Ultimately, it appears that some men of the Chinese Labour Corps either gave up waiting for a ship home or simply slipped away from the front and entered into French society. Even before the end of the war some had married French women. They, and others, went on to form the nucleus of the first Parisian Chinatown. In following this course, the Chinese were not alone. Members of the Russian Expeditionary Force, who feared returning home to a Russia in the midst of revolution and civil war, made a similar calculation. They stayed on and married French women. African Americans who had experienced in France a world free from racial laws now weighed up conditions in the segregated United States against the difficulties of forging a new life in France – and opted for the latter. Men from North Africa and French Indochina, and men from other European nations who had come to France to fight or labour, also stayed on. In a nation that had lost 1.3 million men, almost 5 per cent of the entire pre-war male population, they were needed.
By mid-September 1914, France had endured both the despair of near-defeat and the exultation of salvation. In the Battle of the Frontiers, the nation’s beloved armies had been decimated. For France, 22 August 1914 – less than three weeks into the four-year-long war – was the most costly day of the whole conflict. On that single day, 27,000 Frenchmen were killed, a death toll greater than that suffered by the British on the first day of Somme on 1 July 1916.66 But then had come the counter-attacks of the ‘Miracle of the Marne’. In the space of six weeks the nation had hovered between calamity and triumph.
It was in the days after victory on the Marne that the French artists Pierre Carrier-Belleuse and Auguste-Francois Gorguet began work on one of the most ambitious artistic projects in all of history. They decided to paint a great panorama of the Allied armies. They began their grand projet with no idea how long the war would last or how many nations would be drawn into it; they had no reason to be sure that France would be on the winning side when hostilities ceased, and no way of knowing whether their great painting would be unveiled amid victory celebrations in Paris or hauled back to Berlin as booty of war. Despite all these uncertainties, Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet, along with nineteen other artists, began work immediately, and on a vast scale. Their evolving project, the Panthéon de la Guerre was to become the largest painting every created – 45 feet high and 402 feet long – depicting 6,000 life-size heroes and victims of war.
As the American historian Mark Levitch has revealed in his study of the history of the Panthéon, Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet came to regard the project as their own ‘war work’, their contribution to France’s great national struggle. The painting contained two great symbolic arenas of action: a ‘Temple of Glory’ and a ‘Monument to the Dead’. In front of the Temple of Glory stood a winged statue of the goddess of Victory, and leading up to it was the magnificent ‘staircase of heroes’. Throughout the war, the powerful and the celebrated, old warriors and new heroes, came to Carrier-Belleuse’s studio at 31 Boulevard Berthier to sit for their place in the Panthéon. Those too busy or too important to make the journey were visited by the artists. President Raymond Poincaré was sketched in his office.67 When foreign politicians and dignitaries passed through Paris, the artists seized the opportunity to sketch them. As the project grew, it garnered semi-official backing and a purpose-built government-funded building to house the painting, displaying it as a cyclorama so that it would completely envelop the viewer. Situated beside the Hôtel des Invalides, it stood at the very heart of French military establishment, near the tomb of Napoleon and close to Place Denis Cochin where the statue of Charles Mangin would later be erected.
The Panthéon de la Guerre was completed in 1918, just three weeks before the Armistice was signed, and installed in its new gallery. It rapidly became a popular and critical sensation, seen by 8 million visitors.68 Yet the tortuous four-year task of completing the painting, and the bizarre future that lay ahead of it, became emblematic of the way in which the international nature of the First World War was lost to popular memory.
There were telling precedents for artists attempting to capture, in oil, the unpredictability of unfolding events. In the Paris of the 1790s, Jacques Louis David, the great painter of the French Revolution, had embarked upon his own epic. The Serment du jeu de paume (Tennis Court Oath) was intended to capture the moment in 1789 when the representatives of the people had gathered in an indoor tennis court to declare their determination to confront royal power. As the revolution began to devour its own children, David was asked to make changes, to erase the faces of men who had been present but had since fallen out of favour, and to insert the faces of emerging political figures who had not been present. The attempt to paint history as it evolved drove David to near-desperation. Ultimately, the painting was abandoned.
For Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet, as the war progressed, nations they had never imagined would enter the conflict became allies of France, and space had to be found for them within the Panthéon. There was never any question that the French – on whose soil the war was fought – would remain centre-stage, dominating the ‘staircase of heroes’; but as other nations threw increasing amounts of their men and more of their treasure into the struggle against Germany, pressure grew for their efforts and sacrifices to be recognized. Their heroes and statesmen earned the right to be added to the growing throng in the crowded canvas. Some nations were never able to make up the ground. Tiny Belgium, a combatant from the very start, was allotted more space than the later entrants Italy and Portugal.69
As the war grew in scale and became ever more global, so the painting expanded. The ‘staircase of heroes’ was widened to make way for new intakes of French men and women who had attained heroic status.70 The increasingly technological nature of the conflict created another dilemma. Over the four years of fighting, uniforms changed, and weapons were modified or replaced, all of which added to the pressure on the artists to adapt and update. Entirely new weapons, unimaginable in 1914, appeared on the battlefields. While the 75mm field gun – the stalwart with which the armies of France had begun the war – was awarded pride of place in front of the staircase of heroes, the French Renault and Schneider tanks, which had emerged in the later years, were conspicuously absent. To have found space for them would have taken up too much canvas and necessitated a cull among the ranks of the ‘heroes’.
