The World's War

by David Olusoga

  The Germans in Belgium were shooting women frequently, not simply for grave spying but for trivial offences… Then came the battleship raid on Whitby and Scarborough, and the killing among other victims of a number of children on their way to school. This shocked Mr. Britling absurdly, much more than the Belgian crimes had done. They were English children. At home!… The drowning of a great number of people on a torpedoed ship full of refugees from Flanders filled his mind with pitiful imaginings for days. The Zeppelin raids, with their slow crescendo of blood-stained futility, began before the end of 1914… It was small consolation for Mr. Britling to reflect that English homes and women and children were, after all, undergoing only the same kind of experience that our ships have inflicted scores of times in the past upon innocent people in the villages of Africa and Polynesia…34

  In The War of the Worlds, published sixteen years earlier, Wells had compared the rout of humanity at the hands of the Martians to the near extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginals by British settlers and soldiers in the early nineteenth century. He clearly understood that as well as bringing to Europe the peoples of their empires, Britain and France and Germany were importing the barbarism that had been used to conquer their imperial subjects’ homelands and subjugate their forefathers.

  The machine gun proved to be one way in which technology interacted with empire to help make the conflict a world war. Sometimes the technologies of the war have been overlooked in their impact, as in the case of Marconi’s radio, which played a part in spreading the war to the colonies.35 It was the existence of German radio transmitters that made it necessary for the British and French to so-rapidly attack remote German colonial possessions in Africa – territories that might otherwise have been merely blockaded or pounded into submission from the sea at some later, more convenient, date. However, the bulk of the new technologies in the war had a much heavier, distinctly industrial imprint. The machine gun was exactly what it described, the literal fusion of the ‘machine’ and the ‘gun’, which translated into the mechanization of killing and the reduction of the craft of its soldier-operator to the repetitive labour of the factory worker.36 The heavy artillery that obliterated the forts of Belgium and the ‘Paris Gun’ that crashed shells down on the French capital in 1918 were the products of the great industries of the Ruhr. The name of Krupp, the renowned German armaments company, is as essential to any telling of the story of the First World War as the name of any general.

  The war was industrial in another sense, too. The weapons might have been high-tech, but many required vast amounts of manual labour. To move the guns, and feed them with shells, was a giant logistical and labour-intensive operation. Their emplacements had to be dug by hand and the dedicated railways that delivered their shells had to be built, maintained, operated and repeatedly moved and re-established elsewhere. The German artillery men who built the platforms using quick drying cement, from which the guns were to be fired, were as essential to their successful operation as the men who fired the shells. Each offensive launched on the Western and Eastern fronts required huge numbers of men to prepare the war materials needed if the attack were to have a chance of success. The lessons both sides took from their failed offensives of 1915 were that the attacks of 1916 would have to be bigger and better supplied than those attempted so far.

  Equally labour-intensive was the defensive war. At the heart of the First World War on both the Western and other fronts was the low-tech phenomenon of the trench, one of the emblems of the conflict. The machine gun and the rifle forced armies into siege warfare on a continental scale. General Haig in 1915 advised his government and his fellow commanders to think of the Western Front as ‘a fortress’ that could not easily be breached. The creation, extension, reinforcement and maintenance of such fortifications, and the construction of new lines and reserve trenches behind the front lines, required the skills of the engineer and the muscle of vast armies of soldiers and labourers. The unglamorous history of labour and labour migration is an essential, if often unwritten, aspect of the First World War, and here again those powers that could drew on the resources of their empires – and those of nations beyond.

  Perhaps the most useful precedents for understanding how the search for this labour necessarily globalized the war are not earlier conflicts – pre-industrial, semi-industrial or localized as they were – but the great engineering projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The French attempt to build an inter-oceanic canal across the Isthmus of Panama in the last years of the nineteenth century, and the successful American project to do the same in the first years of the twentieth, along with the construction of the Union Pacific Railway and various British railway projects in East Africa – all had required huge pools of cheap, non-white, migrant labour, which drew on the great reservoirs of poor men in the European empires and in states such as China and Japan, where there were large numbers of impoverished rural people. These were the men who answered the call for labour, seeing such projects as a chance to make some money and advance in life. The enthusiasm in the Caribbean, for example, at the outbreak of war in 1914 was inspired not only by a genuine sense of being part of the British Empire, but also by the rapid appreciation that the war offered men of the Caribbean, as soldiers or labourers, a route out of the stifling, atrophying unemployment that had blighted islands like Jamaica and Barbados ever since the completion of the Panama Canal, which drew heavily on Caribbean labour, had severed that life-line of employment and remittances. Put simply, the First World War now represented the greatest employment opportunity on earth. The Western Front itself was an epic engineering feat, greater than an inter-oceanic canal or a trans-continental railway. It required the movement of more earth, the laying of more railways, the building of more camps and depots, and the felling of more trees than any project known to date. Men from the colonies and beyond worked not just behind the lines, but in the factories and the ports too, in the enormous enterprise of manufacture and distribution that the war necessitated. And like all great labour-intensive projects of the age, the workforce was made up of poor men from everywhere and anywhere. The two fronts together, the Western and Eastern, were among the largest structures human beings have ever made, their temporary nature perhaps having obscured that fact.*4 The mobilization of colonial labour, alongside the mobilization of the women of Europe on the home fronts in munitions factories and much else, was the only viable means to keep such a war machine primed.

