*1 This was a standard device in the armoury of colonial powers. When Cetshwayo, King of the Zulus, had visited London in 1882, he had been taken on a tour of the Woolwich Arsenal and on a trip to see the ships of the Royal Navy off the south coast – a show of might, intended to cow into subservience an African king who had defeated a British army at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879.
*2 Before 1914, there had been a tendency among some German anthropologists to place their science at the service of Germany’s imperial project. See Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War, p. 8, and Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
*3 Doegen was indeed later to pioneer the use of voice records in the teaching of foreign languages.
Chapter 7
‘Babylon of races’
The Western Front – a global city
THE ENGLISH CHANNEL, 21 FEBRUARY 1917. In the early hours of the morning, two ships approach one another in the English Channel. It is still dark and patches of heavy fog have settled over the water. The SS Mendi, a British passenger steamer pressed into military service by the government, is heading for Le Havre, one of the ports into which the British are pouring men and materials bound for the Western Front. The ship bearing down on her in the winter darkness is not a German destroyer but another British vessel, the cargo ship SS Darro, heading to Falmouth; her holds are almost empty, apart from some meat that has spoiled in transit. At 11,000 tons the Darro is almost three times the size of the Mendi, and despite the heavy fog she is cruising at her maximum speed of thirteen knots. In contravention of regulations, her crew are not sounding the ship’s whistle at the required one-minute intervals. Blind to the danger, the Darro cuts through the black water in near silence.
It is the whistle of the Mendi that alerts the Fourth Officer and the lookouts on the Darro to the impending catastrophe. Moments later they catch sight of a green starboard navigation light emerging rapidly from the foggy darkness. Orders to put the engines into reverse are given, the siren is sounded and evasive action taken. But with the siren still wailing, the great bow of the Darro, towering over the Mendi, looms out of the fog and slices into the flank of smaller ship. The Darro strikes the Mendi almost at a right-angle, in the middle of her starboard side, cutting an enormous gash in her hull, an incision so deep that it almost cleaves her in half. With engines thrown into reverse, the Darro pulls away from the shattered Mendi, revealing a fatal wound. The impact has lacerated the ship from her deck to below the water-line; two of her watertight bulkheads are breached, and sea-water is flooding in. The Mendi is doomed.
The Mendi and the Darro are about twelve miles south of St Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight. There is no hope of any help coming from the shore. As the Mendi starts listing heavily to her starboard side, the order to lower lifeboats is given. But the radio operator is not at his post, so no SOS signal is sent. Inside the Mendi hundreds of men, almost all of whom had been asleep in the dark of the ship’s cabins, now begin to rush towards the exits to the deck and to the lifeboats. They fight past debris strewn across the lower decks by the impact and wade through the freezing water that is now surging everywhere and inching higher. Perhaps as many as 140 men never reach the upper deck; an unknown number have been killed in their beds by the initial impact.
The men on board the SS Mendi are not soldiers, not in the strict sense. They are a contingent of the South African Native Labour Corps, men from the various ethnic groups of the British dominion of South Africa – Swazi, Pondo, Zulu, Xhosa, Mfengu and others. They number 802, plus 22 white officers and NCOs. On board are also the eighty-nine members of the crew of the Mendi and fifty-six other military passengers. There are spaces in the lifeboats for a mere 289 men. As the South Africans gather on the deck, the operation to lower the lifeboats begins. Boats Number 1 and 3 are lowered into the water on the starboard side and, despite the difficulties of evacuating from a now heavily listing ship, they fill with their complement of men. Boat Number 2 is also lowered successfully into the water, but it capsizes, casting the men and crew into the water. Boat Number 5 launches, but panicking men on the deck of the Mendi begin to jump and clamber into it, and in the chaos that lifeboat capsizes too, throwing yet more men into the freezing sea. Lifeboat Number 4 suffers a similar fate. Lifeboat Number 6 is lowered but is caught by a wave and smashed to pieces against the side of the Mendi. The fate of lifeboat Number 7 is unknown.
