The war which we are witnessing marks an epoch, not only in the history of England or of Europe, but in the history of mankind. If there were any spectator who, through the unnumbered ages, had followed the course of the creature called Man upon this planet, he would… never have seen a war which engaged so large a part of the men upon earth, which affected, directly or indirectly, the whole world, as this war does.26
For a pamphlet written so early in the war, before America had entered the fray, Bevan’s work was insightful. With the Indian Corps fighting in France alongside French troops from North Africa and West Africa, with British forces fighting side-by-side with the army of Japan in China, and with black British soldiers on the march against the Germans in Africa itself, Bevan reflected on the meaning of this new phenomenon:
…we find brown men and yellow men and black men joined with ourselves in one colossal struggle, pumping out their treasure, pouring out their blood, for the common cause — Japanese and English and Russians carrying on war as allies on the shores of the Pacific, Hindus and Mohammedans from India coming to fight in European armies on the old historic battlefields of Europe, side by side with Mohammedans from Algiers and black men from Senegal. We had often spoken of the wonderful drawing together of the world in our days, but we never knew that it was to be represented in such strange and splendid and terrible bodily guise.27
While there was nothing particularly controversial in this, Bevan also attempted to explain why so many men, from so many nations and races, had taken up arms or grasped the labourers’ spade in the war effort. He genuinely believed that:
What gives the moment its significance is that the presence of these Indian troops does not represent solely the purpose of England. It represents in some degree the will of India… We may speak truly of co-operation in the case of India, as in the case of Japan. It is the promptitude, the eagerness and the unanimity of this voluntary adherence which has seemed to England almost too good to be true.28
…which of course it was. For Japan was fighting to build up its leverage in East Asia and to establish its place among the ranks of the great powers. The men of the Indian Corps fought because they were highly professional soldiers who obeyed orders. Their attitude was lauded by an Indian middle-class and an aristocratic elite, both of whom hoped that the loyalty and the blood of the sepoys would buy influence and gratitude later on.
In truth, the deployment of Asians and Africans to the battlefields of Europe in 1914, and their mobilization and recruitment for service elsewhere, was loaded with problems. It was a phenomenon that challenged the central tenets of colonial theory and went against powerful taboos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the war in Europe, black and brown men were ordered to fight and kill white men. All the colonial powers worried that once armed and once shown that the myth of white supremacy was just that, soldiers from Africa and Asia would prove the greatest threat to the long-term futures of their empires. There were those in Britain who were appalled by the sight of Indian troops in British uniforms, fighting in a European war against a European enemy. Lord Stamfordham and Sir Valentine Chirol, the celebrated pro-imperial journalists of The Times, were both concerned by the equal treatment of Indian troops, and they feared what one writer to the newspaper called ‘the passionate love of battle which is now stirring in the hearts of the warlike races of Hindustan’.29
The challenge facing the British and French in deploying their imperial manpower was that in doing so they might find they had won the war but, in the process, rendered their empires ungovernable in the future. How might they put the genie back in the bottle? Both countries were to prove extremely adept at doing just that, though they started the war unsure of how far India and the African colonies could be pushed – both in terms of recruitment and wartime taxation – before serious opposition emerged. The French showed themselves willing to push their African colonies into open rebellion if it gave them more men with which to fight the Germans. Colonial uprisings could be dealt with later if they could not be avoided completely. The image of the First World War as the graveyard of empires is only half the story. Defeat, bankruptcy and revolution destroyed the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the ancient Ottoman Empire. But the victorious imperial powers – despite localized rebellions and the rise of nationalist sentiment in some colonies – ended the war with their empires intact and the subject peoples maintained in positions of inequality and subordination. Not only this, the British and French empires in 1919 became larger than they had ever been. Both were bloated, having feasted upon the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, and engorged, after having absorbed Germany’s former colonies in Africa. Although some of their new colonies were disguised as League of Nations ‘mandates’, this was little more than a ruse to keep the Americans happy. No ‘wind of change’ blew across Africa (or Asia) in 1919. The peoples of the British Empire did not become ‘Brothers All’, as Bevan had quaintly dreamed.
Nevertheless, more than any preceding event the First World War did expose the complexities and hypocrisies that surrounded race and colonialism in the early twentieth century. There were huge differences in the behaviour of the Allied nations towards non-white peoples, and war itself changed those attitudes further. Different races were treated differently, at different times, and in different theatres of war. The French put Algerian, Moroccan and West African troops into the trenches from 1914 onwards, whereas the British recruited thousands of Africans but never permitted them to fight in Europe. Black British troops from the West Indies were sent to the Western Front, but only allowed to labour behind the lines. (Yet a handful of black men, from Britain’s own small black community – among them Northampton Town FC’s star forward Walter Tull – slipped through the military colour bar and fought with distinction.) The British organized the Maoris of New Zealand into a Pioneer Corps, who fought in the Middle East, while Aboriginal men from Australia were reduced to labourers. White South Africans fought in the front line, while black South Africans could only hold the status of labourers. The Americans only allowed a handful of their black regiments to enter combat, and half of them were placed under the command of French officers rather than white Americans. This led the US Army to issue a secret order that asked French officers to treat the African-American soldier as ‘an inferior being’ to avoid offending white American sensibilities. The French quietly refused for fear of offending their African troops. In the war in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Palestine, Muslim Indians were allowed to fight the Turks, while Muslim Egyptians were tasked with digging trenches and driving camel trains. The official reasoning behind this overall jumble of illogic and prejudice was complicated in the extreme, and shaped by local concerns, colonial practice and the vagaries of war.
