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The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire looks at the history of how many non-white peoples participated in World War I including four million Indians, Africans, African Americans, Chinese, and Indo-Chinese workers and fighters. It discusses the Indians taken from the British colonial empire that fought on the Western front in Europe. It looks at the Senegalese Tirailleurs who fought for the French.
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00:22We think we know the First World War, the trenches, the barbed wire, the shell holes,
00:28the machine guns, the gas, the high explosives, the mud and the blood of Flandersfields.
00:49But the first shot, fired by a soldier of the British Army, was fired by an African.
00:55Here in Africa, three days after war was declared.
01:01That soldier's name was Al-Hadji Grunchi.
01:04He'd been born in the British colony of the Gold Coast, modern day Ghana.
01:08And in 1914, he was a regimental sergeant major in the British West African Frontier Force.
01:14In 1914, they were attacking the Germans in their colony of Togoland.
01:19Now, from the moment Grunchi fired that first shot, the Great War became the World's War.
01:34More than 4 million non-European, non-white soldiers and auxiliaries were sucked in to the World's War.
01:41One and a half million from British India.
01:44More than 2 million from the French colonies in Africa and Indochina.
01:49400,000 African Americans.
01:52100,000 Chinese laborers.
01:54They came as professional soldiers, conscripts, volunteers and mercenaries.
02:00But all had to grapple, not just with a new and terrible kind of warfare,
02:05but with the fears and prejudices that swirled around the questions of race in the 20th century.
02:16Now, history has rightly remembered the millions of Europeans who died on the Western Front and elsewhere.
02:23But fighting alongside them were millions of others.
02:26Men from every continent, of every race and every religion.
02:30The human capital of the European empires.
02:32It was their war too, and this is their story.
03:10The human capital of the European Union and the European Union.
03:12In the first week of August 1914, the empires of Europe went to war.
03:17Six weeks later, the first contingent of 30,000 troops from British India
03:22began to disembark here, at the French port of Marseille.
03:29It's probably impossible now, a century later,
03:33to even imagine the level of disorientation they must have felt.
03:38These were men from villages in rural India.
03:40They'd never left their homeland before,
03:43and many of them will have known very, very little about the outside world.
03:47To make matters much worse, when they'd left India,
03:50they hadn't even been told where they were going.
03:52It was only in the last days of their journey that they were told the truth,
03:56that they were coming here to France to fight.
04:12The spectators who flocked to see the Indians as they marched from the port
04:16had little idea of the sheer complexity of the army they were cheering on.
04:22Alongside units from the regular British army,
04:25it was made up of men from a dozen different ethnic groups,
04:28led by white British officers who had made their army careers in British India.
04:34Below them, in the chain of command, were Indian officers who had risen through the ranks.
04:40It was an army designed to guard the Raj.
04:43And the decision to bring it to fight in Europe's war was regarded at the time as a hazardous experiment.
04:49But in the crisis of 1914, a good year before Kitchener's mass armies entered battle,
04:58Britain needed all the professional soldiers it could lay its hands on.
05:02And so, they marched out of town to their base camp.
05:06And for a few short weeks, Marseille's fashionable race course became a little India.
05:20This is an incredible picture of the Lahore Division of the Indian Army in Marseille on this race course in
05:30September or early October 1914.
05:33And it is a panorama of all the different peoples that made up the British Indian Army.
05:50In the corner, there are huge brass Indian cooking pots, very Indian pots,
05:56the sort of pots you'd see anywhere in a market in India today.
05:58And beside them are sacks maybe of flour for cooking chapatis, or maybe rice, beside the Indian cooking pots.
06:07Down here you can see some goats, which I'm afraid look like they're being slaughtered, according to the rules of
06:13Halal.
06:14This was an army that expected to eat Indian food no matter where it was on duty in the world.
06:19And the British were very good at realising that they got the best out of their men
06:24when they were sensitive to their needs, cultural, religious and dietary.
06:33On the old race course itself, we've got the British officer on his horse.
06:37It's a tiny little detail in a big photograph.
06:40And this could be me projecting it onto him, but there's something about his bearing that is haughty, which is
06:47arrogant, it's confident.
06:49This is a man who is a soldier within the Indian Army who feels that he knows the men he's
06:55commanding,
06:56that he understands their cultures, that he's in charge.
06:58He's very much an authority figure within this frame.
07:05The authority of the India Corps' British officers drew much of its self-confidence
07:10from a racial theory that was rooted in the imperial experience of British India.
07:16It took its cue from the Indian caste system and was known as the theory of the martial races,
07:24a distillation of the received wisdom of the Raj concerning the inherent qualities of the sepoys, Subhadars and Rizaldars,
07:32the private sergeants and captains of the India Corps.
07:38This is a copy of the India Corps in France.
07:42It was written during the war by two white British officers who served with the India Corps.
07:47The most interesting part is right at the end, the appendix.
07:51This was the work of J.W.B. Merriweather, who was a lieutenant colonel,
07:55and he was a real advocate of the martial races theory.
