[The following text is the transcript of the presentation delivered by Professor Alison Fell at ICOH workshop at University of Hull, Enterprise Centre, Hull, February 15, 2016.] Presentation PowerPoint File I run a big project called Legacies of War at Leeds and I’m also here because I’m part of a national project in which there are five funded First World War Engagement Centres and I’m attached to one called Gateways to the First World War. Part of our remit as people working in universities on the First World War is to try and work alongside projects happening for the Centenary and it’s been absolutely fantastic for us to be able to go out and learn from what’s being studied outside universities as well as inside universities. So, I know that this project is about images of colonial soldiers, so what I wanted to do today is talk a little bit about which colonial soldiers and workers were there, particularly thinking about the Western Front. It’s quite complicated, so I’ll try not to go on for too long, but I will just briefly discuss the kinds of men who ended up on the Western Front in the First World War - where they came from, what they did and why they got there. Then I want to talk about some images of them that we will look at together, talk about why those images were taken, what kind of images they are and what they tells us about, not only the mens’ experiences, but about attitudes towards them as well. There are no neutral images, I think, in history, and the First World War particularly and so we’ve got to be careful when we look at images about what it is that we’re actually seeing. So, I am going to, at the end, hopefully get you to talk about some images as well in groups rather than just listen to me. The First World War was a war of empires rather than a war of nations. And because it was a war of empires, if we think about just two of the main belligerents, Britain and France, it started to involve soldiers and workers from all over the world from their various colonies. I think it’s really important to think about soldiers and workers because men from the British and French colonies were used as much for their labour as they were as combatants and this would have caused tensions, as it was often seen as less distinguished work to do. So I’m going to talk about very briefly: the soldiers from India who came and fought for the British, volunteers from Jamaica and the West Indies, who were soldiers and workers, Chinese contract workers who worked for both the British and the French Empires in the First World War. Of course, in addition, Britain also drew on men from the Dominions: South Africa, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, although I’m not going to talk about those today. And then I’m also going to talk about the French Empire, which is something that I know the most about, because in the exhibition there are lots of pictures here of men from the French Empire too. So I’ll mention the West African and North African soldiers who both came and fought on the western front, and also the Indochinese and Chinese workers who came to France There were around a million Indians who went to war. 620,000 approximately who fought, and 420,000 who were non-combatants who would perform various kinds of work. A lot of them served on the western front, but it’s also important to recognise that they served in other fronts during the war, particularly, for example, in the East African Campaign, where a lot of Indian soldiers went but also in what was then Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine and Gallipoli, so they were sent far and wide during the war. On the slide I’ve included a quotation by Santanu Das who is a British scholar who’s worked a lot on Indian soldiers and I’ve also included websites that I think are very good introductions. If anybody wants to find out a bit more online, I think this is where I would start, which is the British Library’s website about the Indian sepoy in the First World War. Das explains that most of the sepoys were recruited from the peasant warrior classes of North and North Western India in accordance with the theory of martial races, with the Punjab contributing more than half the number of combatants. So they were selected from particular areas of India because of this theory of a hierarchy of martial races which was a theory the French Empire also shared. So, when you’re looking at who was there, it’s important to bear this in mind. They did come from very diverse religious backgrounds, so there were Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus and like many of these colonial armies, they were multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Although through the eyes of some of the soldiers from Britain and France who were fighting alongside them, they would have only seen an Indian or an African, in terms of the actual troops themselves, they were very complex forces made up from men who wouldn’t normally have been able to mix together and there were problems with communication, problems of understanding these different identities, these different religions. But those sorts of subtleties, I think, have got lost sometimes in the way that they’re looked at now. So as Santanu explains, many of these men were semi or non-literate and didn’t leave behind the abundance of diaries, poems and memoirs that formed the cornerstone of the European war memory. So, one of the problems we have of trying to get to the experiences of men who fought in the war and came from India, Africa or other colonies, is that, unlike for British and French soldiers, we don’t have all of the written sources that are left behind. In the University of Leeds where I work, for example, we have a fantastic collection – the Liddle collection - of about 5,000 British men and women who left diaries and letters and sketchbooks about their war experiences. It’s relatively easy