Foreign Legions The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire

This programme contains language which some viewers may find offensive

In early November 1914, in Istanbul,

the capital of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, a new weapon was unveiled.

It would spread the First World War far beyond the borders of Europe.

Inside the Fatih Mosque, Sultan Mehmed V,

recognised by many Muslims as the leader of the Islamic world,

was presented with the Sword of the Prophet,

symbolising his authority to call the Muslim world to arms.

This was how the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War,

not just with a declaration of war but with a declaration of jihad,

holy war, against the powers it now described as the enemies of Islam -

Britain, France and Russia.

The declaration of jihad was a vivid signal

that the war between the nations of Europe

would become a global war between empires.

A war that would spread to lands

far beyond the mud and the trenches of the Western Front,

and its savagery would draw in millions from across the world.

In Africa, a rogue German general would lead his army of Africans

on a bloody odyssey, leaving a trail of death, starvation and disease.

In Libya and in Darfur,

tribal rebellions would be sparked in the name of religion.

While on the borders of mighty empires,

plots would be laid for insurrection and invasion.

And all the while on the Western Front itself,

the pace and scale of industrialised warfare would intensify.

More and more men from all over the world

would be pulled in to service the machinery of mass slaughter.

This was a place where Senegalese and Vietnamese soldiers

fought in the same trenches.

Chinese labourers supplied Indian cavalrymen.

And black American troops served under white French officers.

As the war spread, it drew in millions of diverse people

of every race, every colour and every religion,

and from all over the world.

They fought alongside their European comrades

and they died in terrible numbers.

And now all of them have a claim to be remembered

as the heroes and the victims of the World's War.

In the autumn of 1914, the attention of the world

was focused on northern France and Belgium.

The First Battle of Ypres was grinding to a halt

and the Western Front was forming, a quagmire of blood and mud.

For the next four years, success would be measured in yards

and disaster in millions.

But thousands of miles away, in Istanbul,

it was possible to see the war as fluid, expansive.

Germany and her new ally, Ottoman Turkey,

were exploring the intriguing possibility of taking the fight

to the enemy by turning their imperial assets against them.

After the declaration of jihad in the Fatih Mosque

a holy war procession began to march

towards the European quarter of the city.

MOB CHANTS

As the demonstrators surged through these streets,

they began to attack, to loot and even to set fire

to British- and French-owned businesses

and European residents of the city began to flee in fear.

Behind the scenes of riot and disorder,

some observers sensed a controlling hand choreographing the action.

One of those pulling the strings was Max von Oppenheim,

maverick archaeologist and self-styled Orientalist.

Before the war, Oppenheim had spent years

studying and travelling in the Islamic world.

He'd been shunned by the inner circles of the German establishment,

but with the outbreak of hostilities,

his unusual private passions

suddenly took on global significance.

In August 1914, the German Foreign Office

asked Oppenheim to draw up plans for a holy war.

The memorandum he produced was entitled

On Revolutionising The Islamic Territories Of Our Enemies.

And it was basically a blueprint

for what he assured everybody would be a global revolution.

His central recommendation was that

an intelligence bureau for the east be established,

a sort of German jihad bureau.

It was to be headed by Oppenheim himself

and its task was to spread propaganda across the world

and dispatch secret missions to enemy territories.

'Historian Sean McMeekin has studied the evolution

'of Oppenheim's cloak-and-dagger plans.'

He was really quite an enthusiast for all things Islam,

up to and including the idea

which appealed to him when he lived in Cairo of having his own harem.

In his vision, though, the potential of Islam was lethal.

That is, he really thought it could destroy the British Empire.

It really would be a global jihad,

a global holy war against the British Empire,

where the Ottoman Sultan would play possibly the most important role,

but obviously not the only one.

So, in 1914, there's this scheme

that could destroy the British and French empires?

Well, that's right. Britain, in particular,

had a great Achilles heel.

In the Indian subcontinent, in the Gulf States, in Egypt,

Britain ruled over, depending on which estimate you trust,

upwards of a hundred million Muslim subjects.

By some reckoning, Britain was actually

the greatest Muslim power in the world

if you simply judge by numbers.

The French also ruled over a Muslim empire in North Africa,

so all of Germany's potential enemies in a great power war

had this potential Achilles heel of Muslim subjects.

With the Ottomans as their junior partners and with a jihad unleashed against their enemies,

the Kaiser and his followers dreamed of spreading German power,

of driving the British out of India and of redrafting the map of Africa

to create a vast German colony in the centre of that continent.