07:59And he writes that the majority of the population of India are people without physical courage,
08:06and unfit for any military service.
08:09And with a stroke, he dismisses 90% of the population of India.
08:14But he then goes on to describe the various abilities, the strengths and weaknesses of the martial peoples,
08:20the men who have been recruited into the British Indian Army.
08:23He begins with the Sikhs, who are to him the perfect martial people.
08:27The Sikhs are tall men of strong physique and stately bearing, he tells us.
08:33The chief trait of the Sikhs is a love of military adventure and a desire to make money.
08:40Merriweather was also a fan of the Jads, who come from the Punjab.
08:44He considers them to be a thoroughbred race.
08:46He says, in appearance, they are large-limbed and handsome,
08:50and they are unusually remarkable for their toughness and their capacity to endure the greatest fatigue and privation.
08:58Next are the Patans, who are a people from the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
09:03The Patan is a handsome man, Merriweather tells us, as a rule built in an athletic mould.
09:09His easy but swaggering gait speaks of an active life in the mountains.
09:13This makes him an ideal raider or skirmisher, full of dash, but, and this is the important part,
09:19but he's often wanting in cohesion and the power of steady resistance,
09:22unless, critically, he is led by British officers.
09:27Finally, there's the Gurkhas, the most famous of all of the units of the old British Indian Army.
09:32There is much about the Gurkha which especially appeals to the British soldier.
09:37His friendliness, cheeriness and adaptability make him easier to get on with than any of the other Indian groups.
09:44His native weapon is the Kukri, a long carved knife with a keen cutting edge and a heavy back.
09:50With this, Merriweather says, he can cut down trees or a man as easily as you can sharpen a pencil.
09:55Every group is given its vices and virtues. It's determined how reliable they are.
10:01This is a micro dissection of the British Army of India.
10:13By mid-October 1914, the India Corps were in northern France and Belgium, about to get their first taste of
10:21battle.
10:22The war had developed into a frantic race to the sea as the Germans pushed towards the channel ports
10:29and the French, British and Belgians fell back before them.
10:33Everything was in flux.
10:36There were cavalry battles in the wheat fields, refugees at the crossroads
10:41and hastily improvised barricades in the towns and villages.
10:46Still in their tropical uniforms, the India Corps units were thrown into battle with orders to hold the line at
10:54all costs.
10:55At the Belgian city of Ypres, they played a crucial part in the first of five battles that would be
11:01waged there.
11:04After Ypres, the German advance ground to a halt. The armies dug in and a new and terrible kind of
11:11warfare came to Europe. Trench warfare.
11:17The India Corps were among the first to experience the grim realities of industrialized trench warfare, ruled by the machine
11:27gun, barbed wire, high explosives and gas.
11:45And alongside the murderous new weapons was the sheer misery of life in the trenches, as the autumn of 1914
11:54turned into the first winter of the war.
12:06The winter of 1914 was one of the coldest that's ever been recorded in Northern Europe.
12:12There's a photograph of a group of Indian soldiers in the trenches in the winter of 14.
12:17They're huddled together, wrapped in blankets. They look more like vagrants than soldiers.
12:23The photograph was taken by the Daily Mirror, the same newspaper that had taken photographs of the Indians as they'd
12:29arrived in Marseille.
12:30Just a few months earlier. By now they were a different army.
12:34They became veterans, old soldiers in their twenties, of a new sort of warfare that had never been seen before
12:41in the world.
12:49We know a little about what they were going through, thanks to a remarkable cache of official documents.
12:56The reports of the censor of the Indian mails, held at the British Library.
13:02The censor's office was established in late 1914 to vet letters received and sent by the Indian troops in France.
13:11The chief censor, Captain Evelyn Howell, was an old India hand.
13:16Someone who fancied he knew the difference between a Jat and a Pataan.
13:21Every week, he and the small team under his command would sample some of the 20,000 letters that passed
13:28between the troops in the front line,
13:30those hospitalized in England, and family and friends back home, selecting and making exits of the most interesting ones.
13:41Men are dying like maggots. No one can count them. Not in thousands, but in hundreds and thousands of thousands.
13:50None can count them.
13:54Shantanu Das has made a close study of the letters. For him, they're not only a unique historical source, but
14:01also a kind of unacknowledged war poetry.
14:05In the letters, we have some of the first shock of encounter with Western industrial warfare.
14:13And, for example, I vividly remember some of the images that these soldiers employ to describe their experience.
14:24One sepoy writes,
14:26The shells are pouring like rain in monsoon.
14:30The enemy's guns roasted our regiments even as grain is parched.
14:36Corpses lay at every step, and the blood ran in little rivers.
14:43So these are men from poor rural villages in the Punjab.
14:47And so that's why we get phrases like, the corn is being ground.
14:51Absolutely, the corn is being ground.
14:53Or, for example, as bulls and buffaloes lie in the month of Bhadun, so are our bodies.