While weighing up these competing demands, and caught in the midst of swirling historical events, the artists also had to contend with the issue of how to portray colonial soldiers and the non-European nations. From the start, a genuine effort was made to ensure that the painting did capture something of the global nature of the Allied war effort. The most visual and glamorous of the French colonial troops, the North African Goumiers, were depicted in their white robes and on their white Arabian horses, sweeping past a great stone obelisk. However, other colonial troops, along with men of other nations, were lost in the flow of events. The princes and maharajas of India appeared in the large British section, but there was to be no great phalanx of sepoys. Reflecting French support for the African-American regiments, two individuals were represented – they were later identified as those heroes of the 369th Infantry Regiment, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts. But a whole section of the Panthéon that depicted the contribution from Asia, including the French colonies in Indochina, was painted over in 1917 to make way for the Americans.71 Among those participants lost were the Chinese labourers.72 China remained represented within the Panthéon, but only in the form of a few of its political leaders and its now forgotten Republican flag, fluttering alongside those of the other Allies. The Siamese Expeditionary Force was similarly reduced to merely its dignitaries, rather than the pilots or surgeons who were the real stars of the Siamese contingent.73
In 1927 the Panthéon de la Guerre was sold and transported to the United States. There it went on display at New York’s Madison Square Garden, later being transferred to Chicago where it became one of the exhibits at the World’s Fair of 1933–4. By the 1930s,
interest in the Panthéon, like interest in the war itself, had waned. The once famous painting was put into storage and forgotten. In the 1950s it was eventually donated to the National World War One Museum in Kansas City, where it was cut up, re-worked and incorporated into the décor of the building. In its new form, the American section – a late addition to the original – became the centrepiece, with the European nations reduced to supporting parts. The vast majority of the by-now badly damaged painting – around 93 per cent of it – was simply discarded, and in that process still more of the colonial and non-European contingents were lost. The French North Africans, the Japanese, the British Indians all disappeared. For reasons that were to do with parochialism rather than being sinister and Machiavellian, the remarkably inclusive vision of Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet, like the grand multiracial armies themselves, was lost. In its final, reduced, manifestation, the Panthéon became more white, more American and less global. What is left of it in its final resting place is sadly dislocated, diminished in scope and scale, and bears little resemblance to the original.
THE OUTSKIRTS OF HAMBURG, 2014. By the gates of an abandoned army base at Jenfeld, in the Wandsbek district of Hamburg, stands a small, innocuous park. Six miles from the historic city centre, this is not a place that a casual visitor might stumble upon; it is sealed off behind iron railings and a gate that is perpetually locked. Shrouded under the branches of mature trees, and surrounded on two sides by the long back-gardens of neat suburban homes, this pleasant little clearing is known locally as ‘Tanzania Park’, and within it are monuments to Germany’s past so toxic as to warrant their quarantine.
Under the shade of a row of ash trees stand two large terracotta reliefs. Taller than a man and perhaps three metres across, they are memorials to the war in German East Africa. The relief furthest from the gate depicts four Askari being led by a white German officer. The Africans march in symmetrical unison, in profile, rifles slung over their shoulders. They are almost identical, in facial features as well as in arms and uniforms, interchangeable and de-individualized. Beneath their terracotta boots, in Gothic script, are the words ‘Deutsche-Ost-Afrika’ – a dedication to a colony that, at the time of the monument’s creation, had not existed for a quarter of a century. The other relief depicts the carriers of the East African war. Again, four Africans line up, this time led by an Askari. On the slender shoulders of one carrier is a box of ammunition; another carrier strains under the weight of a machine gun, with its broad barrel and folded tripod. In what is perhaps the only concession to realism here, the carriers march barefoot.
Metres away stands another memorial erected in the Nazi era: a brick obelisk, into which are set a series of glazed terracotta plaques listing the campaigns fought by the German Army in Africa during the First World War. The numbers of German soldiers recorded on the plaques as having perished in those campaigns are not greatly divergent from the best estimates of modern historians. The death toll given of the Askari and carriers is utterly fanciful. In this history, re-written in fired-terracotta, only 3,000 Askari and 4,730 carriers died in the four years of fighting in East Africa – as opposed to the third-of-a-million in recent estimates.74 The plaque commemorating events in German South West Africa best illustrates the gulf between fantasy and grim reality. Below the list of the German dead, and behind the severe hallmark of an Iron Cross, appears a depiction of the port town of Lüderitz and the long, rocky spit known as Shark Island. It was on this bleak promontory that the German Army, in 1905, established a death camp in which it exterminated 3,000 Africans during the war against the Nama and Herero peoples, in which Lettow-Vorbeck fought. High above the ceramic plaques, on a tall brick plinth, sits a Nazi eagle.
