pray be seated’ in perfect English soon put us right. Inside were two big bushy whiskered Indians of evidently high rank. We were a bit overcome in the presence of such mighty ones but the chief soon made us feel at home.
He squatted on the floor in the native style and spoke English without the faintest trace of accent: his companion was not quite as good. They were very anxious to know all about us and wanted to know all the news that could be got. Once or twice the principal one said ‘I am afraid I do not make myself quite clear’. ‘Oh that’s alright, you speak English very well sir’
‘Oh well’, most apologetically, ‘you see I have been to an English Universi-ty’. We put in about half an hour most enjoyably and then walked on.
Baker claimed not to know what to expect but finding educated men who were fluent English speakers seemed to go against his assumptions about what Gurkhas were like. An article in The Times from August 1915 had described how the Maori war dance, the haka – ‘the blood curdling serenade’ – intimidated their Turkish enemies at Gallipoli, fearful of stereotypes of Maori cannibals. The joke was that ‘the leader of the haka, a full blooded Maori, wrote M.A. L.L.D after his name, and spoke better English than many a white man’. It is unfortunate that being able to speak English or having a university degree were presented as the key signifiers of being ‘civilised’ in these encounters, but they reveal how expectations about racial inferiority could be challenged.
ENCOUNTERS OFTEN defied the rhetoric and policy of Empire, includ-ing the racial order that it depended on. When sendinclud-ing black men to serve in France, the South African government and army officials aimed to segregate the men from other troops at work and in camp. War Office documents reveal how complex this was: when the SANLC were at Last night our boys played the French at football. It was exciting; we won
by nine to three. The Maoris amused the French very much.
John Williamson, another New Zealander, found that even hospitals were a space for encounters:
As the four of us got seated we checked up on one another and found out that one was a Canadian, one an Aussie, one a South African and myself a New Zealander. What a coincidence that we should accidentally get at the same table after coming from places such a long way apart. We finished up by everyone swapping buttons.
U
NDERSTANDING SUCH encounters brings the experience of colonial troops to the forefront of how we engage with the First World War. Though white accounts cannot speak for the experience of troops of colour, they offer valuable insights. These encounters cannot either make up for the shortage of collected personal material, in written or oral form, but they do allow for greater inclusion. Barry’s anecdote about befriending the Jamaican troops weaves an unheard story into remembered narratives of both West Indian and Australian experience of war.These accounts also reveal how complicated cross-cultural interac-tions could be. The circumstances of war meant that diverse colonial worlds and cultures became entwined. They reveal individual responses to meeting new and different people in a variety of places. Raymond Danvers Baker, a New Zealander, visited a nearby Gurkha camp during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915:
My mate and I didn’t know exactly what to expect; but a ‘Come in please,
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A WORLD AT WAR
Rouen, the army removed the Cape Coloured Labour Battalion. ‘The latter were treated as soldiers, the former were segregated; it would have been impossible to enforce the rules by which the South African natives were restricted to compounds if they had seen the Cape Boys alongside them allowed practically unlimited freedom.’
Yet it would prove too difficult to entirely segregate the black South African men. Stimela Jason Jingoes, who served with the SANLC, spoke in the 1970s of his experience. He described meeting William Johnstone of Folkestone, as the two worked on the docks at Dieppe, France: ‘We hit it off at once and spent our breaks drinking tea and talking about our two countries, until at last we were close friends. After the war we corre-sponded for many years, but at last we lost touch and I do not know what became of him.’ This small-scale interaction had wider implications. It subverted a hierarchy that officials had attempted to transfer from the dominion to the frontline. This was not the only such case. Thomas MacKenzie, High Commissioner for New Zealand in London, wrote in The Times that, ‘in no instance is permission given to Maori members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force to contract marriages in this country’. New Zealand soldier William Binley told a different story:
A Maori was engaged to an English girl and just before the wedding he was put wise to the fact that he needed a ‘best man’. He got another Maori to act in that capacity and the wedding was a success. The best man took a fancy to the bridesmaid (whom he had never seen before) and within a week he was married with the previously married Maori as his best man.
During a time of conflict and instability, these meetings and relation-ships broke the boundaries of the British Empire, opposing policies made to assuage anxieties about racial mixing. White people and people of colour interacted on a seemingly equal footing that disregarded both military status and regulations and their ethnic difference.