15:01So these are people, these are peasant warriors, because they have largely been drawn,
15:07or in the first months of the war, exclusively drawn from the martial races, or what the British termed as
15:14the martial races.
15:15And they are the peasant warriors.
15:17And they fall back on these agrarian metaphors and similes in order to express their innermost feelings.
15:28Here it rains always.
15:31Sometimes the noise of the rain is bang, and sometimes it is the noise of wind.
15:38The rain that sounds like wind is always falling.
15:42But the banging rain comes only now and then.
15:46And the corpses cover the country like sheaves of harvested corn.
15:51It's very important for us to listen to the letters, rather than just read the letters.
15:57And when we listen to them, perhaps we can hear the echoes of the sepoy heart.
16:06The censor was also interested in the sepoy's heart, but not for literary reasons.
16:13Captain Howell wanted to know how the theory of the martial races was standing up under the stress of battle.
16:20And the lyrical language used by some of the soldiers gave him cause for concern.
16:27Many of the men show a tendency to break into poetry, which I'm inclined to regard as a rather ominous
16:34sign of mental disquietude.
16:38So we have an army that's been recruited according to the martial races theory.
16:42And we still see that theory in action in the monitoring of their letters.
16:46That certain groups, certain races will behave in certain ways according to this great theory.
16:52Yes, absolutely. It's like a big structure with which the British colonial army can work with.
17:00It is instructive to note the different behaviour of men of different races under pressure of despair.
17:07The Sikh either grows sulky or tries to malinger.
17:11The Mohammedan of the Punjab wails and prays.
17:15The Pathan also believes in the efficacy of prayer.
17:19But being a man of quicker wit than either of the others, in some cases seems definitely to have taken
17:26means to help himself.
17:28What is interesting is that often some of the Sippoists themselves have internalised these constructions, so that they try pandering
17:37to that notion.
17:38For example, the Sikhs, they often think of themselves as lions, because that's how they have been constructed.
17:46Because it's rather flattering.
17:48Yes, it is.
17:48Another power comes along and tells you that you are lions.
17:51Absolutely.
17:52You are warrior people.
17:53Absolutely.
17:53That's why I think the imperial rule in India was so very successful, because it was a combination of flattery
18:03and almost a sort of seduction that you are so brave, so go into battle and fight.
18:13In the early spring of 1915, for most Indian troops, the fighting was centred here, in northern France.
18:26Nerve Chapelle looks ordinary enough today, but the landmarks of a battle that claimed thousands of lives can still be
18:33seen.
18:34A dense area of woodland, called the Bois de Biel, where the Germans were dug in in unknown numbers.
18:42And the Leysbrook, a narrow but deep canal that bisected the battlefield, and which was to become a killing zone.
19:04And here, of course, we have the memorial to the Indians missing on the Western Front, at Nerve Chapelle.
19:10There are around about 4,700 names of the missing here.
19:16Military historian Geoff Bridger has made a close study of the Battle of Nerve Chapelle, which took place here over
19:22three days from the 10th to the 12th of March, 1915.
19:28So in March 1915, why was there a battle here?
19:32We were trying to establish that we were indeed a capable army, capable of defeating the Germans.
19:38And the purpose was to get our lads away from the wet trenches.
19:44They had been static for the winter.
19:46From about the end of November 1914, right the way through to the end of February 1915,
19:52there hadn't been a great deal of fighting.
19:53The men were wet, cold, and miserable.
19:55And it was intended to prove their fighting spirit, push the Germans back, and hopefully, more than push them back,
20:02break through.
20:03The ultimate aim was to get through to Lille.
20:06If we could have got through to Lille, which is a vital pivotal transport station,
20:10we would have gone a long way to sort of shorten the war.
20:16So this is the battlefield?
20:19This is the official history battlefield showing the situation on the first day, 10th of March 1915.
20:24And these are the German lines?
20:25The German lines are in green, and the British lines are in red.
20:29The British lines are running along here.
20:32The Indian lines are running along here.
20:34And the objective, essentially, is to push through the German lines, which were forming a salient.
20:39So the idea was to straighten the line, and to curl off to the right-hand side, towards the Bois
20:44de Biais.
20:45So this is the greatest attack that the Indians launch in the First World War on the Western Front.
20:52How significant was their role in the Battle of Nocheville?
20:55Very significant, indeed.
20:56They were excellent fighting soldiers, especially in hand-to-hand combat.
20:59The long-range rifle of the British forces wasn't that useful.
21:03You needed to get into hand-to-hand fighting using improvised weapons, clubs, knives, whatever was to hand.
21:07And, of course, the cookery was an ideal weapon.
21:10This is the weapon of the Gurkhas?
21:11It's the weapon of choice of the Gurkhas.
21:12And that and other things were used in the trenches, to the terror of the Germans opposite.
21:17They really thought that the Gurkhas were going to slice their ears off as a body tally.
21:21And they were extremely frightened of them.
21:23So it was a good plan with a good objective.
21:26It made strategic and tactical sense.
21:28It was an excellent plan, and it should have succeeded.