For those who wanted to believe it,

this whole intoxicating vision suddenly seemed possible.

Oppenheim had worked hard behind the scenes

to secure the declaration of jihad at the Fatih Mosque,

but his most significant contribution was a piece of political theatre

that took place on the other side of town.

Here at the German embassy, in front of a crowd of demonstrators,

14 Muslim soldiers, men from the French colonies in North Africa,

were theatrically paraded out onto that balcony

by the German ambassador himself.

These men were prisoners of war

who'd been captured on the Western Front

in the first battles of the First World War.

The Germans had then recruited them and transported them secretly

right across Europe on the Orient Express.

The German cover story was that these men were acrobats in a travelling circus.

And now, here at the embassy, with the crowd looking up at them,

they were made to shout slogans in Arabic and Turkish

in praise of the Ottoman Sultan

and they declared oaths promising that they would personally

take part in the jihad against their former colonial masters.

And Istanbul was just the start.

Oppenheim had plans for something on a global scale,

a special camp designed to turn prisoners of war into jihadists.

It was located 1,000 miles away in Germany.

Zossen, a small town just outside Berlin, had a busy 20th century.

Until the mid-1990s, it was home

to the largest Soviet Army base in East Germany.

Before that, secret Nazi bunkers had been built

disguised as village houses.

And Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was planned from here.

But buried beneath theses layers of history lies an even stranger story.

During the First World War, Zossen was home to a prisoner of war camp

called the Halpmondlager, the Half Moon or Crescent Camp.

Historian Heike Liebau has studied the history of this unusual place.

The camp was meant for, basically, prisoners

from North African countries and from India,

so prisoners from the French and the British Colonial Army.

And the number of prisoners who were kept there

is about 4,000 to 5,000 at one time.

And it's called the Half Moon Camp

-because the half moon is the symbol of Islam?

-Mm-hm.

It's called the Half Moon Camp

because this prisoner of war camp was meant for Muslim prisoners

and it was part of the German jihad strategy.

German propaganda railed against its enemy's deployment of colonial soldiers,

what it called "savages".

But at the Half Moon Camp, these same soldiers were being recruited

for a war against their imperial masters.

When they were captured,

they may have thought that their war was over.

Instead, they were entering a new theatre of conflict

where they were bombarded with jihadist propaganda.

So, these officers, these propaganda intelligence officers,

what are they doing, how are they getting

their message across to the prisoners?

One idea was to have a camp newspaper.

It was called El Jihad

and the idea was to convince as many prisoners as possible

to become so-called jihadists.

Oppenheim took a personal interest

in the day-to-day running of the Half Moon Camp,

ensuring that the dietary and religious sensitivities of the camp inmates were catered for.

But Oppenheim wanted to do something that would prove beyond doubt

that Germany was the true friend of Islam.

In the beginning of 1915, they started to discuss the idea

to build a mosque for the prisoners of war in the Half Moon Camp.

It was not built just out of religious ideas,

it was built out of political ideas,

and it was built out of the expectation

that it would serve the propaganda purposes which Germany had.

This Half Moon Camp was a show camp

and we have lots of postcards showing the mosque in the camp,

showing the prisoners... doing sport games,

doing religious festivities, which were sent around the world.

But despite the mosque,

despite the special treatment and the daily indoctrination,

volunteers for jihad from the Half Moon Camp

would be counted in tens, not thousands.

After the horrors of trench warfare,

most prisoners of war were more interested in surviving

than fighting new wars.

And even those who did volunteer

sometimes had their own private motivations.

That seems to be the case with one of the most intriguing characters

to emerge from the shadows of the World's War.

Mir Mast was a Muslim

from a small mountain village on the border of Afghanistan and India.

He was a Jemadar, a platoon commander, in the 58th Vaughan's Rifles,

part of the India Corp

who had been sent to fight in France at the start of the war.

By the spring of 1915,

Mir Mast had already endured a bitter winter in the trenches.

He'd seen fierce fighting and been awarded

the Indian Distinguished Service Medal for gallantry and devotion to duty.

One rainy night in early March,

a week before the start of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle,

he crept out of his trench

and led 20 of his men silently across no-man's-land...

..not to attack the enemy, but to desert.

This was the first leg of an incredible journey.

One canny soldier with a strong instinct for survival

was about to be pitched into a world of intrigue and conspiracy.

What I've got here arranged in front of me

is the paper trail, the documents left behind by Mir Mast

in archives in London and Delhi and Berlin.