to try and read these and get a sense of what their experiences were and the diversity of their experiences. But for non-literate men who didn’t leave diaries and letters, it’s much harder. Santanu has used lots of different kinds of sources to try and understand what it was like for an Indian soldier. We do have some letters, but, again, these are not like those written by French or British soldiers, because they would often have been written by a scribe in the Battalion, and they’re not necessarily a personal record. So one of the things that we do use a lot as sources to investigate the experiences of colonial soldiers are images and that’s why I think this project’s great. But we need to be careful when we use them as records of what happened. So, turning to the British West Indies Regiment. These were volunteers and there were over 16,000 men who volunteered to serve with this regiment - there was no conscription. One of the issues with the British West Indies Regiment is what they ended up doing in the war and the resentment that some of the volunteers felt about the way that they were treated. On the slide I’ve quoted from a good page from the Imperial War Museum’s website, which, again, is a very good place to start, which explains that the formation of the British West Indies Regiment didn’t give soldiers from the West Indies the opportunity to fight as equals alongside white soldiers. Instead, the War Office largely limited their contributions to labour duties. The use of West Indian Regiment soldiers in supporting roles intensified during the Battle of the Somme as casualties amongst fighting troops meant that reinforcements were needed in the front line. So, there was a lot of resentment amongst some of the soldiers who went to fight in the First World War that they felt that they weren’t allowed to fight alongside the white soldiers and there was a racial hierarchy in place. This is also particularly the case with the African- American soldiers, who, out of all of the non-white soldiers in the Western Front probably experienced the greatest discrimination, because the black American soldiers were segregated to an even greater extent than the other colonial soldiers. The difference between the ways that the white and black American soldiers were treated was really stark, and there was a lot of resentment that they were generally given labour duties, rather than combatant duties. From one perspective, we might think that it might have been quite nice not to have had to go into the trenches, but their resentment was to do with the idea that they had been treated as second class soldiers. Before I talk about the African soldiers, I just wanted to mention briefly the situation in Africa, because, obviously, there was fighting in Africa during the First World War as well as Africans coming to the Western Front, so this slide is a quick snapshot of Africa in 1914. I won’t go into too much detail but you can see that in the late 19th Century, Africa was basically divided up between the European powers. There was very little of Africa that was independent as you can see. A lot of the continent was dominated by France and Britain. Germany, (which is the green bits on the map) had smaller parts of Africa as colonies and it was one of their war goals, if you like, to try and extend their influence in Africa. And so during the East African Campaign, there were African men drafted into the fighting such as the Askari who fought for the Germans. But many African men were used porters rather than as soldiers and there were very high death rates and very poor conditions. These campaigns in Africa were in some ways a kind of extension of the colonial wars between colonial powers under the umbrella of the First World War I’ve got another map explaining the movements of Africans during the First World War. And so if I’m looking at the French bits of Africa which is the north, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and the west, which would have been, what is today, Senegal and other West African nations, you’ve got a little arrow there saying the West African troops to France and the North African troops to France and then some of the West African troops to British East Asia/African Campaign. The big difference between the French Empire and the British Empire in terms of Africans is that the French Africans came to the western front, that is, they travelled from 1914 onwards to fight in France, whereas the British African men fought in Africa itself, and didn’t make the long journey to Europe. To give you some numbers to get a sense of the amount of men from British and French colonies who were involved in the First World War, there were around 1.4m, from India, 1.3m for the Dominions and about 140,000 Chinese contract labourers. For the French Empire, there were about half a million colonial troops, including 166,000 from French West Africa and then Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans. The death rate for troops in the western front was actually quite similar to the French troops in the First World War. It is sometimes argued that the African troops we used as shock troops at the front lines, but, in fact, if you look at the death rates, they’re not that dissimilar to the French. So there are debates about how they were actually used in battle. What is true is that for African workers in Africa, the death rate was higher than for combatants on the Western Front. So, you know, the death rate for British soldiers was around 12% in the First World War which is quite a high death rate, although some people now estimate it a bit higher than that. In France, it was higher, around 16% and you can see that for the French Africans, it was around 17/18% and estimates suggest it was a bit higher for African porters, around 20%. So, now to mention the Chinese Labour Corps, I wanted to show you a little bit of a video