21:40The first day is a considerable success.
21:43The bulge of the village was taken, which was the first objective.
21:48Unfortunately, because of confusion and primarily lack of communication,
21:52the second and third days were not such a success at all.
21:56In fact, the second day was a day of confusion, and the third day pretty much a day of disaster.
22:04By the end of the first day, Indian and British troops had reached the edge of the Bois de Biel.
22:10The woods appeared to be empty of Germans, but without confirmation of this,
22:15the attackers were ordered to fall back to the Leisbrook and dig in for the night.
22:23And what happens overnight?
22:25Overnight, they are staying where they are.
22:27But the Germans are not idle.
22:30During the course of the night, they brought up massive reinforcements.
22:33They had units further back here.
22:35They brought them up.
22:36They passed through the wood.
22:38They occupied the wood at night time so that we couldn't see what was happening.
22:41And then, during the course of the night, they moved out from in front of the Bois de Biel
22:46and dug a trench right in front of it.
22:48And that trench was then heavily occupied
22:50and once more was able to cut straight into the lines of the Indian soldiers.
23:11But the real disaster for the India Corps at Neuve-Chapelle is not that initial successes are reversed,
23:18it's the loss of officers.
23:19Indeed so.
23:21The first 39th, for example, lost all their white officers in that initial attack.
23:25Any reinforcements that were brought in, they were not familiar with the units.
23:29They didn't speak the language for a start.
23:31The Indian Army was a unit and once it was depleted,
23:34I'm afraid those depletions could not be made up during the course of the war.
23:38And indeed they never were.
23:59By the autumn of 1915, the hazardous experiment
24:02of bringing Indian troops to fight for Britain in Europe had paid off,
24:07at least as far as the generals on the top brass were concerned.
24:11At Ypres, they had held the line at a moment of dire peril.
24:15At Neuve-Chapelle, they'd shown that the German trench line could be broken.
24:20Most importantly of all, they helped to buy the time needed to recruit and train Lord Kitchener's new army.
24:29A century on, it's a record worthy of remembrance.
24:35So your grandfather was among some of the first troops, the Indian troops, to fight on the Western Front.
24:40Yes.
24:40And this is?
24:42Sitar medal.
24:42The Sitar medal.
24:44And on the back, it has his name.
24:47Name?
24:48Bursing.
24:49He was a sepoy.
24:51What?
24:51He was number 4,874.
24:54Yes.
24:55And his regiment is the 59 Rifles.
24:5859 Rifles.
24:5859 Rifles.
24:59Wilds Rifles.
25:01So your grandfather was among the soldiers who stopped the German advance in 1914.
25:06Yes.
25:07Saved the British Army.
25:08Yes.
25:08Maybe saved Britain.
25:09And this is his...
25:11Pension book.
25:12His pension book.
25:13So this is your grandfather?
25:14Yes.
25:15Wow.
25:17This is his service record.
25:19Yes.
25:19With his pension, how much he gets in his pension?
25:22Yes.
25:22Five rupees.
25:23Not a lot of money.
25:25And he's fighting with the turban, always.
25:27Right.
25:28He refused the helmet.
25:31Because he...
25:32The British government tell, you take the helmet because of your safety.
25:36He said, my safety in the turban.
25:38He moved.
25:39He don't remove turban.
25:41You must be very proud of him.
25:42Yes.
25:52A year on the Western Front almost broke the India Corps.
25:57By the winter of 1915, nearly 35,000 officers and men were listed as dead, wounded or missing.
26:05Around the same number that had disembarked at Marseille just a year earlier.
26:13Along with the human cost came the destruction of something less tangible.
26:18The Corps' delicate web of cultural, religious and linguistic diversity, which had been held together by relationships between white officers
26:28and their men.
26:30The censor of the Indian males had been warning for months that the Corps was reaching breaking point.
26:36Finally, the decision was made to pull out all but the cavalry units from Europe and redeploy them in the
26:43Middle East.
26:48One last photograph, taken just days before the India Corps left Northern France.
26:54When we look at these faces, war-weary and battle-hardened, we see a group of individuals who've been to
27:01hell and back.
27:02But for the imperial system that sent them there, they were never seen as much more than useful types.
27:27The Western Front was 450 miles of misery and suffering, stretching from the Channel to the Swiss Elms.
27:37Britain and her imperial forces never held more than a quarter of it.
27:41Most of the rest was fought over by the French and the Germans.
27:45A bitter struggle that left deep scars still visible a century later.
27:52To understand the ferocity of that struggle, come to Vaucroix in Argan.
27:58This crater-pocked valley was once a hilltop village.
28:08The French call this a village disparu, a disappeared village, and it's not difficult to see why.
28:20It was in killing fields like Vaucroix that the French were confronted with an uncomfortable truth.
28:26One which they'd been struggling with ever since a united, powerful Germany had risen on their eastern borders.
28:34The disturbing realisation that if it came again to war with Germany, they would be outnumbered.
28:44By the end of 1914, France had lost a third of a million men.
