Colonial Encounters in a Time of Global Conflict, 1914–1918

Santanu Das, Anna Maguire, Daniel Steinbach, Santanu Das, Anna Maguire, Daniel Steinbach

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138082106
• eBook ISBN: 9781351622738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Erster Weltkrieg

This volume gathers an international cast of scholars to examine the unprecedented range of colonial encounters during the First World War. More than four million men of color, and an even greater number of white Europeans and Americans, crisscrossed the globe. Others, in occupied areas, behind the warzone or in neutral countries, were nonetheless swept into the maelstrom. From local encounters in New Zealand, Britain and East Africa to army camps and hospitals in France and Mesopotamia, from cafes and clubs in Salonika and London, to anticolonial networks in Germany, the USA and the Dutch East Indies, this volume examines the actions and experiences of a varied company of soldiers, medics, writers, photographers, and revolutionaries to reconceptualize this conflict as a turning point in the history of global encounters. How did people interact across uneven intersections of nationality, race, gender, class, religion and language? How did encounters – direct and mediated, forced and unforced – shape issues from cross-racial intimacy and identity formation to anti-colonial networks, civil rights movements and visions of a post-war future? The twelve chapters delve into spaces and processes of encounter to explore how the conjoined realities of war, race and empire were experienced, recorded and instrumentalized.

Part I

Spaces

Camp, city, colony

1 ‘A pageant of empire?’

Untangling colonial encounters in military camps

Anna Maguire

DOI: 10.4324/9781315112671-3

In the examination of the encounters experienced during the First World War, the importance of specific sites in which these interactions took place cannot be overestimated.¹ From prisoner of war camps to hospitals, new ‘contact zones’ for colonial encounters emerged as troops from across the British Empire were mobilised to serve in the conflict.² Contact zones are useful conceptual spaces through which to explore the joining together of what had previously been separate and how relations were established. They allow us to locate encounters within everyday relations and everyday spaces within the unusual and strained circumstances of global warfare.³ Each of these distinct spaces had their own rules and regulations, whether military or social, which influenced how people behaved and interacted. This chapter takes military camps as a site of interaction between different colonial troops from Britain’s empire during the war. On unprecedented scale, colonial combatants and non-combatants – the Empire ‘united’ in arms – were stationed alongside each other and began to interact.⁴ Rather than the carefully maintained relationship between centre and periphery, suddenly the periphery encountered other peripheries, and the metropole became a destination for thousands whose war service caused them to pass through what Santanu Das has termed ‘the heart of whiteness’: Western Europe.⁵

Nearly three million men from New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Canada, India and ‘other colonies’ of the British Empire served on the fronts in France, Italy, Greece and Russia, in the campaigns against the Ottoman Empire – the Dardanelles, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Palestine – and the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific.⁶ My focus here is predominantly on the Western Front: the estimated strength of the expeditionary forces in France in the last month before the Armistice was of approximately 1.6 million British troops, 94,000 Australians, 25,000 New Zealanders, 154,000 Canadians, 9,000 South Africans (including ‘Native’ troops), 16,000 from Indian contingents and 107,000 in labour units, including the several colonial labour corps and non-combatant regiments like the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR).⁷ These figures were just a small percentage of the total of those who had served from the British Empire in Europe across the war’s duration.

During the war, different kinds of military camps existed which varied in scale, type and function. In this chapter, I examine base camps from which soldiers were despatched to units in the field and the rest camps where soldiers could recuperate after a battle or travelling long distances. Base depots were manned and operated by the Army Service Corps, sometimes working with labour corps or infantry regiments. Units from different countries might be based in the same camp, or in camps in very close proximity for 2 or 3 weeks, to undergo further training and await further instruction. Étaples, for example, was the largest of British-run base camps on the Western Front, and home to over 100,000 people at its peak in 1917. Although it was the main location for most British infantry depots, it also served as the Australian and New Zealand base depots, respectively. From there, troops would move to separate divisional camps and rest camps which were, in many cases, very close together in order to supply the frontline or to provide the back support for ammunition, transport, stretcher-bearing or communications. During the Battle of the Somme in 1916, for example, the town of Albert and the 30-km stretch between Albert and Amiens were the site of camps for a regiment of the BWIR, an Indian Cavalry unit (near Querrieu), the Canadian Expeditionary Force, the Scottish Black Watch, as well as a station for receiving gas cases run by the Royal Army Medical Corps.⁸ Troops might march past the camps of other regiments on their way to and from the front or encamp alongside each other.