In The London Gazette is the formal announcement

of Mir Mast's Indian Distinguished Service Medal.

But by the time his award was announced

this gallant officer was already being debriefed by German officials.

These are the notes from the interrogation of Mir Mast

by a German official on the 7th of March 1915, in Lille, in France.

So, this is just a few days after he's defected

and brought other soldiers with him

over to the German lines at Neuve Chapelle.

The most important page is this one.

This is a map of the Khyber Pass,

perhaps drawn by Mir Mast himself,

it certainly comes out of his interrogation,

and it lists the numbers and the locations,

the dispositions of the British and Indian troops on the Khyber Pass,

the critical route between Afghanistan and British India.

So, clearly, having deserted to the Germans,

Mir Mast was determined to prove to them just how useful he could be.

From Lille, Mir Mast was taken to the Half Moon Camp

where his cooperation would have brought him to the attention of agents of the jihad bureau.

They were on the lookout for volunteers

for one of the most audacious and dangerous missions of the war.

An exhibition to Kabul to persuade the Emir of Afghanistan

to switch sides and join a holy war against British India.

The mission was made up of German and Turkish diplomats,

Indian nationalists and volunteers from the Half Moon camp

whose local knowledge would be invaluable.

The expedition would set off from Istanbul...

heading first towards Baghdad.

From there, they'd cross the salt deserts and mountains of Persia

before dropping onto the dusty plains of Afghanistan

and their final destination...Kabul.

The most intriguing piece of evidence in this whole story is this photograph.

We know it was taken by the Germans and it shows six Indian soldiers

wearing what look like Turkish uniforms.

On the back of the original photograph

was the title Six Pattans, along with four names,

one of which is Mir Mast.

He's the guy on the far left,

a guy who set himself slightly away from the others.

But it's his face,

this guy has the face of a man who's lived the life of Mir Mast,

who's lived between empires, who's lived a life of intrigue.

It's the face of a born survivor.

The mission set off in May 1915.

Dodging Russian and British patrols, running short of water and supplies,

more than half of the expedition

were lost to exhaustion, disease and defection.

But a core group did reach Kabul.

They were eventually granted official audiences with the Emir.

He weighed up his options,

calculating which imperial power was likely to come out on top.

But the British were past masters of the great game

and were able to undermine all the inspiring talk of holy war.

Well, the British are quite aware, of course,

of what the Germans are up to.

They know that the Germans are there

and they know what the Germans are trying to do.

And so all the British really have to do

is make it clear to the Emir

that it's worth his while not to switch sides,

to increase his subsidy somewhat.

In the end, a lot of gold

was kind of flying around in all directions in the war.

In the end, the Emir decided to stick with the devils he knew

and the jihad bureau's schemes unravelled

in the cold Afghan winter.

There were limited uprisings in Libya, where Zanusi tribesmen marched on the Suez Canal,

and in Darfur,

but Kabul was to be the swansong for Oppenheim's much vaunted strategy

of revolutionising the Muslim subjects of the enemy.

Failure for the elaborate strategies of nations

doesn't necessarily mean failure for the more modest strategies of individuals.

This document is the final piece in the jigsaw

in the remarkable life of Mir Mast.

This is a secret British report

into the nominal role of Indian prisoners of war

suspected of having deserted to the enemy.

It's from October 1918, near the end of the war.

As well as giving the regiments and the names of these soldiers,

this document critically also gives us the latest information

that the British have received on what happened to them.

And for Mir Mast and two of his colleagues, what it says

is these three accompanied the Turco-German mission to Afghanistan

and are reported to have returned to their homes in June 1915.

So, there you have it, evidence that the British, at least,

are convinced that Mir Mast made it all the way from the Western Front

back to his home.

The North West Frontier

wasn't the only potential flash point on the imperial map.

Africa, with its patchwork of imperial holdings,

stitched together during the so-called "Scramble for Africa"

at the end of the 19th century, was also ripe for conflict.

Here in German East Africa, present-day Tanzania,

the sparks from Europe's war would start a conflagration

that would ultimately consume the lives of millions of Africans.

In the decades before the war, German East Africa was booming.

Gold had recently been discovered

and vast coffee and rubber plantations fuelled the engine of imperial commerce.

The capital, Dar es Salaam,

bustled with shipping and was held up as a model of what a colonial city should be.

German East Africa had only got to this point

because the Germans had brutally enforced their will over the local African people.

And they'd achieved that through the creation

of an army of local African recruits.