28:48More Frenchmen died in that first year of the war than any other, even though there was only fighting for
28:54five months.
28:54The Western Front became a meat grinder that consumed men.
28:59And for the French, this awoke a deep national paranoia.
29:03A fear that had haunted her politicians and her generals for a generation.
29:07That the country could simply run out of men.
29:12France, with a population of 40 million, seemed destined to lose when pitted against Germany with 67 million.
29:20But France had something Germany did not.
29:24Access to an overseas empire.
29:36She may have been a republic at home, but on the world stage, France counted as an empire.
29:42And in a Paris suburb, Le Jordan colonial bears witness to the material wealth that once flowed into France from
29:51her former colonies in Indochina, the Caribbean, North and West Africa.
29:57When war came, France, just like Britain, drew on her imperial holdings for something that had become far more valuable
30:04than material wealth.
30:06Manpower.
30:29France had called on her colonial troops before.
30:32In the 1870s, in the war against Prussia, North African Spahi, Berber and Arab cavalrymen, had been brought over to
30:40fight in Europe.
30:41But in the crisis of 1914, for the first time, France decided to bring over infantrymen from sub-Saharan West
30:49Africa.
30:51Recruited in colonies like Mali, Mauritania and Niger, they were known collectively as the Tirailleurs Senegalais.
30:59Riflemen, named after France's largest West African colony, Senegal.
31:10At the Albert Khan Museum in Paris, there's a unique collection of colour photographs of the Tirailleurs Senegalais.
31:18Soldiers who like the troops from British India were recruited according to elaborate theories of race.
31:25This is a photograph that, quite incredibly, we actually know the name of this soldier.
31:31His name was Amadou Saar.
31:33And one of the reasons that he in particular is here on the Western Front is because his people, the
31:39Wolof tribe of West Africa, were one of those peoples that the French colonial theorists had decided were a naturally
31:45warrior people, a race guerriere.
31:48And this theory directly influenced not just who's recruited, but how they're used on the Western Front, whether they're put
31:55into a labour battalion, whether they're a support division, or whether, like the Wolofs, they're seen as shock troops, troops
32:00who should lead an assault.
32:01It's not just a textbook theory. Work's been done to look at the casualty rates among soldiers who came from
32:08the warrior races.
32:09And we know that Wolofs, men from his community, were about three times more likely to die in combat than
32:16white soldiers fighting in the same campaigns.
32:20And when I look at this young guy, Amadou Saar, he looks like half my relatives from Africa. He looks
32:26like people in my family.
32:27That brings it home that this idea that somebody came to his country with an expertise, supposedly, in the nature
32:36of his peoples, the characteristics of his tribes, and made decisions that determined whether he would live or die, whether
32:43he would fight or be left in Africa.
32:47And I've read a lot most of my life about racial theories, about colonialism.
32:51And when I look into his eyes, I can't help seeing him as a victim of just the craziness of
32:56the ideas that surrounded race in the 20th century.
33:07The Khan collection contains other clues about what can happen when the madness of war is overlaid with the craziness
33:15of racial prejudice.
33:17Oh, this is incredible. This is two West African soldiers in their full uniforms, their combat soldiers, with the Adrienne
33:29helmet and the coupe coupe, which was a kind of machete that the West African soldiers used.
33:35And it became an obsession of German propaganda, this idea that this was a barbaric weapon used by uncivilized, savage
33:42soldiers in Europe, which is ludicrous in a war where there was poison gas and flamethrowers and U-boats.
33:49But it's really important to understand that when the French decided to bring men like this into the Western Front
33:56to fight for them, they were breaking all of the rules of empire.
34:00The first rule is that white life was sacrosanct. Everywhere in the empire, but especially in Africa, when there was
34:07violence against white people, it was met with the most extreme responses, the most extreme violence.
34:13But in the middle of a war of national survival, which is what the First World War became, the French
34:18have to abandon that taboo.
34:20And to bring black Africans, Africans from below the Sahara into Europe and order them order them to kill white
34:28men is an abandonment of everything that empires were built upon.
34:39The French general, Charles Maugin, was one of the most vocal champions of recruitment from France's African colonies.
34:48He was as tough as they come, and the impression made by his portrait is confirmed by the nickname given
34:56to him by the troops, the cannibal.
35:00Mongein hated Germans.
35:02As a child, he'd been driven from his family home when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed during
35:09the Franco-Prussian War.
35:11He was raised in the spirit of revanchism, revenge against the hated Bosch, and with a burning desire for the
35:19reconquest of the lost provinces.
35:23He joined the army and made a name for himself policing France's empire, leading native troops against tribal uprisings and
35:32suppressing them, as the Maugin family album reveals, with ruthless brutality.
35:38This initiation into the harshness of colonial rule led to the formation of colonial rule led to the formation of
35:44one of his core beliefs.
35:46France, as Maugin's statue proclaims, is a nation of 100 million.
35:52He believed that France's 60 million colonial subjects could be part of the French Republic if they were prepared to
36:00fight and die for it.