To an enormous number of people, the First World War arrived suddenly, out of a clear summer sky and following a crisis seemingly too small and insignificant to have generated such epic consequences. The war euphoria that erupted across Europe during the first days of August 1914 was so convulsive as to have almost obscured the briefer moment of shock that preceded it. Since Prussia’s defeat of France in 1871, most of Europe had been free of war. The British had to look back to Waterloo in 1815 to their previous entanglement on the continent (unless one counts Crimea in the 1850s). However, throughout that near half-century of peace on the continent, Europe’s armies had been involved in another kind of warfare – the series of wars, invasions, expeditions and punitive raids in their colonies. Those colonies – pre-industrial societies in Africa and Asia – had provided the testing grounds for new weapons and new tactics. Indeed, some of the new weapons had become virtually synonymous with colonial wars. It seems difficult to understand why the lessons of these ‘small wars’ were not applied to military thinking and planning in 1914; but they were not to any meaningful extent.
Advances in artillery had been enormous, but such heavy and cumbersome weapons had not been suitable, or necessary, in the small
wars of empire, so their fearsome evolution had remained largely concealed from the great mass of the population. But it was the Maxim heavy machine gun, more than any other weapon, that had transformed warfare in ways whose lessons were not absorbed.30 There were soldiers in the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 who took the Maxim gun with them to war, and who had themselves used the devastating weapon against tribal peoples in the colonies. They at least knew the potential of the Maxims and their variants, yet their commanders seemed unable to comprehend that the ‘Devil’s Paintbrush’ – the ultimate tool of colonial domination – now ruled the battlefields of their own continent.
If there was one group for whom both the power of modern weapons, and the experience of multiracial armies, should have been apparent, it was the British and French generals, a high proportion of whom had built their careers fighting for empire. General, later Field Marshal, Sir Douglas Haig had fought against the Mahdists in Sudan, the Boers in South Africa and had campaigned in India. Earl Kitchener (of Khartoum) had commanded British forces in Sudan and also served in India. The career of Sir John French, who led the British Expeditionary Force of 1914, had taken him to Sudan, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Eritrea and South Africa. Horace Smith-Dorrien, who led British Imperial forces in the Second Battle of Ypres, had fought in the Anglo-Zulu War, under Kitchener against the Mahdists in Sudan, in the Second Anglo-Boer War, and in the campaign to tighten British control of the Tirah Valley on India’s North-West Frontier. On the French side, Joseph Joffre had fought in China and Tonkin (Vietnam), while Robert Nivelle had made his name in Tunisia, Algeria and China, during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. Philippe Pétain had served in Morocco, while Charles Mangin – the army’s great colonial expert – had served in Sudan, Mali, Senegal and across French North Africa.
While most of these men had had considerable experience of the power of industrial weapons, particularly fast-firing rifles and the variants of the Maxim machine gun, they struggled in 1914 to understand the extent to which such weapons had transformed warfare. At the Battle of Omdurman (1898), British rifles, field artillery and the mile-long range of the Maxim gun meant that none of the enemy – Sudanese Dervishes under the Mahdi’s successor – got within 800 yards of the British lines.31 It was for his role in this one-sided contest that Kitchener had been elevated to the peerage. Yet the centrality of machine guns to his triumph in Sudan was not something Kitchener was ever able to fully acknowledge. Nor was he capable of fully grasping that the devastation the Maxim gun had wrought upon Africans would befall all attackers, of whatever race or nationality, who attempted an assault over open ground against similarly equipped defenders. Omdurman did not lead Kitchener to use his new status as peer of the realm and hero of empire to call for radical rethinking of what the British still called ‘musketry’ in the years before 1914.