Camps were in close proximity, therefore, not only to the horrors of industrialised warfare but bore testimony to combined military and imperial power. In training and frontline camps, therefore, men of different races and ethnicities, still grappling with their transition from civilians into soldiers, encountered those who were meant to be their comrades and Allies, but who often appeared as alien, strange or ‘other.’ New Zealander John Maloney called his camp in Egypt, probably at Zeitoun just outside Cairo, ‘a real pageant of Empire’: ‘I saw British territorials and Yeomanry, Scotchmen, French troops, Australians, Flying Corps men, Sikhs, Ghurkhas [sic], Irish troops, Canadians and Gyppos.’⁹ He was not alone in attempting to communicate the vibrancy and vitality of ‘jumping off ground(s)’ where so many gathered in preparation to serve the ‘Mother Country,’ as his compatriot George Gibson found in Doullens in Northern France: ‘We met Tommies, Canadians, Aussies, and Froggies Galore.’¹⁰ Colonel Henry Logan, another fellow New Zealander, also on the Western Front, described Étaples as a ‘huge affair’ with ‘camp areas for every country in the British Empire […] Indians, Canadians, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders and of course, reinforcements for all the English, Scottish and Irish regiments.’¹¹ The men’s depictions of the ‘full strength’ of the British Empire served to suggest the scale of the war effort to those reading about it at home, reassuring them that their ‘boys’ were not alone but well supported.

This chapter demonstrates that camps were neither the frictionless contact zones nor the ‘colourful’ environments of temporary imperial microcosms, as is so often represented by white colonial soldiers. The spectacle that Henry Logan described at Étaples had been very differently presented by Wilfred Owen as a ‘vast, dreadful encampment […] a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept for a few days before the shambles.’¹² It was also a scene of imperial discord as when, in 1917, rioting took place following confrontations between Australians and New Zealanders and the military police, during which a corporal was shot and one thousand men broke out of the camp.¹³ These incidents begin to hint at the tense undercurrents present in military camps, not least in the type of emotional communities which might have been available to the troops, sharing in anger, frustration and despair as they navigated their lives in these temporary homes under khaki and canvas.

Race was the organising principle through which the British Empire had been mobilised, from the reassertion of martial races theories about the ideal imperial soldier, as seen in the early mobilisation of the British Indian Army, to the shifting responsibilities of colonial battalions between European and extra-European theatres.¹⁴ This principle often shaped how troops interacted with each other in the camp. The distinction between labourers, non-combatants and combatants was significant and intersected in complex ways with race. In the case of the BWIR, though the men had ‘volunteered,’ enlisted, trained as and remained a soldiering regiment, restrictions were placed on their duties, which meant that only a small proportion saw active combat and only on non-European fronts.¹⁵ Their designation as soldiers placed them at a higher rank than the labour corps, who for example came from South Africa, China or Egypt and were recruited specifically for support work and manual labour, but lower than Indian combatants.¹⁶

The military necessity to arm ‘non-white’ men to fight alongside and against white men held the potential to undermine the racist ideology of European imperialism at its core.¹⁷ Amidst the descriptions of pageantry, some of the representations of camps seemed to flatten the racial hierarchy that determined the rank of the serving men and sought to sustain imperial order. The charms of encounters – intimate, evocative, tender – have, as Kris Manjapra has recognised, a tendency to obscure the asymmetries of power at play and the colonial discourses which frame them as cross-cultural, cross-racial and cross-national.¹⁸ The experiences of these encounters require us to burrow beneath these surface charms and fascinations to what could be evocative, convivial, violent or painful: this leads us to the interrogation of racist ideologies and practices at play, including the occurrence of segregation. These practices created a sliding scale of what sort of encounters were available to colonial troops. Rather than the unity of the British Empire imagined in these singular spaces where men from geographically disparate colonies and dominions came together, this chapter instead pushes against the notion of pageantry to reveal the assertion and re-articulation of differences along national, ethnic, religious and class lines ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Colonial encounters in a time of global conflict: an introduction
• PART I Spaces: camp, city, colony
• PART II Process: experience, commonalities and politicisation
• PART III Instrumentality: propaganda, resistance and the post-war world
• List of contributors
• Index