36:05In 1910, Charles Maugin published this book, La Force Noire, The Black Army.
36:11It's basically a manifesto calling for the mass recruitment of Africans into the French Army.
36:20Part of his argument was the familiar one about numbers, but Maugin went further, citing experiments by French surgeons who
36:29claimed to have successfully operated on black Africans without anaesthetics.
36:34Maugin argued that the so-called warrior races were inured to the impact of modern warfare, thanks to what he
36:41called their primitive nature and underdeveloped nervous systems.
36:48Maugin got the chance to take his arguments a stage further at Verdun in 1916.
37:02Of all the human meat grinders of the First World War, the Battle of Verdun was surely the most pitiless.
37:09Over a ten-month period, from February to December 1916, half a million men were wounded, a quarter of a
37:18million killed.
37:19There are more than 15,000 French soldiers buried in this section alone, including French Muslims, their gravestones facing towards
37:28Mecca.
37:29At least we know their names.
37:32In the Ostry Tower that looms on the skyline are the remains of 150,000 unknown soldiers, their identities erased
37:42by the Armageddon that was Verdun.
37:46Attrition on this horrific scale was precisely what German commanders had in mind when they unleashed their offensive early in
37:541916.
37:56A memorial at the city gates recalls a long list of sieges, sacks and liberations reaching back 1,500 years.
38:06These are the battle honors of a citadel that was of as much symbolic as strategic importance to France.
38:13By attacking it, the Germans knew they would provoke a furious counter-attack.
38:19And this would be a chance, in the words of the German commander, Falkenhayn, to bleed France dry.
38:45The town of Verdun is about 10 miles in that direction, and in 1916 it was defended by a ring
38:52of fortresses.
38:53And the most important, the centerpiece of the whole system, was this place, Fort Duermont.
38:58The fort underneath my feet, it's encased under thousands and thousands of tons of concrete.
39:05And its defenses included these.
39:08These are retractable steel gun emplacements.
39:12It makes this fort look more like a battleship than a fortress.
39:15They rise up out of the ground and fire in all directions.
39:18There are machine gun emplacements, observation posts, and underneath here, there's a barracks full of soldiers.
39:24And in 1916, in the Battle of Verdun, this place took on the same sort of symbolic importance as the
39:30town itself.
39:42The battle began disastrously and farcically for the French.
39:46A German soldier scavenging for food somehow penetrated Duermont's defenses,
39:51and found a way into the fort itself, where he was quickly joined by his comrades.
39:58With barely a shot fired, the keystone of Verdun's defenses became an enemy stronghold.
40:05Humiliated and shocked, the French unleashed a torrent of shells at the fort.
40:09But by the autumn, it was clear that only a full-scale frontal assault would drive the Germans out.
40:18General Nivelle was in overall charge of the forts recapture, but his second-in-command was Charles Montjean.
40:25And the cannibal made sure that when units were selected for the assault, elements of La Force Noire were among
40:32them.
40:44On the 24th of October, 1916, French forces emerged from thick fog.
40:50And after a few hours of fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the echoing tunnels of the fort, they retook
40:56Duermont.
41:05When the Senegalese soldiers, who had taken part in the recapture of Fort Duermont, marched off this battlefield,
41:11they were ordered by their white officers not to wash the mud off their uniforms,
41:15so that the people of Verdun and the people of the French villages behind the lines
41:19would know that they were the Africans who had taken Duermont back from the Germans.
41:29And the message got through. The cover of a popular Sunday magazine was soon telling its readers that one black
41:37is worth two bosh.
41:41But running alongside the gung-ho patriotism were less palatable themes.
41:46The innate savagery of the colonial soldiers, their lack of civilisation, their otherness.
41:58Today, a contemporary statue that honours the black heroes of Duermont stresses their humanity, as well as their courage.
42:06But at the time, they were seen rather differently.
42:11Throughout the war, everything to do with the colonial soldiers, from the way they were recruited,
42:16to the way they were deployed on the battlefields, was influenced and shaped by ideas of race.
42:22But at the same time, the French liked to believe that their nation was colour blind.
42:26That in France, it was culture, and not skin colour, that really mattered.
42:31France, in effect, became trapped between the racial ideas she used to justify ruling over millions of people in her
42:38colonial empire,
42:39and the ideals of the French Republic, the revolutionary ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality.
42:48In the midst of battle, there was little time to tease out these contradictions.
42:54But away from the battlefields, on the home front, they were harder to ignore.
43:00During the war, Fréjus, a small fishing port on the Mediterranean coast, was an army town,
43:06surrounded by military bases, depots and barracks.
43:09And prominent among the soldiers stationed here during the winter months were the Tirailleurs Senegalais,
43:15as historian Alison Fell explains.
43:22Fréjus was a very small town in the First World War, about 8,000 people,
43:26and there's about 40,000 French African soldiers who spent the winters here.
43:30And so this small town on the Côte d'Azur suddenly has an army camp four or five times the
43:37size of it,
43:38with men from Africa.