Seeing encounters as wholly harmonious, though, where military rank and racial difference were universally forgotten, would be as
mis-leading as restricting memory of the war to the experience of white troops. Friendly encounters cannot justify any jingoistic notions of the war as a time of ‘Empire United’, nor can or should they create a narrative of multiculturalism. Alongside sociable interactions were those that revealed racial hierarchies, both in the institutional organisation of the army and within these personal, individual interactions and explicitly racist attitudes and behaviours.
THE BRITISH EMPIRE had been reluctant to employ its black pop-ulations until the labour demands of war necessitated it and it was dependent on theories of martial races to dictate who would be allowed to fight and where. Inequality was intrinsic to the British Empire’s or-ganisation of war. The white dominion forces of Australia, New Zealand and Canada were combatant soldiers where their colonial counterparts from China or Egypt were not. Indian men were soldiers and could fight on the Western Front; West Indian men were soldiers by name but could only participate in combat outside Europe; black South Africans were la-bourers only. Not only that, but the colonial troops were not exclusively
volunteer forces enlisting out of loyalty to the Mother Country: coer-cion, conscription, economic need and unemployment could and did drive enlistment.
The organisation of the military in this way would have a bearing on how the men perceived themselves and those whom they encountered.
New Zealand soldier Raymond Danvers Baker thought Britain’s Indian troops better than the French colonial soldiers, though they ‘were pretty fearsome looking objects’, as the martially superior ‘Gurkhas and Sikhs left them standing’. BWIR padre Horner commented that in France:
With the ordinary native labour corps, particularly the Chinese, our men do not agree very well. A good deal of this is probably our own lads [sic]
fault, for they have I must confess a somewhat irritating habit of rubbing in the fact that, being soldiers, they are on an immeasurably higher social scale than a mere labourer who is working for a wage.
The BWIR retained soldier status, giving them superiority over the Chinese Labour Corps and South African Native Labour Corps, as well as having more freedom to explore the cafes and bars of the French villages.
T
HE DEEP-SEATED racial distinctions and beliefs that led the governments and army to make decisions based on theories of martial races were reflected in the actions and behaviours of the men. Uncovering racist treatment and behaviour that emphasised colonial inequalities helps our understanding of colonial encounters. William Barry’s friendship with the West Indian troops did not apply to the Egyptians near the camp. He amused himself on a train journey through Egypt by throwing small pieces of cheese and bread at the local people – ‘Gyppoes’ as he called them – and watching them fight over it. When in a hospital in prisoner of war camp, white South African Corporal Dotish awoke from an operation to find his ward mates were French Senegalese soldiers: ‘To awaken in the morning and see two faces absolutely as black as pitch made me wonder if I had had anightmare in the night. I nicknamed one Smiling Sambo and the other Dusky Joe.’ The use of racist terminology throughout descriptions of arriving in new lands and meeting new peoples – ‘coolies’, ‘coloured’ or
‘natives’ – exposes how pervasive racial prejudice and resultant abuse was at this time.
While enlistment was not necessarily proof of duty and loyalty to the so-called ‘imperial cause’, having contact with Britain was significant for colonial troops. For many of the white dominion troops, Britain was familiar; it was ‘home’. In a letter to The Times on April 18th, 1917, a ‘New Zealander’ wrote nostalgically of, ‘the rolling downs, and the chessboard fields, and the fat cattle that are not all gone yet. A country Sunday stands for England’. His compatriot Alfred Olsson wrote home that London was ‘the world’s greatest city’. ‘What I consider the most magnificent building I have ever seen is St Paul’s Cathedral which con-tains the remains of so many of England’s most famous dead.’
This attitude was deeply ingrained in other colonial societies. Horner described the awestruck reaction of West Indian men and how over-whelmed they were to arrive: ‘Here at last was England, that this was their first view of that wonderful “Mother-land” of which they had heard and read ever since they had been children, that great mother, whose children they were, whose flag they served under, and whose quarrel they had in loyalty made their own.’ Though Horner may have projected his own British identity onto the men, he also showed how prominent imperial rhetoric was in the colonies. In a similar way, Jingoes of the SANLC reflected on his own arrival into Liverpool: ‘It was, for me, as if all my geography lessons at school were coming alive … I had Top: Muti, son of Ntshingwayo of the Zungu Tribe,
Zululand, being presented to General Maxwell after performing a 'Zulu war dance', Dannes, June 24th, 1917.
Bottom: Soldiers of the South African Native Labour Corps perform a 'Zulu war dance' on the same day.