…white solidarity literally blown from the muzzles of the guns. An explosion of internecine hatred burst forth more intense and general than any ever known before. Both sets of combatants proclaimed a duel to the death; both sides vowed [to drive] the enemy to something near annihilation… In their savage death-grapple neither side hesitated for an instant to grasp at any weapon, whatever the ultimate consequences to the race. The Allies poured into white Europe colored hordes of every pigment under the sun; the Teutonic Powers wielded Pan-Islam as a besom of wrath to sweep clean every white foothold in Hither Asia and North Africa; while far and wide over the Dark Continent black armies fought for their respective masters – and learned the hidden weakness of the white man’s power… The psychological effect of these colored auxiliaries in deepening the hatred of the white combatants was deplorable. Germany’s use of Turks raised among the Allies wrathful emotions reminiscent of the Crusades, while the havoc wrought in the Teutonic ranks by black Senegalese and yellow Gurkhas, together with Allied utterances like Lord Curzon’s wish to see Bengal lancers on the Unter den Linden and Gurkhas camping at Sans Souci, so maddened the German people that the very suggestion of white solidarity was jeeringly scoffed at as the most idiotic sentimentality.55
Stoddard and Grant were not lone voices, though others were less alarmist in their tone. Jan Smuts, the South African general, was telling guests at a Savoy Hotel dinner in his honour, in 1917, that ‘We have seen, what we had never known before, what enormously valuable military material lay in the Black Continent.’ He continued:
We were not aware of the great military value of the natives until this war. This war has been an eye-opener in many new directions. It will be a serious question for the statesmen of the Empire and Europe, whether they are going to allow a state of affairs like that to be possible, and to become a menace not only to Africa, but perhaps to Europe itself. I hope that one of the results of this war will be some arrangement or convention among the nations interested in Central Africa by which the military training of natives in that area will be prevented, as we have prevented it in South Africa. It can well be foreseen that armies may yet be trained there, which under proper leading might prove a danger to civilisation itself. I hope that will be borne in mind when the day for the settlement in Africa comes up for consideration.56
The rulers of the British Empire were awake to the dangers of a new post-war black consciousness; but there was a greater confidence in an ability to control the forces awoken by the war, added to which there was the perception that victory had proved the power of the British Empire’s unity. W.D. Downes of the Royal Sussex Regiment concluded his memoir With the Nigerians in German East Africa with the assessment that ‘This is the end – Armageddon has been fought and won – the British Empire has made good. It has proved once again in history that it is invincible and can never be broken into from the outside as long as it stands together.’57 His laudatory prose harked back to what might be called the ‘spirit of 1914’, that upsurge of pro-empire, pro-British sentiment felt across much – though by no means all – of the British Empire. Rather than ripping apart the fragile assemblage of colonies and dominions, the war had, in some ways, brought the empire together. The four years of struggle were seen by many as the British Empire’s finest hour. Among the white dominions and within India a new sense of common purpose was said to have emerged, lubricated in the cases of India and South Africa by the promise of post-war, sub-imperial annexations in Africa. Despite the institutionalized racism that had informed the British deployment of soldiers and labourers, and the large financial burdens placed on Britain’s colonial subjects, there was a feeling that war’s end was producing a new age in which cooperation and mutual belonging would be the touchstones of empire. Idealists appealed for the preservation in peacetime of a wartime sense of brotherhood. The most optimistic voices – who tended not to hail from the ranks of those who had actually served in the war – hoped that this new sentiment would be powerful enough to overcome, or at least counterbalance, racial and religious tension.*4 The 1919 edition of the Wonder Book of Empire, for children, reassured its young readers that:
Our Empire has been welded by blood and tears, by the courage and hopes of many generations, toiling and sacrificing for England’s glory. And although we have made serious mistakes, we have no cause on the whole to be ashamed of the way in which we have administered our heritage… We may all be sure that better times are in store for the peoples who have passed under the sway of the British Empire, which, whatever its faults, is founded upon the bed-rock principles of justice, humanity and freedom.58
If 1919 was to be the year zero of a new age in which Britain would make amends for ‘mistakes’ of the past, then the first step might well have been to thank, fully and open-heartedly, all the peoples of the empire for their efforts and to acknowledge their losses. Yet, concurrent with the emergence of a new culture of remembrance ran a parallel process of calculated amnesia. The process of forgetting was partly explained by the appalling magnitude of Britain’s own losses – over 750,000 men killed and over 1.5 million injured. But in the post-war years, within the culture of national mourning and in British popular imagination, the war became less global and less multiracial.
