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Illustrations
Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
~
David Olusoga
An invitation from the publisher
Illustrations
1. Arthur Wardle’s 1915 recruitment poster, commissioned by Britain’s Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, plays on the sense of imperial brotherhood that was fostered on the outbreak of war to encourage the ‘young lions’ of the dominions to come to the aid of old lion’ of the British motherland.
2. The War Deeds of Mike Mountain Horse, created on calfskin, is a pictorial narrative of the war experiences of one Native Canadian, reflecting a tradition of the ‘story robe’. In twelve panels, it records his exploits from August 1917 to the Battle of Amiens in August 1918. (From the Collection of the Esplanade Museum, Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada.)
3. The racecourse at Marseilles (30 September 1914), transformed into a vast encampment for the Lahore Division of the Indian Corps, as photographed by Horace Grant. Their arrival brought new sights, sounds and even (4) the smells of new cuisine. As their commander Lieutenant General Sir James Willcocks (5) observed, ‘Asia had dropped into Europe.’
The smells of new cuisine
Lieutenant General Sir James Willcocks.
6. Jemadar Mir Dast, the Pathan soldier presented with the Victoria Cross in August 1915 for his heroic actions in the Second Battle of Ypres. He is photographed, during his recuperation, on the terrace of the Royal Pavilion Hospital, Brighton.
7. Convalescing men of the Indian Corps pose with staff in the cavernous space beneath the dome of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion (1915), after the building became a much-publicized military hospital.
8. Indian Corps men and officers of the 2/2nd Gurkhas, 9th Gurkhas and 6th Jats who have been mentioned in dispatches (1915). Even white officers sometimes donned turbans.
9. Members of the Indian Corps prepare to leave Europe in late 1915, their faces and uniforms more creased than those of the smart arrivals of late 1914.
10. Alhaji Grunshi of the Gold Coast Regiment, pictured with his medals in a grainy photograph of 1918. He is credited with firing the first shot of any British-commanded soldier in the war.
11 Askari and their German officers on parade at the colonial station in Ebolowa, German Cameroon.
12 Indian fatalities following the Battle of Tanga in German East Africa (November 1914), where poor British leadership and effective German machine guns combined to deadly effect.
13. General J.C. Smuts, the South African politician-soldier who led the multinational campaign to subdue German East Africa in 1915-16.
14. A few of the hundreds of thousands of carriers who toiled, and died, for both sides in the East African war. This group were serving Lettow-Vorbeck’s German and Askari forces.
15. A poster (1918) in aid of German colonial war funds idealizes Lettow-Vorbeck and his smartly uniformed Askari, though by this time his ragged forces were depleted and diseased.
16. The postwar myth of Lettow-Vorbeck and his loyal Askari was reinforced by his book Heia Safari! Germany’s War in East Africa (1920), written with Walter von Ruckteschell.
17. A poster for the ‘Day of the African Army and Colonial Troops’ (1917) celebrates France’s Tirailleurs Sénégalais, who are shown eager to rush into the fight alongside the white French poilus.
18. Albert Bettanier’s La Tache Noire (“The Black Stain), painted in 1887, was an exercise in artistic symbolism, dripping with revanchism for the loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871.
19. La Force Noire (1910), written by Charles Mangin, encapsulated the view that the martial manpower of France’s colonies could revitalize the French Army. It was a controversial proposal.
20. The uncompromising General Charles Mangin (1866-1925). His unswerving belief in throwing his African troops into the forefront of the battle - testament to both his confidence in their usefulness and his recklessness with their lives - earned him the nickname ‘the Butcher’.
21. Members of the 43rd Battalion of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, heroes of the recapture of Fort Douaumont in October 1916, pose with their banner.
22. Continuing the celebratory vein after the recapture of Douaumont, the cover of Le Rire Rouge (17 February 1917) depicted Mangin directing some stereotypically fierce-looking Tirailleurs accompanied by the slogan ‘Music of War - One Black is worth Two Bodies’.
23. Among the otherwise contrasting French and German propaganda about African troops were comparable portrayals that stressed primitiveness, whether in a presumed childlike simplicity (as in the 1915 French advertisement for the chocolate drink Banania)…
24. …or, more extreme, as ersatz fighters barely out of the jungle (in this image from the German satirical magazine Lustige Blätter).
25. Max von Oppenheim (centre, in suit) in a Bedouin tent in 1899. The German orientalist and archaeologist became - come the war - an eager proponent of Jihad.
26. Kaiser Wilhelm II greets the Sheikh ul-Islam, accompanied by Sultan Mehmed V (foreground) and Ottoman War Minister Enver Pasha, in 1917.
27. The Sherif of Medina preaches Jihad to a local throng in late 1914.
28. Ottoman infantry in the campaign to wrest the Suez Canal from British control pause for rest and a photograph (1915)
29. The Senussi, newly armed with German Mauser rifles, prepare to attack British Egypt from the west in late 1915.
30. Mir Mast (left of group) with other ex- Indian Corps Pathans of the German–Ottoman expedition to win over the Emir of Afghanistan. Their epic trek (31, next page) in 1915–16 took them through eastern Persia.