The bulk of the remaining passengers of the Mendi are, at this moment, still on the deck. The ship lists more heavily, and then an explosion shakes it, signalling the beginning of her death throes. The order to ‘abandon ship’ is given, and the men are urged to throw themselves into the sea and swim away from the sinking steamer in order to escape the vortex that might drag them underwater. Only around a hundred men have made it into the lifeboats. Others jump into the sea and hang on to pieces of wreckage or float as best they can on rafts or using their life-vests for buoyancy.
Now, twenty-five minutes after the collision, which occurred at around 4.57am, the last traces of the Mendi slip beneath the water. Hundreds of men are in the icy water, clinging to rafts and wreckage. Some are fainting with exhaustion and cold, and then disappearing under the waves. Over the next two hours, 110 men from the Mendi lifeboats are brought aboard the Darro. Another 137 are plucked out of the sea by HMS Brisk, a Royal Navy destroyer that has been escorting the Mendi. The SS Sandsend, a ship that answers an SOS made by the crew of the Darro, rescues another 23 men. The total number of survivors is two-hundred-and-sixty-seven. Of the men of the South African Native Labour Corps, 618 meet their death; 9 of their white officers and 33 crewmen are also lost. The bodies of most will never be recovered.
As the Board of Trade’s Court of Inquiry later notes, the captain of the Darro, Henry Stump, chose not ‘to send away a boat or boats to ascertain the extent of damage to the Mendi, and to render her, her master, crew and passengers such assistance as was practicable and necessary’.
By the 1940s, the story of the loss of the Mendi had become a feature of black South African history and folklore, heavily mythologized in its retelling. The tragedy had acquired a symbolic meaning and become part of the long narrative of suffering, exclusion and exploitation that inspired and informed the freedom struggles of South Africa’s black majority. The 21 February became ‘Mendi Day’, on which services were held in memory of the dead, and the wider story of the South African Native Labour Corps was in this way remembered. The fate of the Mendi remains part of the tradition from which emerged black political and national consciousness, one tragedy in a long list that acted as milestones along the troubled road to the new South Africa.1 Today, the Order of the Mendi is the nation’s highest award for courage, bestowed only on those South Africans who have performed outstanding acts of bravery. In Europe, even in Britain in whose seas she was lost, the fate of the Mendi has been almost completely forgotten. The names of the men whose remains were never found are listed in the Hollybrook Cemetery in Southampton, and there has been some renewed interest in their story, but the loss of the Mendi, along with the wider story of the South African Native Labour Corps, has largely been obscured – overwhelmed, like so much else, by the dominant narratives of the ‘literary war’.
The Mendi had left Cape Town on 16 January 1917, its passengers – most from the Eastern Cape – bound for the most diverse and dangerous place on earth. France and Belgium in 1917 witnessed the greatest gathering of peoples and races in the history of the world. Perhaps only Ottoman Istanbul, at the very height of that empire’s global reach, could compare to the Western Front in the penultimate year of the First World War. This prodigious gathering of peoples was utterly new and nothing like it would be seen again until after the Second World War.
In the trenches, the armies of two vast inter-continental empires fought side by side. Men from almost every continent, different in their skin colours, were unified in either the khaki of the British Army or
the horizon-blue of the French Army. Behind the lines – within the militarized zones of encampments, billets, depots, rail-hubs, rest areas, estaminets (improvised canteens), official kitchens, brothels, hospitals, supply dumps, ports and stations – an even greater encounter of world peoples was taking place. In its mixture of races, religions, languages and nationalities, the French, British and – more recently – American sectors of the Western Front and their support networks were in many ways a foretaste of a multiracial Europe that would later emerge, after another global conflict. The spectacle of the world brought together in rural France fascinated the newspapers of the Allied nations and the neutral states alike. There are innumerable articles, photo-essays and illustrations of the ‘types’ of the various armies. Posters and collectable cards were produced for the young boys of Europe, to teach them to distinguish a sepoy from a tirailleur, an Indochinese Annamite from a Nepalese Gurkha. Although the poets and canonical memoirists of the war seemed little interested, journalists and diarists were eager to record this exotic and inherently transient moment of globalism. It was an event that – as many commentators noted – would be remembered by all those who witnessed it, whether they were residents of rural Belgium and France or the soldiers and labourers sent there.