One of the first manifestations of this amnesia was the Victory Parade held on the morning of Saturday 19 July 1919 as the main event of the official programme of celebrations one month after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Colour photographs taken of the day show the flags of the Allied nations hanging from every building along the route. ‘Victory’ placards festooned public buildings, and across the broad streets of central London hung yet more flags. The Cenotaph, then a temporary structure of wood and plaster, had been designed for the event by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. Piles of flowers had already begun to accumulate at the base of the monument, and as the marching ranks of Allied troops passed, each unit saluted in memory of the dead, as did the Allied commanders Haig, Foch and Pershing, who were all present. Fifteen-thousand soldiers, sailors and airmen took part in the parade – so many that a special camp had to be set up in Kensington Gardens to accommodate them.
In her painting of that day, the Australian artist and suffragette Dora Meeson depicted the Indian contingent marching down Whitehall, passing Horse Guards and moving towards the Mall and Trafalgar Square. The sight of Indian troops marching through the imperial capital was a potent symbol of India’s importance; yet the more concrete, political changes that India’s middle class and political elite had hoped would be the reward for India’s sacrifices did not, for the most part, materialize. And other imperial subjects who had fought for the empire were not even accorded the symbolic recognition of a place in the parade. No troops from the West Indies were present, a final insult to the people of the British Caribbean who had been among the most supportive of the war effort in 1914. Some of those men had sold everything they owned to pay for passage to Britain in order to enlist in the army of the ‘mother country’, and more generally the impoverished population had poured money they could ill afford into financially supporting the war effort. By 1919 the people of the West Indies, including men like Norman Manley – who had served in the war, seen his brother killed and was later to become Chief Minister of Jamaica – had developed a less idealistic, more clear-eyed understanding of how the empire worked and what their place in it really was. The Nigerian Regiment, which had been sent to East Africa in 1916 to replace white South African troops, was likewise excluded; officials at the Colonial Office had concluded that it would be ‘impolitic to bring [to England] coloured detachments to participate in the peace processions’.59 The public reason given was cost and the lack of available shipping. A letter from Lagos to the newspaper West Africa read:
In your issue published the week after the Victory march in London, you asserted that Africans could not be in the march because there was no time to get them to England owing to lack of transport. You do not mean to say that Great
Britain could not afford to send out two men-of-war to bring them if they had been wanted?…They were fit to assist in breaking the aggression of Germany but they were not fit to be in the Victory march… We live and learn.60
Nigerians would long remember this slight and resent that, while their service had been celebrated in memoirs like those of Captain Downes, there remained no black officers in the West African regiments. It was also noticed that in the neighbouring French colonies there were black men who had risen through the French Officer Corps and even attained the rank of general. For British West Africans, these were signals that their imperial masters were unwilling to imagine the world anew.
Five days before London’s Victory Parade, another had been held in Paris. The British Empire was represented – by troops from Britain, New Zealand, Canada and Australia. There was a Serbian contingent, too. A phalanx of troops of the Siamese Expeditionary Force marched past with their nation’s new red, white and blue flag, and General Pershing led a large contingent of the American Expeditionary Force. Absent, though, from the US procession were any of the 42,000 African Americans who had served in combat or the multitudes who had worked as labourers. Even the 369th Infantry Regiment, despite having been longer in the line than any other US regiment – black or white – and despite suffering 1,300 casualties and winning the regimental Croix de Guerre, was excluded from the parade. The process of erasure had begun. There were other groups, though, that became subject to a still more complete form of amnesia.
