Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing

C. Buck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349501052
  9781137471642
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137471659
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Literatura general

This book reframes British First World War literature within Britain's history as an imperial nation. Rereading canonical war writers Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, alongside war writing by Enid Bagnold, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, Roly Grimshaw and others, the book makes clear that the Great War was more than a European war.

1

The First World War and the Unhoming of Europe

Anyone familiar with writings on the First World War will be familiar with the tendency to describe the war in geographical terms, whether as fronts, campaigns, or battlefields. The names in this topographical war narrative – the Western Front, the War in the East, the Somme, Gallipoli – are redolent of European national investments in the war. Other key tropes, such as the home front, no-man’s land, the trench, the lines, behind the lines, HQ, among many such terms, combine with the list of place names to create a map of the war that naturalizes specific national meanings but also becomes the basis for a geography of differences – racial, sexual, and gendered. Such tropes, taken together, render invisible the implications of the war’s colonial stakes. They establish both the war’s significant spaces and the relationship of those spaces to a changing geopolitical order. For most of the twentieth century, war studies relied on the war period’s own topography. But that topography reproduced a nineteenth-century imperial geography and thus needs re-examination. The entwining of these spatial coordinates with the history of the European imperial nation state marks sites such as the Western Front as particularly potent objects of study. Paradoxically, the retelling of Britain’s own war stories needs to begin again with the Western Front, read not as a scene of national trauma, but as an imperial contact zone, with the all-important difference that it is within Europe.

On 28 August 1914, in the face of significant mobilization difficulties, Lord Kitchener and Lord Crewe announced in the House of Lords the government’s intention to use cavalry regiments from the Indian army in France and Belgium.¹ This announcement came after some disagreement between the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, who believed that the use of the Indian troops in Europe would remove a “stigma,” and the War Council, which wanted to use the troops in Egypt to release British troops for the Western Front. Kitchener’s announcement marked a significant policy shift for the British who had, barely a decade earlier, refused to pit native troops against white Europeans during the Boer War. Objections were raised more widely, by, for example, Lord Stamfordham and Sir Valentine Chirlo of The Times, but King George V supported the use of the King’s Own Indian Regiment.² Most of the Indian army was moved out of Europe by the autumn of 1915, playing a larger role in Africa and the Middle East through the remainder of the war. However, the policy of using non-white colonial troops in both combatant roles and as support labor continued on a massive scale. With a standing army of just over 155,000 in 1914, India was by the end of the war to have supplied 1,096,013 men overseas, 65,056 of whom were killed; 132,496 Indians served as combatants and laborers in the European war zone. None of the white settler colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, supplied more soldiers or carried such heavy losses as India.³

Africa, which already had the West African Frontier Force and the King’s African Rifles, was also a significant source of manpower for the British army, supplying about 50,000 soldiers, as well as unnumbered carriers who were conscripted.⁴ In addition to white South African troops, “‘experimental’ combat units of ‘coloured’ South Africans served in West and East Africa.”⁵ By 1916, three battalions of the British West Indian Regiment (BWIR) were being used for combat in Jordan and Palestine, while Maori and Fijian black troops were also mobilized; “at least one ‘Coloured’ unit was formed by men living in Britain.”⁶ As important as, if not more important than, the mobilization of colonized subjects as soldiers is their use as labor. Britain, according to Laura Tabili, used “hundreds of thousands of Black and Chinese non-combatant laborers and other personnel from British possessions in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean” on the Western Front alone.⁷ Richard Smith, for example, notes that nine of the 12 battalions from the BWIR were used on the Western Front as labor battalions. Whilst the scholarship of historians like Tabili, Visram, David Omissi, Glenford Howe, and many others has provided information and perspectives that fundamentally alter our understanding of Britain’s war, scholarship on war writing remains remarkably impervious to its effects. With the notable exception of Santanu Das, the presence of so many non-white subjects in Europe has been curiously invisible in mainstream accounts of the war by literary critics.⁸ This invisibility contrasts with the wartime nation’s consciousness of its reliance on the labor and resources of its colonies. To better understand the forms of visibility given to non-European colonial soldiers and contingent laborers on the Western Front we can turn to Britain’s Illustrated London News, the subject of section one of this chapter. There, we will find a potent mix of pride and anxiety shaping the representation of these colonials in alien lands.

