Alouis Adriaen’s farm was heavily shelled. Two shells landed on the stable and another fell on the house. The people inside were lucky. When the shell hit, they were all down in the cellar. All they had were a few scratches and bruises from bits of falling masonry. The animals were also lucky; by the time the stable was hit they had already run off in fright towards Hallebast. The negroes billeted at the farm were less fortunate. Four were killed and three were wounded.25
The men of the BWIR were ultimately permitted by the British Army to take part in active operations, but only outside Europe. In East Africa, for example, they participated alongside black Africans from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Nyasaland and elsewhere.
Although the army authorities were successful in preventing them from fighting on the Western Front, there were a small number of black men in British uniforms who did see action in France and Belgium. In 1914, an Act of Parliament had ostensibly made clear exactly what it meant to be ‘British’, in the eyes of the law. The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act was passed on 7 August 1914, three days after the outbreak of war, and it came into force on 1 January 1915. It defined ‘natural-born British subjects’ as ‘any person born within His Majesty’s dominions and allegiance’. In practice, however, officialdom took the position that to be British was to be white. Both the Army Council and the War Office, operating largely under military law, determined that black men, whether from within Britain itself or from the empire, were not to be permitted to serve in the regular British Army. Neither were they to be conscripted. The men from the Caribbean who had been drawn into the BWIR could easily be kept segregated from their white comrades – funnelled into labour-battalion work or deployed to other theatres. It was far more difficult for the army authorities to prevent men from Britain’s small black population from enlisting in the regular volunteer army. A tiny percentage of these men, most of them apparently mixed-race, did manage to cross the colour line. During the great recruiting surge of 1914, huge discretion was given to recruiting officers with regard to which men they could pass as fit for service. Age and height restrictions were both, at times, overlooked by recruiters who were just as caught up in the fevered patriotism of the moment as the eager volunteers who stood in front of them. That the recruiters were paid a fee for each man who enlisted may have also influenced the degree to which some were willing to bend rules or turn blind eyes. While there are reports of discrimination against black Britons by some recruiting officers, there were clearly other recruiters who were willing to look beyond race.
In December 1914, Walter Tull, the star midfield footballer who played professionally for Northampton Town Football Club (and before that Tottenham Hotspur), travelled down from Northampton and presented himself at a recruiting office in Holborn, in London. The son of a Barbadian carpenter and a British woman, Tull was unquestionably fit enough to do duty and was demonstrably intelligent. He was also willing to give up his fame and career to volunteer for active service, so he was accepted into the ‘Footballers’ Battalion’ of the Middlesex Regiment, a battalion made up of supporters and officials as well as players.26 After training, Tull served on the Western Front, rising to become a sergeant and surviving the Battle of the Somme. In May 1917, he won a commission, becoming second lieutenant. This was theoretically in contravention of the 1914 Manual of Military Law, which stipulated that ‘alien soldiers’ were prohibited from ‘exercising any actual command or power’. The HM Stationary Office publication Short Guide to Obtaining a Commission in the Special Reserve of Officers (1912) explained in more detail that all officer candidates ‘must be of pure European descent’.27 Yet by 1916, when Tull applied for officer training, the catastrophic level of losses the British Army had endured exposed the impracticality, if not the inequity, of these rules, and they were quietly relaxed. Service record, education, fitness and combat experience all, for the moment, took precedence over race, and black men were permitted to apply for temporary commissions ‘after serving with credit in the ranks of the Expeditionary Force’.28
Second Lieutenant Walter Tull was killed in action in late March 1918, near the village of Favreuil in the Pas-de-Calais, during the opening of the German Spring Offensive of that year. His remains are not among the 385 men buried in the Favreuil British War Cemetery, as his body was never recovered.