For the local civilians, living amid a sudden kaleidoscope of peoples, races, languages, traditions and faiths, the experience was almost overwhelming. They encountered new peoples as temporary neighbours, as customers in their shops and restaurants, and as men billeted in their homes, sometimes living in intimate closeness with them. The responses to these encounters cover the full gamut of human behaviour. There were outbreaks of racial violence, murders and riots in various parts of France in the summer of 1917. There were also liaisons between colonial men and French and Belgian women that ended in marriage and mixed-race families. Indian soldiers reported being treated almost as sons by bereaved French ladies in whose homes they were billeted, while in hospitals doctors and nurses cared for men who, in normal circumstances, they would never have met.
Within the armies themselves, even before they had begun to meet the civilians of Europe or the men of other regiments, there were moments of unprecedented encounter. When the Gurkha regiments of the British Indian Corps marched through Bombay, in August 1914, on their way to the ships that would carry them to Marseilles, some residents concluded that the strange men from the mountains of Nepal must be elements of the Japanese Army rather than soldiers of their own Indian Army. Likewise, there were white Australians from the growing cities of that country’s south-east who had their first encounters with Aboriginal men in the camps and canteens of wartime France and Belgium. In the decisive year of 1918, African Americans from Harlem and the Deep South, rejected by their own white officers, found themselves serving in the French Army alongside West African Tirailleurs. For black Americans, men from a nation in which it was commonly believed that Africa was a continent of uneducated savages, their meetings with the Tirailleurs Sénégalais – the officers of which were often the well-to-do and well-educated sons of African chiefs – would have been a profound shock. In the same front lines, and under similar conditions, soldiers recruited by the French from the paddy-fields of Vietnam donned the blue uniform of the poilu or the overalls of the labour battalions only to find themselves serving alongside labourers from China. In Europe, the Asian soldiers and labourers seem to have at times forged a common bond and put aside historic conflicts and differences.
As men from all corners of the world were brought together on European soil, so too were their religious practices. During the four years of war, Muslim prayers were held in the fields of Flanders. In July 1917, 1,500 Indian soldiers observed the Eid prayers and afterwards sat down to share a celebratory meal with their Indian comrades of other faiths. Ramadan was observed in the trenches, and troops from the Punjab marked the Sikh festival of Vasiakhi. At the vast complex of barracks, hospitals and depots the British had built at Etaples, near the coast south of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Chinese labourers entertained British troops and their fellow countrymen in an open-air theatre. Beneath dragon-emblazoned banners, the Union Flag and the now almost forgotten multicoloured banner of pre-communist Republican China, men on stilts in traditional costumes performed for the crowds. Both Chinese New Year and the Dragon Festivals were celebrated in France and Belgium – and both were filmed and photographed. There were great public demonstrations of Asian martial arts and tai chi put on for the entertainment of the French troops. Traditional Chinese opera was performed with instruments specially brought over. British and French newspapers – desperate for some light relief – effused over the colonial troops and foreign labourers with their exotic handicrafts and cultures. They became one of the great spectacles of the war – but not one that was remembered long after 1918.