Between 1914 and 1918 the Illustrated London News, a respectable weekly newspaper, supplied its largely middle-class readers with a constant flow of war news. Indeed, from news reports to advertising, the paper focused almost exclusively on the war. In its pages the British were treated to a constant display of themselves as an imperial nation at war. At the same time, this rich source of photographs, drawings, and paintings of Western Front life sets the cultural context necessary to an understanding of the literary works that are also the subject of this chapter: Captain Roly Grimshaw’s two Western Front texts, his 1914–15 war diary and his 1930 novella, “The Experiences of Ram Singh, Dafadar of Horse: An Echo of 1914,” and Mulk Raj Anand’s 1940 novel Across the Black Waters.⁹ The composition of these three works, which make the Indian army in Flanders and northern France their main subject, spans the early months of the war to the beginning of the Second World War. Grimshaw, a captain in the Anglo-Indian army, kept his war diary during the first winter in Flanders, and went on to publish a war story at the peak of the first flowering of post-war eyewitness publishing in 1930. Anand, a major Indian novelist, reports that his novel about sepoy experience on the Western Front was drafted in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and revised back in England. It was finally published in wartime Britain.

The patchwork process of memorializing, forgetting, and recreating the participation of colonized subjects in Britain’s war is not however the main subject of this chapter. The chapter reads the presence of colonial troops in Europe in these texts, together with the images of the war’s colonial face that was front and center in the Illustrated London News, and argues for the European war zone as a space in which the possibility of cultural, territorial, and racial degeneracy is both visualized and contested. The military presence of non-white colonized subjects in these literary and cultural depictions of the war, long neglected by scholarship on the conflict, reveal a British culture deeply aware of the significance of the colonial in its basic core identity, deeply aware, yet deeply uncomfortable.¹⁰

Empire at war in the Illustrated London News

Historian Andrew Thompson argues that the war brought a shift in British consciousness of empire:

Previously, imperial unity and solidarity had largely been conceived in terms of the white colonies. But from 1914–18 the machinery of wartime propaganda projected images of a multi-racial empire utterly united in a crusade against Prussian militarism.¹¹

Even the briefest look at the ILN supports this argument. On 5 September 1914 the paper reported Kitchener’s speech to the Lords, in brief, beneath a full-page collage of photographs of the Indian army still in India. The photographs are captioned, “To Fight Side by Side with the British in France: Indian Troops.” The text highlights the Marquess of Crewe’s insistence on the Indian cavalry as “high-souled men of first rate training and representing an ancient civilization,”¹² and indeed the ILN was soon to be referring routinely to the troops as “Our Indian Army,” establishing a familiar pattern of response to these non-white colonial combatants on European soil (Figure 1.1). Readers of the ILN saw images of the Indian cavalry with the Canadians, New Zealanders, and Australians accompanying the king to the opening of parliament, Africans walking 260 miles carrying on their heads 1000 pounds sterling in silver for the war fund from the Emir of Sokoto in northern Nigeria, and “natives” celebrating the anniversary of the British occupation of German Togoland.¹³ The careful construction of an empire in which colonizer and colonized alike are voluntarily linked in support of “the Flag” only partly describes the active management of British anxieties about this new empire.

Figure 1.1 "To Fight Side by Side with the British in France: Indian Troops." Illustrated London News [London, England] 5 September 1914. Credit: @Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

As well as confirming Britain’s vision of itself as a powerful and united imperial nation, these images betray Britain’s persistent need to manage relations with its colonies throughout the war. An important source of revenue, materials, and labor, the colonies also threatened civil unrest. Even as the ILN celebrated the Empire’s unity in the face of German militarism, its images of colonial troops in Europe evidence the disturbance their presence created in Britain’s colonial discourses. The rarity of images that depict non-white soldiers and support labor in Europe belies the extensive use of non-white labor on the Western Front. The ILN reader could be forgiven for believing the non-white subject of colonialism to be fighting and working where he belonged, in the territories outside of Europe. Where the paper did foreground their presence on the Western Front, the Indian army provided a near exclusive focus, eliding the more typical relegation of the colonized subject to lower status, non-combatant work as laborers. The British were already used to seeing the Indian army as escorts at coronations, royal weddings and funerals, and Jubilees producing what Queen Victoria called an “excellent effect.” As Rozina Visram points out, the colorful uniforms, complete with turbans, did more than create an exotic display: “an Indian Army contingent in London, the Empire’s capital, highlighted the power, pomp and grandeur of Britain in the eyes of the world.”¹⁴ The paper’s 5 September full-page spread of images exactly reproduces these effects.