‘Tanzania Park’ is little visited, an inconvenient relic of an unquiet past when the rulers of Germany’s Third Reich commissioned memorials in honour of men who died for the African empire of the Second Reich. The Askari Reliefs were the work of Walter von Ruckteschell, a German officer and artist who had fought alongside Lettow-Vorbeck. His studio was not in Hamburg but in Dachau, the town on the outskirts of Munich that was captured from socialist revolutionaries in 1919 by a unit of the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps under the command of Franz Ritter von Epp, another veteran of the German genocide in South West Africa. In among his Freikorps ranks were Ernst Röhm, the founder of Hitler’s brown-shirted storm-troopers, and Oskar von Niedermayer, the former leader of the German Afghan mission, who, after his adventures in Asia, had embarked upon a scholarly life in Munich. The Freikorps unit that took over the streets of Hamburg in the post-war chaos was led by none other than Lettow-Vorbeck himself, the ‘Hindenburg of Africa’.75
By 1939, when the Askari Reliefs were sent to Hamburg, the town of Dachau was the site of a Nazi concentration camp. Once in Hamburg, Ruckteschell’s reliefs were installed not in their present discreet location, but on either side of the main entrance of the Jenfeld Barracks. The unveiling ceremony was timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Schutztruppe of German East Africa and German South West Africa. The barracks – one of the many facilities built by the Nazis as they re-armed and rebuilt the German Army – was renamed the Lettow-Vorbeck Barracks, and each block was dedicated to one of the military heroes of Germany’s colonial wars or its First World War struggles in Africa. The men who were housed in those blocks, and who were drilled on the huge parade ground around which they still stand, were trained and readied for another war, a conflict that many Germans hoped would see the return of the African colonies that had been wrested away by the hated Treaty of Versailles.
Only one of the ten figures depicted in the Askari Reliefs is a white German. Their purpose was to give solid form to a powerful post-1918 fantasy: the myth that the Askari and the carriers had fought for Germany during the First World War out of loyalty and even affection for their German overlords.*5 Ruckteschell knew better. He had been witness to the routine brutality, coercion and plunder that had characterized the conflict. Yet the figures of the Askari and carriers that look out from his reliefs exude calm faithfulness. They are stern but committed. Their symmetry and lack of individualism suggests that they would be mere automatons, were it not for the guidance and leadership of their white officer, who alone stands still, his rifle rested on the ground as he surveys the scene with purposeful confidence. The Askari Reliefs and other forgotten relics, in Hamburg and elsewhere, are features of a post-war process through which Germany sought to make sense of its war in Africa, and to find within it a narrative that could substantiate German grievances and ambitions. It resulted in the confection of an alternative history, in which the mercenary Askari, and the carriers, were loyal and willing participants – a fantasy in which Lettow-Vorbeck’s self-mythologizing books, Heia Safari and My Reminiscences, also played a major part.
Tanzania Park and the Lettow-Vorbeck Barracks are today controversial, disputed reminders of a lost Germany and a lost German empire. Like Wünsdorf in Zossen, where the Crescent Camp once stood, the Lettow-Vorbeck Barracks are a place overburdened by the past. The whole space is contaminated by a history that is uncomfortable, and yet not unconformable enough to justify it being completely expunged. The terracotta Swastikas that once adorned the walls of the barrack buildings are conspicuous by their absence, excised by heavy chisel blows: everywhere, stern-faced eagles grip empty wreaths. Yet the relics of the Second Reich remain. Most controversial today is not the bust of Lettow-Vorbeck set into the walls of one of the barracks, nor that the whole complex is named after him, but rather that one block is named Trotha Haus and carries a bust of Lothar von Trotha, the general who ordered the genocide in South West Africa – a crime that, in the 1930s, remained Germany’s only genocide. There are plans to convert the barracks into smart flats for young German professionals. What to do about the names and the terracotta busts of Germany’s African ‘heroes’ is, at the time of writing, yet to be resolved.
In seeking to present an image of itself after 1919 as a just and
humane power, beloved by its colonial subjects and wronged at Versailles, Germany found a political reason to celebrate and memorialize the service of Lettow-Vorbeck’s black Africans – however inaccurately it was done (and even as Germans were deploring the presence of black Africans on their own soil). In post-war memoirs, novels and histories, Germans painted ‘their’ Africans sharply and clearly into the official history of the war. It is ironic that at the same moment Britain and the United States were engaged in the inverse process, of airbrushing the service and sacrifices of non-white people out of their national narratives of the war, whether in the histories or in the memorials. It happened in different ways, and to different degrees, and it was not always intentional; its effects were enormously varied and there were those who passionately opposed it. But it is clear from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century that it was largely effective.
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