Equally forgotten is the fact that the diversity of the men and women who served and laboured in the First World War was not just racial in nature. Within the broad categories of ‘white’ and ‘European’ – even more nebulous in the early twentieth century than they are today – lay a great array of peoples and nationalities, all of whom were caught up in the war to some extent. The German Army, which we have come to imagine as one huge, grey homogenous military machine, was made up of various peoples, many of whom were, in 1914, unused to thinking of themselves as Germans – this despite an energetic propaganda effort that stressed the racial unity of the German Volk. There were 30,000 Danes in the German Army, men from the disputed region of Schleswig, seized by Germany in the 1860s. Many of the young Danes who fought for the Kaiser did so unwillingly. Over 2,000 of them refused to take up arms for a nation to which they felt no allegiance and fled north to neutral, welcoming Denmark. Five-thousand of those who did fight in German uniforms did not live to see the northern half of Schleswig reincorporated into Denmark after the war. Alongside the German Danes were the other minorities: Serbs, Lithuanians, Frenchmen from annexed Alsace and Lorraine, and 3 million Poles, who had clung on to their identity, language and Catholicism in the face of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf of the 1870s.2 When Luxembourg was occupied by the Germans in August 1914, the men of the Grand Duchy were likewise subject to conscription into the German Army, despite Luxembourg’s supposed independence. By contrast, almost 3,700 Luxembourgers, who were outside their homeland when the Germans marched in, volunteered to serve in the French Army. Even Germany itself in 1914 was a patchwork nation, consisting of twenty-five federal states, four kingdoms, five duchies, six grand-duchies, seven principalities, the cities of the old Hansa League and the annexed French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The German Reich was less than fifty years old and the extent to which each of its nationalities considered itself German varied enormously. The German Army was therefore, in essence, an army of minorities, some of them less enthusiastic than others about their young nation or the course it had followed under Prussian domination and the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Between 1914 and 1917 there was another complex and ethnically diverse war being fought on the other side of Europe. The Russian Army on the Eastern Front was also the product of a multi-ethnic empire of various peoples. Within the vast legions of the Tsar were ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Armenians, Muslims from the Caucasus and men of Mongol origin from the far east of the empire. There were over 100,000 Estonians in the Russian Army, along with an unknown number of men from Finland, then a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire. There were Poles in the Tsar’s army, as well as in that of the Kaiser and the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Russian Jews and ethnic Germans both served in the Russian Army, but both groups were distrusted and were the subject of crude propaganda attacks.3
In the snowy expanses of the Eastern Front the Russian armies confronted not just the Germans but the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, another multi-ethnic, polyglot state, ruled from Vienna, the city that Adolf Hitler was later to condemn as ‘that Babylon of races’.4 Fighting on two fronts, like their German allies, the army of Austria-Hung
ary was as heterogeneous as the empire from which it was drawn. Although three-quarters of the officers were German-speaking Austrians, of their men only around one-third were from a similar background. The rest were Magyars, Romanians, ethnic Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, Croats, Czechs, Serbs and Bosnians.
Russia, the great colossus and itself a continental empire, had no need for additional labour or manpower in its war effort. A little of Russia’s great ethnic diversity instead flowed in the opposite direction during the war. Calculating that Russia had an abundance of manpower but a lack of materials and munitions to arm them, the French suggested that Russian troops be sent to the Western Front in exchange for French munitions. In early 1916, ships carrying the men of the Russian Expeditionary Force were dispatched to France. The first contingent landed in Marseilles, in 1916, just three months after the last troops of the Indian Corps had left for Mesopotamia from the same harbours. The Russian troops were city men, factory workers from Moscow and Samara, and peasants from the Volga. Three brigades of Russians were also sent to the front in Salonika, to fight against German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian forces. The brigades deployed in France were, by early 1917, in the line near Reims, manning the Fort de la Pompelle, one of the many defensive forts built by France after the defeat of the 1870s, its architects never imagining that it would one day be defended by men from the Russian steppe. The Russian cemeteries on the Western Front are among the many little-visited and half-forgotten memorials to a global war. After the October Revolution, in 1917, one battalion of the Russian Expeditionary Force mutinied and was attacked in its camp by French forces and loyal Russians. The Russian troops who remained loyal to France formed the Russian Legion – a unit that was eventually incorporated into the 1st Moroccan Infantry Division, perhaps the most hybrid of all the divisions that fought in the war. This bizarre formation consisted of the Moroccan Tirailleurs, the Tirailleurs Malgaches (black Africans from Madagascar), the French Foreign Legion and the displaced Russians. At the end of the war, some of the Russian survivors chose not to return to their homeland and simply slipped into French society, along with thousands of other displaced former soldiers and labourers from across the world.
The World's War Page 31