which I think is quite good, to explain why there were some Chinese people in France on the western front in the First World War. In 1917, the French and British authorities were getting really desperate for labour, for manpower, both in combatant positions and also for all of the other jobs needed to keep the Army going. They were getting so desperate that they called on women, for example, and the British government formed some sections of the British Army for women in 1917 and then they also looked elsewhere to try and get more workers. And so they made an arrangement with China, both the French and the British Empires contracted Chinese workers, so there were around nearly 100,000 by 1918 working for the British and around another 30,000 working for the French. Video playing 3 weeks before the end of World War One, the world’s largest painting opened to the public in Paris called Le Panthéon de la Guerre. It was begun in 1914 and depicted France Victorious surrounded by all the allies. But in 1917, with the painting almost complete, the United States entered the War. For the Americans to be included in the painting, the artists have no choice but to paint over an existing scene in what is to become an apt analogy of their fate, the Chinese Labour Corps are painted out. But who were the Chinese Labour Corps and why were they in France? At the outbreak of war, China was in chaos. Over 2000 years of dynastic rule had been overthrown by revolution, just three years previously and a replacement system remained elusive. Despite declaring its neutrality, China was dragged into the war when Britain’s ally, Japan, invaded and took German control of Shandong Province. But in January 1915, China decided it was in her interest to assist the allies, despite widespread belief in China that Germany would win the war. In doing so, Britain promises China the return of Shandong after the war. The Chinese Government offers non-competent labourers to assist in the war effort. The French signed an agreement with the Chinese Government for 50,000 labourers. The British had an open-ended agreement but final records showed that 96,000 Chinese volunteer labourers are recruited and transported to France. It is the transportation of Chinese labourers to the western front which directly leads to China declaring war on February 17th 1917. The French ship, Athos, carried 900 Chinese labourers recruited by the French was torpedoed by a German submarine with a loss of 543 Chinese lives. The Chinese Government declared war with Germany on August 14th 1917. The Chinese workers were contracted for three years and they had to work ten hours a day, seven days a week. They would have three days’ holiday a year on Chinese New Year and for the Dragon Boat Festival and one for the mid- Autumn Festival. When not working, the labourers were confined to camp. The work undertaken was extremely diverse, from digging trenches to repairing tanks. They unloaded ships and trains, built roads, laid railway tracks. They were kept on after the war to do some of the most dangerous and gruesome work, recovering live ordinance and exhuming the dead, burying them in the numerous war cemeteries. Video ends. We’ll stop there. So I think that’s quite a nice introduction to the Chinese Labour Corps and explains a little bit why they’re there. China now of course is a leading world power, but at the time, it wanted to have a place at the table and felt betrayed by what happened afterwards. The Chinese were paid, although the conditions were very hard and they also were there after the Armistice, burying the dead and clearing some of the shells, which was dangerous. To summarise then, in any part of the western front in France, you could get a whole myriad of different men from different countries. You get lots of French newspapers saying that it’s like nothing they’ve ever seen. The local populations didn’t really know what had hit them because in France they could see Chinese men, Indochinese men, different kinds of African men, North and West African, they could see African-American men, West Indian men and Indian men as well as the French and British men. One of the interesting things about all of these men mixing together is that for some of them, it politicised them, because they saw different conditions and different relationships between these soldiers and the Empires that they were part of. So, what’s interesting, for example is, that some of the African American men who went to France became part of the early Civil Rights Movement after the war. They wrote in quite glowing terms about the French West African men because they thought they had a much better deal, because the French/West African soldiers were allowed, for example, to mix with white women. They were sometimes allowed to visit brothels for example – that’s one of the things that the African Americans were prevented from doing. French African men were nursed by white women as well and it was thought by African Americans that they had better conditions of service – that they were treated equally to the French soldiers. Now that wasn’t quite true, because although French West Africa troops did get pensions after the war, and were quite well treated at the time in hospitals, they certainly didn’t become French citizens after the war, which is what some of them wanted. But it is interesting that you can see some of the seeds of later independent movements being sown in the First World War. We can see some images of some of these men around you today. When I’m teaching the First World War to my students at Leeds, I get them to think about the question: what was the purpose of the images that were produced? Here, we have photographs, we have illustrations, we have press photographs and we have photographs from private collections. They’re all produced for different reasons, so some of them are produced for very political purposes, like