31. The trek through eastern Persia.
32. The luminaries of the Afghan expedition: (left to right, seated) Kasim Bey, Werner Otto von Hentig, Mahendra Pratap, Oskar Niedermayer and Maulawi Barakatullah sit awkwardly for the camera in Kabul.
33. This poster for the ‘Day of the African Army and Colonial Troops’ (1917) celebrates France’s North African fighters: Moroccan and Algerian infantry plunge forwards under the Tricouleur, and beside them ride the flamboyant Spahi light cavalry.
34. A propaganda postcard (1916) depicts the Halbmondlager’s mosque with an inset group of its Muslim PoWs.
35. An ornate page from the Lagerzeitung der Halbmondlagers Wünsdorf, the PoW’s camp’s newspaper, dated 5 March 1917.
36. A striking portrait of a wounded Tirailleur Sénégalais in German captivity conveys a distinct sense of fearful discomfort, whether as a reaction to his recent experiences or his current situation - or both.
37. A Gurkha PoW in the Halbmondlager speaks into the recording equipment as part of the wartime German academic project to record the diverse inmates’ voices and languages.
38. The Kaiser, with Carl Hagenbeck and assorted dignitaries, converses with some Ethiopian ‘exhibits’ at Hagenbeck’s zoo in Stellungen, Hamburg (1909). In some ways, the camps at Wünsdorf seemed to echo these people shows’.
39. Lines of mainly North African PoWs at Wünsdorf, the diversity of their origins and units suggested in the variety of clothing and uniform on display.
40. A rifleman, probably of the Tirailleurs Algériens, who were known as ‘Turcos’, waiting to board a French troop train (1914).
41. Fijian Labour Corps volunteers en route to the Western Front pause in front of a well-known redwood tree in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, having crossed the Pacific (1917).
42. Men of the South African Native Labour Corps queue to take a bath near Dannes, north of Etaples (March 1917). Their lives were some of the most circumscribed on the Western Front.
43. Members of the Chinese Labour Corps, near Etaples, interrupt their usual routines to mount entertainments - here including performers on stilts - for British and Asian onlookers (June 1918).
44. Riveters of the Chinese
Labour Corps carry out essential repairs at the British Tank Corps’ Central Workshop, in the latter part of the war.
45. Labourers from French Indochina prepare to do some digging.
46. King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) of Siam, on his throne of state (c. 1915). When he joined the war in 1917, he sent a select expeditionary force of specialists to the Western Front.
47. A recruitment poster (1915) for the recently founded British West Indies Regiment responds to the genuine enthusiasm for the war effort that emerged in the Caribbean islands.
48. In Charles Gustrine’s poster ‘True Sons of Freedom’ (1918), produced in Chicago, Abraham Lincoln looks approvingly upon ‘Colored Men’ carrying the fight to the Germans. But many white Americans, in the army and wider society, objected to more African Americans in uniform. In truth, the uniforms many of them fought in were French, while by 1918 the Germans had long abandoned the spiked helmet.
49. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) validated the Ku Klux Klan as defenders of American white supremacy.
50. A young African-American recruit in front of the Stars and Stripes, in a wartime postcard.
51. The great white chief Senator J.K. Vardaman (c. 1915), venomous opponent of African-American recruitment and apologist for lynching.
52. W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was, as editor of The Crisis and a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the most powerful advocates of African-American rights in the war era, including those of servicemen.
53. General John Pershing (1860–1948), commander of the American Expeditionary Force, pictured at his HQ at Chaumont (October 1918). His solution to the ‘problem’ of the African-American army divisions was to offer one (successfully) to the French and the other (unsuccessfully) to the British.
54. Sergeant Henry Johnson of the 369th US Infantry, recipient of the Croix de Guerre and the most celebrated African-American soldier of the war. He is pictured aboard ship, returning at war’s end.
55. Topping their US Army uniforms with French Adrian helmets, the 369th US Infantry - the ‘Harlem Hellfighters’ - served with the French Army, acquiring experience, respect and liberties that were unavailable to African Americans still under US command.
56. A still underweight Lettow-Vorbeck (centre) recuperates in genteel comfort in Dar es Salaam following his belated surrender.
57. One of Walter von Ruckteschell’s terracotta Askari reliefs (1938), which glorified Germany’s East African campaign in 1914-18 for the Nazi era. Once adorning the Lettow-Vorbeck Barracks, the reliefs now lie in a German park as half-noticed curiosities.
58. ‘Protest of German women against the coloured occupation on the Rhine’, declares Walter Riemer’s propaganda poster (1920). The Rhine runs red, perhaps with blood.