The Germans – often claimed to be ahead in this respect – were, at first, almost as prone as the British to see the machine gun as a colonial weapon that was of little relevance to a ‘real’ war in Europe. But in Germany lessons were sinking in. In 1908, a deputy in the Reichstag was pleased to report a noticeable change in attitudes. ‘A year ago,’ he informed the chamber, ‘people in military circles were not so conscious of the value of machine guns as they are today. Then there were many people, even in the German Army, who still regarded the machine guns as a weapon for use against Herero and “Hottentots”.’32*2
The small wars of empire made sense to Edwardian Britain, Third Republic France and Wilhelmine Germany – they seemed to represent the proper order of things. The modern weapons were in white hands, the enemies were black- and brown-skinned men of ‘lower races’, and the wars themselves were fought in the enemy’s homelands, all of them reassuringly distant from Europe’s shores. European casualties were generally light, the costs of campaigning modest (especially in the case of the parsimonious British), and the emerging narratives easy to convert into heroic adventure stories. These wars were in reality, as the historian Correlli Barnett has pointed out with reference to the British Army, not a picture of warfare as it really was but merely vivid examples of a very ‘specialized form’ of warfare, utterly divorced from that which would be fought ‘between great industrial powers’.33 Yet it was all the British public knew. Despite all the interconnectedness of the pre-1914 world, what took place in the imperial realm was widely regarded as being of marginal significance to any war in Europe. Europe was, conceptually speaking, not only a separate continent but a separate realm, its borders regarded by many as the frontier between the civilized world and the rest of humanity. It was believed – both consciously and subconsciously – that European conflicts belonged to another, distinct tradition, one with its own history that stretched back to Agincourt and Waterloo, for which wars against ‘savages’ could offer few lessons.
In a similar manner, before 1914 the manpower of the empires was deemed of only marginal importance by most. Armies raised in the colonies – or armies that might yet be raised there – were of little interest to most pre-war military planners, though there were some notable exceptions. In the British case, the War Office in London had only limited interactions with the Colonial Office, and the interests of the government in Delhi and the government in London were divergent when it came to the training, recruitment and equipping of Indian soldiers. The views of the few men among the French and the British ranks who foresaw a role for Indian and colonial troops in a European war were sidelined.
The First World War represented the breakdown of all these barriers. Weapons once dismissed, or falsely categorized, as tools of colonial conquest were demonstrated to have silently and universally transformed the balance of power between defender and attacker, favouring the former. The awesome capacity of the machine gun to kill thousands of men in hours, or even minutes, had been concealed by geographic distance and the racial difference of its first victims. But the fields of dead who lay scattered in 1914 were largely white men, Europe’s own, and no longer the ‘lesser’ peoples of Africa and Asia. Preconceptions that had sealed Europe off from the realities of its own destructiveness and latent barbarism suddenly gave way in the summer and autumn of 1914. For the French, British and Germans, the myth of the transformative power of the individual hero, along with notions of ‘spirit’, élan and ‘pluck’, collapsed under the weight of the 400 rounds that spewed from the heavy machine guns every minute, or were demolished by the effects of shells filled with shrapnel and high-explosive TNT and Melanite. That Africans, Indians and others were present in Europe in 1914 to witness the belated homecoming of the weapons and fallacies of the age of empire seems apposite – as well as tragic.
Yet even as it was happening, the generals still struggled to comprehend the sudden interconnectedness of these phenomena that had long been conceptualized as being separate. Despite Moltke’s premonitions of the war’s dimensions, the Germans were slow in 1914 to fully realize the potential significance of the manpower of the British and French empires, even when the first of those soldiers were on the battlefield facing German troops. All the armies were slow to accept that the fully automatic machine gun and barbed wire had rendered obsolete great swathes of military doctrine, especially the existing doctrine of the attack. While the French, for many reasons, had enormous difficulties coming to terms with the futility of frontal assaults, the British were particular resistant to increasing the number of machine guns per battalion. As late as the summer of 1915, Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War by 1914, was confronted by Sir Eric Geddes of the Ministry for Munitions over why so few orders had been placed for new machine guns. Despite constant reports from front-line officers calling for additional heavy machine guns, Kitchener remained adamant that the British Army would not require more than two per battalion and that the absolute maximum should be four per battalion; any more he regarded as ‘a luxury’ – to the disgust of the energetic Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George.*3 The minister went on to order over 100,000 new machine gu
ns for 1916. Yet it was Kitchener and not Lloyd George or Geddes who had seen thousands of men killed before his eyes by Maxim guns. Kitchener’s inability to recast the weapon, in his mind, as being central to the war in Europe was, under the circumstances, astonishing.
One who understood, clearly and early, the new age and the links between the current war and the bloody history of colonial conquest was not a soldier but a writer. H.G. Wells was a man as schooled in recent history as he was astute at projecting possible futures. In 1916 he published one of his best, most important, and most forgotten novels, Mr. Britling Sees It Through. In this quasi-autobiographical work, the eponymous hero is, like Wells himself, a celebrated writer. Cultivated, cosmopolitan and well-informed, Mr Britling watches as society around him is forced to confront ‘Prussian Militarism’. His international friendships are put under intolerable strain, and his little part of England changes under the effects of war. Surveying the first few months of the conflict, Mr Britling acknowledges that the horrors that have befallen the people of Britain, France and Belgium are little different to those inflicted upon colonial peoples in Africa and Asia, by those same imperial powers.
The World's War Page 4