propaganda, so they’re trying to persuade a particular audience that having these men on their side is justified and good, or sometimes they’re also produced in response to negative images of the men. So, a key battle, for example, was going on with German images of African men versus allied images of African men. You get a lot of racist German propaganda in the First World War, arguing that the Allies are not following the rules of war, because they’re using what were seen as “uncivilised African savages”, this is how they were depicted in propaganda. And so, in response, you get Allied propaganda with still, I would argue, racist, but more positive images of African men in which they’re seen as loyal and childlike and well treated. So it’s interesting that there’s this propaganda battle going on between both sides and some of these men are used as pawns. So, that’s one of the reasons some of these images were produced. Official photographs, or press photographs, are often showing colonial soldiers and workers being treated well. You don’t get photographs of these men being treated badly, or being punished. You don’t get very many photographs of them in their free time, or when they’re interacting with each other. It usually seems to be when they were interacting with their officers, with other white men, and it’s interesting to think about, even in what seems to be a neutral photograph, what their function is, as they are often taken for a particular reason. So we need to be thinking about who produced them, where were they produced? Obviously, we don’t get images produced by the men themselves. You hardly ever get that. We don’t even have many writings by the men themselves, so it’s very difficult to have the experience as seen through the eyes of the actual men who went through it. We need then to think about who these images were produced for? And then also to think about how are they remembered now? You know, have things changed 100 years on? How can we remember them now? Is this kind of history taught in schools now? Does anybody – if you ask the average person in the street in Britain, would they know that there were African men in the First World War, for example? So to finish I thought I’d just talk about two images and then I’ve got some other images that I’d like you to talk about in groups. So, this slide is an example of a painting of Indian troops. It’s a postcard and this is one of the images from your exhibition. Here it says, ‘The Good Samaritan from Delhi’ and the caption is in English, French and Russian, at least I assume that’s Russian. If anybody’s Russian speaking? So, it’s all of the allied languages. This is a postcard that was produced in Paris. It wouldn’t have been produced by the government but it’s certainly giving a very positive message about Indian troops. So, what we’ve got here is an Indian soldier and a German soldier who is wounded. We know he’s German because we can tell from his helmet and he’s obviously wearing a sling and this Indian soldier then is acting as a good Samaritan. It’s interesting, because it’s exactly the same postcard that I have seen with French West African men helping a wounded German with exactly the same captions. They obviously were produced by the same company. So why might we have a picture of an Indian helping a German soldier? Well, I think it’s to communicate this idea that these are morally upright men, that they are following the rules of war and not killing prisoners of war, which you’re not supposed to do according to the Geneva Convention in the First World War. The anti-German postcards that you get and there’s an awful lot of them, often have Germans killing prisoners of war, or killing innocent civilians to try and show the Germans as being guilty of war crimes. To try and obviously paint them in a bad light, make them the enemy, whereas in this postcard you’ve got the Indian soldier doing exactly the opposite, treating an enemy prisoner well. It’s also quite interesting that his action is described using a biblical image as a good Samaritan which maybe is to try and appeal to a largely Christian readership would have been buying this postcard. Secondly this is a picture of some French African soldiers in France and they’re holding a flag that says, October 1916. This is to do with the Battle of Verdun which was an enormous battle, I’m sure you know, in France in 1916. It’s their equivalent of the Battle of the Somme and this is the African soldiers seen as playing their part in the battle. I think this photograph is about showing them to be loyal soldiers, fighting for the Mother country, showing them to be well- equipped in terms of their uniforms. They’re being looked after by France, and they should be proud of what they’re doing; they’re good soldiers. (From the audience: they are wearing medals as well). Yes, exactly, yes, which is the French War Medal called the Croix de Guerre, so they’re being set up as heroes if you like, of the war and it’s interesting to think – who is this image being produced for? You know, is this for the French population to show them that they’ve got these brave soldiers fighting for them? Is this against negative propaganda about African men? Or, is this maybe for the soldiers themselves or others at home in Africa to show that they’re being well treated? Because there were very dubious practices in terms of the recruitment of men from Africa in the First World War, although some of them volunteered, there was also some soldiers who were just rounded up basically. Now I thought we could just have a look at a couple more and just see what you think of them. So, I’ve got two photographs on the next slide and I just wanted you to think about why it was produced, whether it’s a spontaneous photograph, what the purpose is, who you think it might have been produced for and how does it depict these colonial soldiars or workers?