Eight images, seven photographs and one painting, depicting Indian troops in dress uniform surround a painting of the King’s Own Regiment, in which Indian officers similarly surround a single English officer (Figure 1.1). England is at the center of the Empire in the layout of both the page and the center painting. The hierarchy implied by this layout is combined with a studied casualness in the arrangement of the soldiers and their individual poses in the painting. The soldiers stand at ease, one leg bent and one hand casually resting on hip or sword hilt, whilst they are grouped informally to give the impression of the English officer as the natural center of the painting. Military discipline appears here as organic rather than imposed, and harmonious with the caption’s emphasis on “the desire of the Indian people that Indian soldiers should stand side by side with their comrades of the British Army.” Voluntarism on the part of the subjugated colonial subject was critical in the paper’s presentation of the people of the Empire willingly giving their soldiers, labor, money, and lives to the war effort.¹⁵ For Britain in the early twentieth century the contradiction between the democratic ideals of the home country and the despotism of empire, already theorized by political thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and J.A. Hobson, was becoming increasingly fraught, requiring the performance of a freely expressed enthusiasm and loyalty.¹⁶ The relative informality of an inherently formal moment puts on display the Indian soldiers’ exotic uniforms and impressive military physique, whilst allowing the oxymoron of voluntary subjugation.

Large-scale mobilization of the Indian army was always liable, however, to revive memories of the Indian Uprising of 1857, especially since the British government and the India Office were concerned in 1914 and throughout the war with Indian nationalist penetration of the army.¹⁷ During the Indian National Uprising 70,000 sepoys joined the rebellion leading to substantial restructuring of the Indian army.¹⁸ Images of Indian militarism, and especially images of massed soldiers, were thus potentially fraught with anxiety, making it tricky for the paper to play up the Indian army’s potential contribution to the war effort in Europe. On the one hand the Indian army’s recruitment policy under Lord Roberts had created the idea of the Indian soldier’s innate aggression. Troops were largely drawn from the so-called “martial races” of northern India, the Punjab, and the North-West Frontier Province, who were exempt from what Roberts described as the “softening and deteriorating effect” of peace and easier living in southern India.¹⁹ Useful though this aggression was deemed to be in the face of German militarism, it always had the potential to trigger fears of Indian uprising. Not surprisingly the ILN’s images of the Indian army contrast with its portrait of army mobilization in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Images that show white troops preparing for war emphasize number and scale, with photographs of units marching in formation, the soldiers already wearing field khaki. The Indian soldiers in their exotic dress uniforms, carrying swords and pennanted lances, look distinctly old-fashioned. Since the Indian army was deliberately kept a step behind the British army in England in terms of equipment, this was partly a matter of fact, partly of effect.

We can see this in the photograph of “A Lancer Regiment Preparing to Charge” (Figure 1.1, bottom center), which offers the most dramatic illustration of the Indian army’s military power in this spread of images. Although a picture of massed charging horsemen, the cavalry’s impressive display of force is both visually subordinated to the imperial mission and made to yield historicity for the British. The turban is key here with its Oriental connotations. The lances, looking more decorative than deadly, also contribute to the image’s strong associations with the past rather than the contemporary. Consistent with India’s designated role as the pre-modern in a colonizing discourse, the Indian army represents the British army’s own past history.²⁰ The connotations of tradition and historical depth allow the Indian army likewise to represent Britain’s role in the war as continuous with its imperial past, in which it has successfully dominated and assimilated these martial races.

The special martial fervor of the Indian troops is also linked to their pre-modern status. Over the coming months the ILN portrayed the fighting successes of the Indian troops as the result of primitive instinctual aggression. On 22 May 1915, for example, the caption beneath an image of Pathan soldiers at Ypres describes the deafening war cries of these Afghan border tribesmen, “their war-cry swelling louder and louder above the din.”²¹ In another double-page sketch of a Gurkha attack on the German trenches, we see Gurkhas armed with large curved knives rather than guns in hand-to-hand combat. The sketch is titled, “The Gurkhas Surprise the Germans: Fierce Work with the Kukri in the Enemy’s Trenches,” while the caption talks about the kukir or “cooker” as the typical weapon of this race, and describes the Gurkhas dragging some of the bodies back to show their British officers what good work they had done.²² For the British the Gurkha was the racial “type” within the Indian army most closely linked to barbarism.²³ The text’s reassuring yield of pre-modernity ensures Indian subordination to the British whose empire operates under the sign of modernity, an idea that was reiterated repeatedly in the paper’s images of “natives” in different parts of the Empire fascinated by, or simply juxtaposed against, the modern technology of the British army.

The war itself was cast in strongly evolutionary terms, as the end of civilization. Henry James, for example, in an often quoted letter from 4 August 1914, wrote that “the plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter: 1 The First World War and the Unhoming of Europe
• Chapter: 2 Travel Writing on the Western Front: Masefield, Blunden, Sassoon, and Bagnold
• Chapter: 3 E.M. Forster and the War’s Colonial Aspect
• Chapter: 4 Mapping Alterity on the Home Front: Kipling, Bagnold, and Allatini
• Chapter: 5 Bringing the War Home: The Imperial War Museum
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index