  If the movement of labour for the war effort was a wartime imperative, and for thousands of people an economic opportunity, it was also a vestigial, ironic, reflection of the global economic interconnectedness of the pre-1914 world, of the kind that had convinced many that a general war on a global scale was an impossibility. That optimistic assumption was, in retrospect, fanciful. Perhaps we can see that today better than contemporaries could. The pre-war world of 1914 was the age of world fairs, expositions and trade-missions – and those extravaganzas were merely the most exciting manifestations of an economic reality that we in the twenty-first century have largely forgotten. The pre-1914 world was one built upon a system of integrated global trade. Raw materials and finished goods pulsed around the world on arterial shipping lanes, through which sailed vast merchant fleets, armadas that dwarfed the world’s navies, even at the height of the Anglo-German arms race to build the largest number of the most powerful dreadnought-type battleships. Global trade brought about a global integration of capital, raw materials and industrial goods, and also of labour. The First World War was therefore not simply a human tragedy; it was also a catastrophic rupture, which ripped apart this interwoven global economy. So great was that rupture, and so deep the divisions that it left behind, that it was not until the 1970s that the world returned to the levels of international trade and economic integration that it had known in 1914.37 Today we fret about the positive or deleterious consequences of globalization, a seemingly recent phenomenon. But our modern age is best understood as the
second age of globalization, the first beginning sometime in the 1870s and coming to an abrupt and shuddering halt in the autumn and winter of 1914, as world trade turned to world war.

  The replacement of economic globalization with an unprecedentedly global war forced Europeans into closer contact with peoples of other races, and in new types of relationships; it forced them to confront and question what it was they meant by ‘race’ – a term which, as in the designation ‘British race’, seemed capable of loose applicability to almost any people who shared a culture, background, kinship or colour. Nationalism and its close cousin, ethnic nationalism – the idea that it was natural for every distinct people to occupy its own nation state – seeped into the bloodstream of Europe.

  Inherent within the process of defining or demonizing the enemy as some kind of alien ‘other’ was a process of defining one’s own national characteristics, and it was here that the fluid border between cultural characteristics and racial traits became even more vague, allowing it to be crossed on a daily basis by propagandists and writers of all hues. In Britain, the Germans were depicted in numerous propaganda campaigns as a people whose cultural progress had atrophied, leaving them culturally stuck somewhere in the fifth century when – or so British writers claimed – their Hunnic ancestors under Attila had brought down the Roman Empire. So the Germans were the ‘Huns’ (or even more dehumanized, in the singular ‘Hun’), a people whose debased Kultur had given the world not Goethe or Beethoven but rather militarism, or ‘Prussianism’ as some writers preferred to pointedly call it. Germans were by nature rude and crass, lacking in discretion and liable to behave in ways that were dishonourable. They transgressed every rule and had no truck with fair play or sportsmanship. They were also guttural of language and coarse of habit. In the boys’ adventure story With Haig on the Somme, written in 1917 by D.H. Parry, a German agent is uncovered when his deplorable table manners and gluttony are witnessed during a communal meal.38 In another wartime epic, the heroes come across an exquisite French château in which Germans have been billeted:

  Empty wine bottles lay beside a priceless marquetry table, whose top had been burned with cigar ends; and as the men scattered rapidly through the adjoining rooms, they found everywhere traces of German ‘kultur’ which the vandals had left behind them. Upstairs it was the same thing; hangings torn and slashed for the mere lust of destruction, smashed china, objectionable caricatures scrawled upon the walls, and upon the open grand piano in the salon a copy of the Hymn of Hate, with a half-smoked cigarette beside it. ‘The beasts!’ exclaimed young Wetherby, hot with indignation.39

  But if German-ness was innate, congenital, ordained by race, could the ‘Hun’ be reformed? Was the problem German Kultur or the German ‘race’ itself? The more forward-thinking propagandists of the Second World War could draw a distinction between the ideology of National Socialism and the culture of the German people.*5 In the First World War the racialization of the Germans had no equivalent counterbalance, and so the Kaiser and the Prussian military elite were not seen as a junta who were holding captive a cultured European people, but rather as an accurate reflection of the characters and inner drives of 67 million Germans. It was the ‘Huns’ who had sacked Rome and, so it was said, plunged the world into darkness, and now their supposed descendants were ready to repeat the same crime one-and-a-half millennia later. Britain, France and their allies were now all that stood between Europe and a second Dark Ages.