The 140,000 Chinese men who laboured behind the Western Front were destined, ultimately, to become some of the most forgotten of all of the many participants in the First World War. The inward-looking path taken by China’s communist leaders after 1949, combined with growing indifference in European history to the non-military nature of the Chinese contribution, made it possible for the fact that they had ever set foot in the fields of Flanders to evaporate almost completely from memory. However, in 1919 the role of the Chinese remained a subject of current interest, debate and even controversy; with the war over, Chinese still remained in Europe in large numbers. Six months after the Armistice, the British still had 80,000 members of the Chinese Labour Corps at work on the former Western Front, while the French kept on 35,000. Even by the summer of 1919, the British still were employing the services of 50,000 Chinese and the French 25,000.
The Chinese were, in effect, part of the last great army of the war – the army tasked with dismantling and entombing the Western Front itself. That this great scar, which cut across the face of the continent, is today nearly invisible in places is in large part due to the work of the French Emergency Works Service and its British military equivalent: a force of Chinese labourers, military labour corps, civilian contractors and 200,000 German PoWs. Together, they filled in thousands of miles of forward trenches, communication trenches and reserve lines, many hundreds of which had originally been dug by the Chinese in earlier years. In Flanders, the old drainage systems that shed the water from fields into the rivers and tributaries had been shattered by four years of shelling. Now the old channels had to be exhumed and reconnected if the former battlefields were finally to drain. Tanks, too mangled to be repaired even by the skilled hands of the Chinese mechanics, were interred: huge holes were dug and the tanks were simply tipped into them. The work of clearing the battlefields of debris was as dangerous as it was arduous. Around 30 per cent of the approximately 1.5 billion shells fired on the front had failed to detonate, and they included poison-gas shells. Everywhere there were abandoned firearms, grenades and stockpiles of ammunition. It is not known how many Chinese labourers and others died in the clearance operations.
Another task that was allotted to the Chinese was the grim one of collecting the dead and gathering together the broken fragments of human beings that littered old battle zones – the areas the French classified as the ‘Zone Rouge’. Intact bodies, identifiable and unidentifiable, were interred in the rough, makeshift cemeteries of the post-war era – fields of simple wooden crosses, temporary and provisional. They were a far cry from the neatly tended war cemeteries that were established later.
In performing these roles, the Chinese became an almost spectral presence in this shattered landscape. Freed, in many cases, from the constant overseeing that had characterized their wartime service, they had greater autonomy than they had ever known. Some became unofficial tour-guides to the battlefields and cemeteries. In the months and years after the Armistice, thousands of civilians – but especially women – travelled to the former Western Front. Widows, mothers, sisters and fiancées came to see where their men had died. They visited graves and walked the battlefields they had read about in newspapers and letters over four years of war. Photographs taken in that period show family groups on their sombre pilgrimages, women in black widows’ garb, posing with Chinese men – who stand in the margins, almost cut out of the frame, but who sometimes have been ushered into the centre of the group, portrayed as one of the last curiosities of the war. The Chinese labourers supplemented their incomes by selling ‘trench art’ – decorated shell-casings of varying quality. The most accomplished of these pieces are stunning and poignant works of art. For a people whose story was destined to be largely forgotten, the act of literally stamping onto brass shell-casings, with hammer and punch, the characters of their language and the mythological creatures of their ancient culture gave physical form to their ephemeral presence.
One photograph shows a man of the Chinese Labour Corps posing for the camera amid the ruins of a graveyard; behind him, and the lines of shrapnel-pocked tombs and obelisks, stands a mound of broken bricks and dust. This image was, at some point after the war, made into a postcard, which allows us to identify the location as the Belgian town of Dikkebus, home to the diarist Pastor Achiel Van Walleghem. The rubble in the backdrop is the eviscerated remains of his parish church. Having plotted the ebb and flow of the war as it appeared to him and his community for four years, he was still in the area to witness the aftermath and to describe the discord and distrust that characterized the immediate post-war period.