NOYELLES-SUR-MER, PICARDY, 2014. Near the estuary of the River Somme, on the edge of the village of Noyelles-sur-Mer, a long, straight dirt road runs through the centre of a broad field of tall maize. Flanking the road on the way into the village are two Chinese stone lions, gifts to the village (population 860) from the People’s Republic of China (population 1.35 billion). At the end of the dirt road, surrounded on all sides in summer by the billowing seas of maize, is one of the most incongruous sights on the whole of the former Western Front. The Chinese Cemetery at Noyelles-sur-Mer is entered through a grand Chinese-style archway, shaded by two tall evergreen trees. Within the low walls of the cemetery are the graves of 841 Chinese men – labourers who came to France and Belgium to work behind the lines of the First World War. On the day they ‘signed’ their contracts of employment in China, with an inky thumbprint, they were promised that they would ‘work on railways, roads, etc., and in factories, mines, dockyards, fields, forests etc.,’ and that they would not be ‘employed in military operations’. But nevertheless here they lie, victims of shells fired from distant guns, or of bombs dropped from the German aircraft that attacked their camps. Many more died of cholera or had their short lives snuffed out by the Spanish Flu epidemic that followed hard on the heels of the war itself.
The war cemetery is as well tended and as sombre as any of the hundreds in France and Belgium. Each headstone is engraved with the name of the fallen man and the serial number he was allotted upon signing on with the Chinese Labour Corps. In some cases, the name is unknown and the victim is commemorated only by the serial number, retrieved from the metal identification bracelet that each man wore, attached around his wrist with metal rivets. Each headstone bears one of four proverbs, in both Chinese characters and English letters, which have been cut into the standard Portland limestone as used for all British war graves. They read: ‘Faithful unto Death’, ‘A noble duty bravely done’, ‘Though Dead He Still Liveth’ and ‘ A Good Reputation Endures For Ever’.
Many of the dead in the small Chinese Cemetery of Noyelles-sur-Mer, which today is surrounded by farmers’ fields, were themselves farmers – poor peasants mainly from Shandong province, on China’s north-east coast. They were for the most part young men, some of them very young, and they came to Europe in the hope of making some money and seeing something of the world. In many cases they had little to keep them at home. As with so many who came to Europe from afar, the conflict offered a way out of grinding poverty. War work was potentially the key to a better life, or at least a temporary means of supporting children, parents or both. What is unique about the men from China, though, is that they were not from one of the warring nations or its empire; China did not declare war against the Central Powers until August 1917, long after most of the 140,000 labourers had signed up. The men whose remains lie at Noyelles-sur-Mer, and the thousands more who survived and returned to China, were economic migrants. Of all the many peoples who ventured to the Western Front, the Chinese are among the most forgotten. Almost from the moment the gunfire stopped, their part in the story of the war was airbrushed out, and their presence in France and Belgium – which continued into 1919 and 1920 on the orders of the military authorities – was almost instantly resented.
In 1914 Republican China was a nation only three years old – a revolutionary state, emerging from the ruins of recent turmoil and the traditions of a civilization that stretched back five millennia. The country was ‘semi-colonized’, having over the years submitted to twenty-seven foreign territorial concessions – one-sided trading deals, which opened up China to the trade and industries of the European powers and America, for little in return. China had been
further weakened by the ‘Boxer Indemnities’ – enormous sums that flowed out of China and into the treasuries of seven European nations and the United States, the countries that had dispatched a joint military force to suppress the nationalist Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century. China’s ruling elites were desperate to modernize the nation and they aimed to do so, in part, through a process of internationalization. By playing some role in the war, China, they hoped, would demonstrate to the great powers of Europe that it was a modern, or at least modernizing, nation, and one worthy of being treated more as a partner. The leading Chinese thus came to regard the outbreak of war in Europe as an opportunity, a chance for China to win a place within what we would today call the ‘international community’ and, perhaps, take back some of the powers and territories wrested from its control by the foreign concessions.