  Anti-German sentiment became ever more racialized, influencing the wartime attacks on the homes and property of Germans or suspected Germans living in Britain. But it did not stop there. There were occasions on which this flood of ethnic nationalism spilled over into attacks on any foreigners, and not specifically enemy nationals. As non-Europeans were few and conspicuous in a Britain with only a tiny black population, they were a clear and easy target. There was a chaotic feel to Britain’s wartime riots and attacks on foreigners, motivated as they were by ignorance, opportunism and a frenzy of rage. The country, especially the capital, became palpably more anti-Semitic, and any minority suspected of not doing its bit was treated with mistrust and even hostility. But there were contradictions aplenty. While black Britons, the Chinese, and the Russian Jewish communities all faced attacks by mobs, pride in the empire, and pride and relief that the non-white men of the empire were at arms in defence of the motherland, became to some extent a balancing force. While black Londoners could be attacked, black and brown soldiers from the colonies felt their treatment in Britain was warm and hospitable. This was not always the case, but it was often enough to be commented on in letters and memoirs.

  The propensity among the British to racialize the Germans and distrust racial foreigners went hand in hand with an increasingly racialized understanding of themselves. The war took place not just at the zenith of empire but near the high water mark of the race idea. It erupted at a moment when Social Darwinism exerted a powerful grip on high ideas and the popular imagination, from the lecture hall to the beer hall. Ideas of the degeneracy of races, their contamination by the polluting blood of other, lower races, were gaining ground. Social Darwinists in Britain worried that indolence, sloth and decadence had shaken off the harsh hand of nature and allowed the British to fall into the stupor of the lotus eater. The classically educated ruling classes feared that Berlin was Sparta to London’s Athens, the home of a people who were better fed, better disciplined and hardened by the constant preparation for war. Were the British working classes puny weaklings compared to the men of the Ruhr and the Rhine? Was Britain faced not just with an economic and military rival but by a fitter and more virile race? And might defeat not just roll back the frontiers of the British Empire but cast the British race into decline, as the stronger Teutons spread into new territories and multiplied? And what might that mean for the world and the ‘lower races’ if the paternal hand and wise council of the British race, supposedly a race of natural rulers and born colonists, were forced off the world stage? All of these neuroses spiralled around the Edwardian imagination. As the boundaries between race and nation became all the more fluid under the colossal pressures of the new phenomenon of ‘total war’, these potent fears and pre-occupations became the nightmares of Britain’s ruling elite and their colleagues in the white dominions.

  In the end, the political and military leaderships of Britain and France – if they were to mobilize the human resources of their empires – had to reach an accommodation between assumptions and ideas about race on the one hand, and the imperatives of war on the other. One response was the complex paraphernalia of ethnic distinctions that informed colonial recruitment – in the British case the ‘martial races’ theory, and in the French case the concept of les races guerrières. But in their actions they exacerbated the Germans’ own Darwinian fears. The German government and press feared that their enemies, by infusing their armies with the life strength of primitive but virile peoples, had loaded the Darwinian dice against Germany. German wartime propaganda tended to present the country as the victim of a racial betrayal by the Entente powers and stressed the imagined racial homogeneity of the German and Austrian armies against the racial and cultural diversity of their enemies. Sven Hedin, a pro-German Swedish explorer who wrote a propagandistic account of life behind the German lines in 1914, described a dying German soldier in a field hospital:

  Here is a reservist. What a tremendous figure of a man. What can Latins, Slavs, Celts, Japs, Negroes, Hindoos, Ghurkas, Turcos, and whatever they are called, do against such strapping giants of the true Germanic type? His features are superbly noble, and he seems pleased with his day’s work. He does not regret that he has offered his life for Germany’s just cause.40

  Such inflation of the racial prowess of the ‘Germanic type’ hints at a deep and early sense of insecurity and victimhood that many Germans felt, at their racial as well as their national isolation. The issue of race became, increasingly, an area of contestation and one of the conflict’s defining charac
teristics, as the Great War evolved inexorably into the World’s War.

  Empire, colonialism, race and multiple theatres of war were defining features of this war. Yet, bizarrely, the First World War has a unique characteristic that has – among other consequences – come to submerge the war’s multinational, multi-ethnic, multi­racial dimensions. The historical war has been overwhelmed by what the historian David Reynolds has called the ‘literary war’, a popular memory of the conflict formed from the collected fragments of prose and war poetry, which, over the course of the twentieth century, coalesced into a dominant but narrow image of the conflict.41 This process, by which history has been overshadowed by literature, has had many distorting effects, among which is that it has rendered invisible those aspects of the war that were inherently unappealing to the poets and prose-writers of the time. Features of the conflict to which they were little exposed, or in which they found no inspiration, along with elements that did not subsequently fit into the narrative that was built around their powerful words, were discarded or consigned to footnotes. The literary war focuses on lost generations, the follies of a callous establishment and the sheer pity of it all. It is a powerful and important condemnation of a conflict that cost millions of lives, but it is hardly a comprehensive exploration of the greatest war the world had ever known. Seventy million men were mobilized during the First World War. From that mass levy, there emerged only about 1,000 published memoirs, most of which are long out of print and forgotten beyond the world of academic history. Only a handful – Jünger, Blunden, Remarque, Graves – have become classics, textbooks known to students and casual readers and works through which the war has for a century been understood.42 The list of war poets whose words are remembered a hundred years later is similarly circumscribed.