At the end of hostilities, the former inhabitants of the war zones rushed back to their homes to reclaim property and salvage any belongings that might have survived the devastation. Some had buried money and valuables in their gardens in the early months of the conflict, and they now returned, spades and shovels in hand, to try and locate their hoards. It was as the civilian population took up residence and began the long process of piecing their lives back together that they encountered the thousands of Chinese labourers. To them, the Chinese were not a curiosity of war but a strange and increasingly unwelcome alien population in their midst. In 1919 the former front lines became a dangerous world of tension and violence.
On a freezing January day in 1919, Pastor Van Walleghem and a friend went for a walk through the ruins of Flanders, from Ypres to Dikkebus, ‘to look around the old war zone’. ‘Everywhere,’ Van Walleghem wrote, ‘we saw the same desolation.’ With his capacity for off-the-cuff, judgemental remarks (undimmed by four years of contact with non-Europeans), Van Walleghem condemned the Chinese he saw who:
…were busy breaking out all the window frames at Alouis Borry’s place, for wood to burn… It seems that they do nothing else other than demolish the few things that still remain standing, which they then set on fire. This gives them some kind of barbarian pleasure….61
In 1915, after the destruction of his church, Van Walleghem had been forced to move to a nearby village, but in May 1919, as he was pleased to note, he ‘returned to Dikkebus for good’. There he joined a struggling community of:
…about 200 people who were somehow managing to live there. Some of them had been able to make their houses or stables habitable. For the first few days they had to work hard to get out all the earth and wood, where they had been turned into shelters or storehouses during the war years. They were sometimes helped by the Chinese or by German prisoners of war.62
Three
months later, the flow of refugees returning to their former homes had increased and, despite the earlier assistance of the Chinese, attitudes towards them had noticeably changed.
By July some 350 people had returned. At first they found it hard going, knocking together bits of wood for shelter and levelling the fields. Some of them managed to plant or sow, but in most cases it was too late on in the year, so that the harvest didn’t promise much. What’s more, the region had been made unsafe by the presence of all different kinds of unsavoury people: the front scavengers and, above all, the Chinese.
Many of the Chinese had undoubtedly become scavengers to some extent. As British and French control over their day-to-day activities lessened, they scoured the land for wood, most likely to burn: still housed in wooden huts, damaged buildings or under canvas, they struggled to keep warm in the winter of 1919. Others simply made the most of their sudden freedom of movement and explored ruined villages, shifting through the ruins of abandoned homes for anything valuable. In scavenging for wood, the Chinese may well have appeared to the returning refugees to be, in their own small way, continuing the destruction of war. Being unable to communicate with one another, the Chinese and Flemish-speaking locals must have experienced a vast gulf, one widened by mutual suspicions and racial prejudice.
The scope for violence and disorder was just as cavernous. The former front lacked much in the way of a civic infrastructure. The withdrawal of Military Police, who had kept watch on the armies, had not been followed by the return of the civilian authorities. In the vacuum, there was without question a degree of lawlessness. Occupying a zone that was awash with abandoned firearms, some of the returnees armed themselves and believed that the Chinese had done likewise.63 Unsolved murders and other crimes were attributed to the work of the Tsjings – the pejorative Flemish term for the Chinese, which was itself a corruption of the English ‘Chinks’. There were some robberies and there may well have been more serious incidents involving the Chinese; nonetheless, these racial strangers provided an easy scapegoat. As the historian Dominiek Dendooven has noted, it seems very likely that ‘many of the Chinese horror stories were rumours’.64 That is not to say that the Chinese were not militant and agitated. Withheld wages, poor conditions, miserable working conditions and the refusal to allow them to return home led to simmering resentment. There were break-ins of civilian homes, stealing, strikes, and at Soissons, in Flanders, an incident that came close to a riot. By May 1919, Van Walleghem concluded that ‘the number of English officers was relatively few and they no longer had any control over the Chinamen’. In his account of the events surrounding the infamous murder of Belgian civilian Jules Bailleul, Pastor Van Walleghem reported that Chinese men ‘had escaped from their camps and roamed the countryside, armed with rifles and grenades that they easily found on the old battlefields’.65
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