43:40Absolutely, it must have been absolutely transformed,
43:42and the vast majority of the population would never have seen a black man before.
44:00So Alison, what stereotypes about Africans and African soldiers that were common at the time in France?
44:07Before the First World War, the common stereotypes were of savage, cannibalistic, highly sexed,
44:13certainly for African men.
44:15And there's a lot of nervousness about the presence of black African troops on French soil in the First World
44:22War,
44:22which is one of the reasons why there is an initiative from the top to propagate the image of the
44:27African soldier
44:28as a loyal, simpleton soldier, a bon enfant, in order to try and allay those fears.
44:48One of the main ways that they propagated this image was through an advert for a drink called Bananya.
44:52It's a very famous advertisement with a grinning tirailleur, and the slogan is Yabon,
44:59which was the slogan that was most associated with the tirailleur Senegalese.
45:04And that's part of the language, the simple version of Pinch in French, that the tirailleur were taught by the
45:10French army?
45:11Absolutely. The French army realised that the officers couldn't communicate with the African troops,
45:17and also because they spoke a variety of different languages, they couldn't communicate with each other,
45:21so they were taught a form of Pinch in French.
45:24So Yabon in standard French would be C'est bon, so it's good.
45:28So it's like baby talk?
45:29It's like baby talk, absolutely. And they were taught a very, very limited set of set phrases,
45:35so it also really limited their ability to express themselves beyond the most basic daily needs.
45:45But in Fréjus, the prejudices of the French army came up against someone who saw things a little differently.
45:53Lucie Costurier was a Paris-based painter who moved to Fréjus to escape the war.
45:59When African soldiers came to her house looking for odd jobs and scrounging for cigarettes,
46:05she struck up what was for the times an unlikely friendship with them.
46:11She's kind of quite fascinated, I think, like many of the French civilians, to meet Africans for the first time.
46:17She invites them in, and then she asks them, the French army, if she can teach them,
46:23and it develops from there, and then from that point she starts to offer regular French lessons.
46:28She taught them French, she taught them writing and reading, and it was through her work with them in a
46:34way
46:40of the French.
46:41If I had been swayed by the opinion commonly held that the intelligence of Negroes develops only until the age
46:49of 13,
46:50and decreases after that, I would never have set out to teach a 28-year-old to read and write,
46:57and one who had practised for seven years the muddled jargon of the tirailleurs.
47:05She's put a finger on the hypocrisy of the French deployment of African soldiers,
47:10that it's done in the name of republicanism, equality, fraternity, a colour-blind nation,
47:15but that's not really what's happening.
47:16Absolutely, and there are a lot of objections within the French army
47:20that treatment of the tirailleurs Senegalais that they considered too soft would spoil them for military actions.
47:30So they wanted the tirailleurs to be savage on the battlefield,
47:34but to be infantilised, to be children when they're off duty, when they're in towns like Fréjus.
47:39Absolutely. They said that they might need to implement a policy of what they called re-Senegalisation,
47:46which was the idea that they would take all these kind of soft, civilising influences away from them
47:51and they would become the fighters again that they needed to be.
47:58And France would always need fighters until the last German had been driven from the last trench
48:05that scarred French territory.
48:07From 1917 onwards, recruitment of the tirailleurs Senegalais grew in scale and intensity.
48:16After the war, a mosque in the West African style was built in Fréjus
48:20in memory of those who had rallied to the tricolor.
48:25But the circumstances of their recruitment should also be remembered.
48:37French recruitment in Africa in the First World War fell far short of the country's republican ideals.
48:44Recruitment in West Africa was outsourced to agents, to intermediaries, to men who worked to a quota system and were
48:51paid by results.
48:52Now, what this meant in practice was that men were forced, coerced into the French army.
48:58And they tended to be from the most powerless sections of their communities, the poor, orphans, boys who had no
49:05one to protect them.
49:06But it also seems certain that some of the men forced into the French army were in effect slaves.
49:13There's stories of men being forced to the collection stations bound in chains.
49:17And we know that the African agents carried out raids to seize men from their villages and take them to
49:23the collecting stations.
49:25Those raids were horribly similar to the raids of the slave trade, a trade that took place in the same
49:30parts of Africa in earlier centuries.
49:32Now, to me, it's really difficult to think of a more bitter, more uncomfortable irony than that, that men were
49:41taken from their homes, bound in chains, and sent to Europe to fight for liberty and civilisation.
49:56Liberty and civilisation were words often on the lips of Europe's politicians as the meat grinder of the war continued
50:04to turn.
50:05And it wasn't just the British and the French who swore by them.
50:09The Germans also believed that these values were what the fighting was all about.
50:15To her enemies, Germany was clearly the aggressor.
50:19Her armies a Teutonic horde with the blood of poor little Belgium on their bayonets and the rubble of Liège
50:25under their boots.
50:27But, of course, things looked different from the other side of the front line.
