sultan’s declaration of Jihad, the theories of Charles Mangin, the heroics of the 369th Infantry and Henry Johnson, the experiment of the Crescent Camp, and more. And while, in recent years, the ‘forgotten voices’ of ordinary Tommies speak louder than they once did, the voices (literally) of men such as Mal Singh, and the strange mirror-image lives of Mir Dast and Mir Mast, are only now re-emerging.
Over a century, the First World War has shrunk; it has contracted and diminished in our imagination, reduced too often to a tragic but monochrome European feud. The struggles in Africa, and in Mesopotamia – where three-quarters-of-a-million Indians served as soldiers and labourers – as well as the battles in Asia and on the Eastern Front have been pushed firmly to the margins. Bitter but narrow debates around the culpability of individual generals, the wisdom of certain tactics or the impact of new weapons have come to dominate discussions of the course of the war, and the powerful poetry of a tiny number of European officers has further narrowed the aperture through which the war has been seen. The sepoys of the Indian Corps get a mention here and there, and from time to time we are reminded of the presence of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais; but the thrilling, panoramic, kaleidoscopic span of the war has, like the Panthéon de la Guerre, been lost.
To seek to uncover the global nature of the First World War is not to dismiss the fact that the conflict was fought mainly in Europe, and mainly by white Europeans, of whom as many as 16 million died. But, by definition, ‘mainly’ is not the whole story, and beyond ‘mainly’ lie the experiences, the s
acrifices and the stories of 4 million non-European, non-white peoples, who have remained in the shadows for much too long.
*1 Closer to our own times, in the early 1990s the British journalist Jason Burke encountered a group of insurgents in occupied Baghdad. Their leader, Abu Mujahed, revealed that for them ‘Black American servicemen were a particular target,’ because, ‘to be occupied by Negroes is a particular humiliation.’ Indeed, Burke was told that ‘Sometimes we abort a mission because there are no Negroes that we could kill.’ See Jason Burke, On the Road to Kandahar: Travels Through Conflict in the Islamic World (2007), p. 239.
*2 Neither were the elderly spared. In one incident, Berry Washington, a 72-year-old African American, was lynched in Milan, Georgia, for shooting a white man who was part of a mob attempting to rape two young black girls.
*3 The contents of the ‘insulting note’ were never divulged.
*4 And for the white populations of Canada and Australia, the war had provided founding myths that were critical in the development of national identities that would lead, ultimately, to independence.
*5 In 2005, the Hamburg local authorities working with the Helmut Schmidt University and the Museum of Ethnology added plaques in Tanzania Park that offer an honest, balanced and commendable commentary on the activities of the German Schutztruppe in East Africa.
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