59. Karl Goetz’s scabrous anti-occupation medal (1920) focuses its virulent racism on the supposed ‘Black Shame’ - the accusations of rape levelled at French African soldiers in the Rhineland.
60. War tourism. The US photojournalist Helen Johns Kirtland inspects the remains of a mine swept up on a beach, probably on the Belgian shoreline. Her curiosity was professional, but many women visited the old battle zones to see where their loved ones had perished.
61. Civilians pick their way, after the war, through the obliterated French town of Lens. In the absence of war, the former battle zones became sometimes lawless places of uneasy cohabitation between returning civilians and lingering military personnel, such as the Chinese labourers.
62. Bandleader James Reese Europe (left, standing) and his jazz musicians of the Harlem Hellfighters return to New York (February 1919). They were feted on arrival; but demobbed African Americans faced renewed racism.
63. Gurkhas march up the Mall in London, as part of the Victory Parade on 19 July 1919. But not all contingents who had come to the empire’s aid were acknowledged, and not all of the dead were remembered.
Notes
Full bibliographical information is given for the first citation of works; authors’ or editors’ surnames are given for subsequent citations (with dates, if there is more than one work by the author/editor).
Chapter 1: ‘Weltkrieg’
1. Brigadier-General Sir James E. Edmonds and Captain G.C. Wynne, History of the Great War Based on Official Documents by Direction of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Military Operations. France and Belgium, 1915 [The Official History] (1927), p. 176
2. Daily Mail (26 April 1915)
3. Captain Paul Villiers, quoted in George H. Cassar, Hell in Flanders Fields: Canadians at the Second Battle of Ypres (2010), p. 108
4. Ibid., p. 107
5. Edmonds and Wynne, pp. 177–8
6. Anonymous, ‘The German Gas Attack at Ypres’, in Charles F. Horne (ed.), Records of the Great War III (1923)
7. Timothy C. Winegard, Indigenous People of the British Dominions in the First World War (2012), p. 112
8. James Dempsey, ‘Mountain Horse, Albert’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Vol. 14 (2003a); online (accessed 4 April 2014), at www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mountain_horse_albert_14E.html
9. Lieutenant Colonel J.W.B. Merewether and Sir Frederick Smith, The Indian Corps in France (1917), p. 304
10. Christian Koller, ‘The Recruitment of Colonial Troops in Africa and Asia and Their Deployment in Europe During the First World War’, in Immigrants & Minorities, Vol. 26, Nos 1/2 (March/July 2008), pp. 111–33
11. ‘British Prisoners in Germany’, Hansard (27 April 1915), Vol. 18, cc. 852–82
12. Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914–1918 (2011), p. 141
13. ‘British Prisoners in Germany’
14. Dempsey (2003a)
15. Mike Mountain Horse, My People the Bloods (1979), p. 140
16. L. James Dempsey, Blackfoot War Art: Pictographs of the Reservation Period, 1880–2000 (2007), p.168
17. L. James Dempsey, ‘A Warrior’s Robe’, in Alberta History, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Autumn 2003b), p. 18
18. Ibid.
19. Benjamin Disraeli, speech of 9 February 1871, in Parliamentary Debates, Series III, Vol. CCIV, pp. 81–22; quoted in William Flavelle Moneypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, new revised edition, Vol. 2, 1860-1881 (1929), pp. 473–4
20. A.G. Hopkins and Peter Cain British Imperialism 1688–2000 (2001), p. 389
21. Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850–1995, 3rd edition (1975), p. 239
22. Quoted in Edward Grierson, The Imperial Dream (1972), p. 13
23. Anniker Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (2005), p. 206
24. Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1, To Arms (2001), p. 694
25. Quoted in George Robb, British Culture and the First World War (2002), p. 13
26. Edwyn Bevan, Brothers All: The War and the Race Question (1914), p. 3
27. Ibid., p. 6
28. Ibid., pp. 7–8
29. ‘India and the War’ (letter to the editor), in The Times (14 September 1914)
30. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (1975), pp. 92–3
31. Correlli Barnett, Britain and Her Army: A Military, Political and Social History of the British Army 1509 –1970, p. 323
32. Quoted in Ellis, p. 103
33. Barnett, p. 324
34. H.G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), pp. 202–3
35. Jeremy Black, Introduction to Global Military History: 1775 to the Present Day (2013), p. 103
36. Ellis, p. 16
37. Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, translated by Sorcha O’Haren (2010), p. 2
38. Robb, p. 6
39. D.H. Parry, With Haig on the Somme (1917), p. 223
40. Sven Hedin, With the German Armies in the West translated by H.G. de Walterstorff (1915), p. 163
41. David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War
and the Twentieth Century (2013), p. xv
42. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1977), p. 158
43. Santanu Das, ‘Introduction’ in his (ed.) Race, Empire and First World War Writing (2011), p. 4
Chapter 2: ‘Across the Black Waters’
1. Merewether and Smith, p. 16
2. Massia Bibikoff, Our Indians at Marseilles (1915), p. 12
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