50:32From Berlin, the aggressors were the mighty empires who threatened Germany with encirclement.
50:39France and Britain to the west and the juggernaut of Russia to the east.
50:44Worse still, Germany was cut off from her own imperial holdings by naval blockade and could not do what Britain
50:52and France had done, bring colonial manpower to fight on Europe's soil.
50:58To the German public, carefully primed by the German propaganda machine, this was nothing less than a betrayal of civilisation
51:07itself.
51:08The modern hygienic warfare of the white man reduced to mere savagery by a West African wielding a machete.
51:19That sense of anger, outrage and betrayal can still be felt in all its rawness in German satirical magazines from
51:28the period.
51:36John Bull today, in the German satirical magazine, Kladder Dutch.
51:43This is John Bull, but he's been distorted into an exaggerated, racialised, stereotypical, prejudiced view of an African.
51:52It's just a horrible image.
51:56So he has the Union Jack tie as John Bull wore, his pipe, his top hat, but he has a
52:01ring through his nose.
52:02And it's the sort of racialised, hateful image that we associate with the American Deep South.
52:09I really didn't expect to be shocked. I don't think I'm an easily shockable person.
52:16But this is, this is a really shocking image.
52:18You can still feel the hate that inspired them.
52:34So in the name of civilisation, France is employing savages.
52:42All of the clichés, all of the stereotypes of Africans are represented here.
52:49There's the hint of cannibalism and of the mutilation of the dead.
52:53There's wildness, savagery.
52:56And the French white officer is leading this army of supposedly subhuman savages into war, pushing them on, pointing them
53:04on.
53:05It's a raw nerve. It's a live issue.
53:08This sense of victimhood, that all of these peoples, these lesser peoples, are being turned on Germany in a way
53:15that's unfair and uncivilised and unacceptable.
53:20The brutality of these caricatures is a stark reminder of a simple truth about the experiences of the soldiers of
53:28empire who were sucked into the world's war.
53:32Not only did they have the conflict and all its manifest horrors to deal with, they also had the heavy
53:38load of ignorance, prejudice and racism to carry on their shoulders.
53:43And these experiences were, for the most part, unrecorded.
53:49We have their names, far too many names, but precious little elves, apart from the occasional fragment preserved by chance.
53:58A letter in a census report.
54:01A photograph taken behind a front line.
54:05A medal and a proud family memory.
54:14But there is one place where, in the most unexpected way, you suddenly get heart-stoppingly close to an individual.
54:23And it's as if the forgotten ghosts of the world's war are suddenly standing there before you.
54:36The latter's story that I leave for a moment is the most difficult time.
54:42That is, for many generations rather than the ones that come to God's Monsieur, the ones who have sold to
54:54God's Stephen.
54:54It, the people of the people of the people who have had died after their friendship in India.
55:00That's beautiful. A voice from another world.
55:15You can hear when he makes mistakes. You can hear his stumbles.
55:18Yeah.
55:29The man whose voice has been so miraculously preserved in the Humboldt University Sound Archive here in Berlin is Mal
55:38Singh, a soldier with the British India Corps.
55:41He was brought over to France in 1914 to fight for the British and then taken prisoner by the Germans
55:47on the Western Front.
55:49According to the punctilious notes taken at the time, we know that on the 11th of December 1916, at four
55:57o'clock, Mal Singh, aged 24, from the village of Rana Suki in the Punjab,
56:03was ordered to stand in front of a horn microphone and recite his plaintive poem, which was then recorded directly
56:11onto a shellac disc.
56:14For us, the recording brings to life a poignant story of a man transported across continents and oceans to fight
56:22and to be made prisoner in someone else's war.
56:26But the ethnographers and linguists who made the recording had no interest in that.
56:31All they wanted was a sample of his Punjabi dialect to further their research and cataloguing of racial and linguistic
56:40types.
56:41But it's only thanks to their tunnel vision that a century later, the ghosts of Mal Singh and hundreds of
56:49his comrades materialize in the Sound Archive.
56:52And precious fragments of their experiences could be recovered.
57:18Here, in a cemetery near Berlin, are the headstones of more than 200 Indian prisoners of war who died in
57:25captivity.
57:26Mal Singh is not among them.
57:30Maybe he made it back to India to eat butter and drink milk once more.
57:36Maybe he was transferred to another camp where his death, like the deaths of many others, went unrecorded.
57:45He survives today as a snatch of crackly sound, recorded for reasons that would have been obscure to him, and
57:53preserved for reasons that now probably seem obscure to us.
57:58Progress, science, culture, civilization.
58:08In remembrance services every year, we make a promise to the dead of the world's war.
58:17Living up to that promise seems even more necessary when so much and so many have been forgotten.
58:41Celebrating Black excellence with insights from leaders in sport, science, fashion and beyond, Black is the New Black, streaming now
58:49on iPlayer.
58:50And as Black History Month continues, so does our story of the Forgotten Soldiers of the Empire.
58:56Next.
58:57Next.
58:58Next.
59:02Next.
59:04Next.
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