Among those concessions was Tsingtao in Shandong, territory that in 1898 China had been forced to lease to Germany on unfavourable terms for ninety-nine years. Tsingtao had become the base for the East Asian Squadron of the German navy, which was an important strategic asset and a danger to British naval and merchant shipping in the event of war. In the first months of the war, the Chinese ruling elite, led on this matter by the brilliant and worldly diplomat Liang Shiyi, made two far-sighted calculations. First, they concluded that despite initial German successes it would be the Allied powers that would emerge from the war victorious. Second, they understood that the post-war world would be shaped at the following peace conference – whenever that might come. Only those nations with a seat around the conference table would be in a position to influence the future. Rightly fearful of rising and expansionist Japan, their rapidly modernizing neighbour across the East China Sea, the rulers of China sought a means by which their nation might secure a place at the peace conference and reverse the decline in their status. In August 1914 Liang Shiyi proposed to the representatives of Britain that China raise an army of 50,000 men, which would then be deployed to assist British forces in expelling the Germans from Tsingtao.29 This approach was rather brusquely rebuffed by the British, who felt it was not even worth consulting their French and Russian allies on the matter. China’s military assistance would not be required, even for operations conducted on Chinese territory. In 1914, China was a military nonentity and financially almost a failed state. Rather, it was to modernized, dynamic Japan – the nation and growing maritime power that had defeated the Russians a decade earlier in the Russo-Japanese War – that the British looked for assistance in East Asia. Honouring its existing pre-war alliance with London, Tokyo declared war on Germany (and later in August, on Austria-Hungary too) and agreed to assist the British in removing the Germans from Tsingtao – but only on the condition that Japan be permitted to take control of the region, and thereby increase its power and influence in China. On 7 November 1914, the German garrison at Tsingtao surrendered to the joint Japanese, British and Indian force that had besieged their base.
In early 1915, the Chinese, still seeking a way to join the ranks of the Allied powers, changed tack and offered to place a Chinese army and a contingent of Chinese labourers under British control, for deployment in Europe. Once again, China’s offers of assistance were rebuffed. China’s next offer, made in June 1915, was to send to Europe an army of just labourers, men who would fight for China’s future interests with spades rather than rifles. Their presence would at least remind the Allied powers of China’s place in the world and give a future Chinese delegation some claim to a role in the war at peace talks. This offer of ‘Labourers as Soldiers’ was taken up by the French, with the first contingent of Chinese leaving China in July 1916 and landing in Marseilles in late August.
The British were still resisting Chinese overtures, partly in response to complaints of the British trades unions, which feared that the arrival of cheap Chinese labour would lower wages in Britain. But British indifference to the Chinese offers ended abruptly in July 1916, as a result of the sobering statistics generated by the British and French Somme Offensive, launched that month. By the conclusion of the battle in November 1916, British and imperial forces had suffered over 400,000 casualties, almost a quarter of whom had been killed or were listed as missing. The catastrophic scale of the losses shook British confidence. Kitchener’s volunteer army had been decimated, though he was not alive to see it.* The new Secretary of State for War, Lloyd George, was overheard saying: ‘We are going to lose this war.’30 After just the first four disastrous weeks on the Somme, the British were faced with not only enormous casualties but also a severe labour shortage. General Haig estimated that the army was in immediate need of 21,000 labourers. On 28 July, the British Army Council finally accepted China’s offer of labourers, and recruitment began.
Once again, the same sort of eccentric, racialized thinking that had influenced attitudes towards the British Indian Corps came into play. Convinced that the Chinese population of Canton, near British-administered Hong Kong, were too small of stature and too used to a warm climate to endure conditions in northern France, recruitment was focused on the colder northern Chinese province of Shandong, where it was believed that the local people were both taller and sturdier. At the port of Wei-hai-Wei (modern Weihai) the British established a recruitment depot and an administrative station. It was to here that the agents of the private recruiting firm Forbes and Co. reported. With experience of contracting Chinese indentured labourers for work in the gold mines of South Africa, the agents of Forbes and Co. began to criss-cross the valleys and villages of Shandong, offering young men monthly wages, monthly remittances sent back to their family, a free uniform and a chance to travel. On recruitment, each would-be labourer was ordered to strip naked and was then examined by a doctor, who checked him for twenty-one separate, disqualifying medical conditions. If the candidate was approved, he was doused with disinfectant, had his head shaved and his thumb-prints taken by a British police officer, a contingent of which had been specially seconded from Scotland Yard. These records were to be used as a means of later identification. Then, the recruit’s serial number and name was stamped onto the metal identification bracelet that was fixed around the man’s wrist, to be removed only on his return to China.
The first contingent of the Chinese Labour Corps arrived in France in April 1917. They were administered as a unit of the British Army and were subject to British military law. The headquarters of the corps was in Noyelles-sur-Mer, which in 1917 was conveniently near the principal British Army base and depot at Etaples. It was at Noyelles that the main hospital for the Chinese Labour Corps was also established. The Chinese became specialists in digging trenches, and they were regarded as better and faster trench-diggers than white British workers. With the help of Chinese translators – educated students who accompanied the labourers to the war zones – they adapted to innumerable tasks and became among the most capable labourers available to the British. Captain A. McCormick, whose war memoir records his time with the Chinese Labour Corps, among other regiments, regarded them as men ‘capable of enduring great physical exertions’.31 Another British officer, who witnessed the industry and dynamism of the Chinese, concluded prophetically that ‘if China were united, if the Chinese had an idea or an ideal to work, or fight for, she could and probably will conquer the world in any sphere. It is an awe-inspiring thought that the riches and material and brains are now lying fallow in that great country.’32
By late 1917, the British Directorate of Labour had come to a similar conclusion in its assessment of the skills and capacities of the Chinese. In 1918, a document was issued entitled Notes on Chinese Labour to All British Officers Working with the Chinese Labour Corps. It reminded them that Chinese labourers were among the best workers in the world and men capable of skilled, even specialized, work. The army increasingly demanded ‘the intelligent distribution of labour’ and warned that ‘The Chinese are not ignorant. They have brains. Orders and counter orders and unintelligent distribution of labour… have a demoralising effect…
and induce them to regard our brains as inferior to their own.’33 The more effective deployment of the Chinese Labour Corps had begun piecemeal, as local commanders noted their capacities and began to catalogue the trade skills that some of the labourers possessed. The increasing technological nature of the war constantly ratcheted up the demand for skilled labour. The British therefore certified 4,725 Chinese labourers as being highly skilled.34 These skills were put to use by a wide array of army support and supply units. Company 147 of the Chinese Labour Corps worked in Douai, engaged in the highly specialized task of artillery maintenance. Others worked at the light-railway workshops, maintaining the narrow-gauge engines and rolling stock that transported shells and ammunition up to the front lines. The Motor Transport Central Workshop at Rouen had been assigned Chinese men to work as labourers, and by the start of 1918 they had effectively taken over the running of one truck repair shop, and were also working in the paint shop and the moulding bay of the attached motorcycle workshop. They had come as labourers but had evolved into mechanics.
Three companies of Chinese labourers were assigned to the Central Tank workshop at Erin. This was the great tank hospital, in which the new weapons were maintained, adapted and repaired. Linked to the front lines by rail, it was here that most tanks spent most of their time. After each engagement they were cleaned, stripped and repaired. It was at Erin that the Chinese truly amazed the British authorities. In the frantic build-up to the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917 – the first mass tank offensive in history – the Chinese Labour Corps worked frenetically. A total of 476 machines were prepared for the battle. In addition to maintaining and repairing the tanks, Chinese mechanics built 110 tank-towed sledges, which were used to carry equipment into battle. They also scoured the nearby Crécy Forest for brushwood, which they bound together with chains to create ‘fascines’, enormous one-ton bundles of wood that the tanks carried with them into attacks and used to in-fill trenches that were to be crossed. Chinese engineers even constructed tubular radiators for the tanks.
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