The Askari, the key Swahili word for soldier,

had been recruited from those tribes who had fought most affectively against the Germans

in the early years of the colony.

So it was, if you like, a sort of backhanded compliment.

They were well paid, they were highly disciplined

and they were extremely well trained.

When the war came, German East Africa was cut off,

surrounded by the colonies of Belgium,

Portugal and Britain.

Military resistance appeared futile.

This was the view held by the colony's civilian governor,

Dr Heinrich Schnee.

As a colonial administrator, Schnee wanted to protect German East Africa

from the destruction of war, so that once the fighting was over,

it could quickly get back to making money.

But the colony's military commander had other priorities.

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was one of Germany's colonial hard men.

With the Fatherland at war in Europe,

he believed the colonies had a duty to fight,

if only to divert resources away from the Western Front.

According to all accounts,

Lettow-Vorbeck was cultured and personally charming,

but by the time he arrived here in East Africa,

it was clear that he was also a man with a streak of ruthlessness,

a character trait that was to prove disastrous

for literally millions of people on this continent.

The first major action in this disastrous war

came in November 1914,

when a British flotilla approached the coast of German East Africa.

On board was an 8,000-strong expeditionary force

drawn from the British Army in India.

Their destination was the busy German port of Tanga.

They expected little, if any, resistance.

Word had reached them that Governor Schnee was willing to discuss a neutrality pact.

HORN HONKS

But that news was out of date.

When Lettow-Vorbeck heard about the invasion force,

he immediately despatched Askari units to Tanga

with orders to dig in and resist.

The stage was set for the first major offensive

of the war in East Africa.

It's difficult to think of a battle that better illustrates

just how strange things can get

when global empires go to war in other people's countries.

On paper, the battle here at Tanga

was a fight between the British and the Germans,

but the army that Britain landed on these beaches

was mainly made up of Indians, men from Kashmir, men from Bangalore

and the princely states of the Raj,

while the defenders of German East Africa,

the army dug in around the town of Tanga over there,

they were mainly Africans, Askaris from across East Africa.

The situation on the ground

was complicated by a set of racial theories

in the heads of those in charge of the battle.

The British commander, Major General Aiken,

was a man who knew little about this continent

and little about its people,

but what he did know about was the idea of racial hierarchies,

one of those theories that underpinned imperialism,

and he was convinced that British-trained Indians

were far superior to German-trained Africans.

And he became supremely overconfident that his Indians

would, in his words, "Make short work of a lot of niggers."

The Indian troops landed without opposition,

but waiting for them on the outskirts of town were the Askari,

outnumbered, but well-armed.

As the Indian and British soldiers

got within 600 yards of the town of Tanga

the German machine guns opened up.

GUNFIRE

Whole units were mowed down.

In two days of fighting,

more than 800 Indian and British troops were killed or wounded.

German casualties numbered 150 men.

The British were forced to accept that the invasion had failed.

They sent a party of officers to negotiate with the Germans

here at Tanga's hospital.

According to one eye-witness,

they discussed the battle "as if it had been a football match".

The unexpected victory of Lettow-Vorbeck and his Askari

marked the birth of a myth that was to live on in Germany for decades.

After Tanga, the German public

became fascinated by every detail of the war in Africa.

The Kaiser sent personal commendations to the East African Army

and the German press and the German propaganda machine

set about transforming a little-known colonial hard man

into a living legend and a Teutonic hero.

MEN SING IN GERMAN

But set-piece battles like Tanga would be the exception.

Cut off from regular supply lines, Lettow-Vorbeck's tactics

were, for the most part, to avoid major engagements.

Instead, he launched hit-and-run raids over as wide an area as possible.

Lettow-Vorbeck and his Askari troops set off on a 1,000-mile journey.

Armies from South Africa

and the British, Belgian and Portuguese colonies

all set off in pursuit.

And he drew them deeper and deeper into East and Central Africa.

This was a war of endless marches, where the deadliest enemies

were climate, exhaustion and disease.

Of the 20,000 South African troops sent after Lettow-Vorbeck,

half were invalided home due to illness.

For all its well-documented horrors, the Western Front

was at least a narrowly-defined killing zone.

But the war in Africa

passed directly through countless villages like a plague of locusts.

And for the civilians caught in its chaotic path,

there was nothing romantic about this blood-stained "safari".

Many were press-ganged as porters,

forced to carry the war forward on their backs.

The British alone recruited

about a million Africans into the Carrier Corps.

These were men who were made to march alongside the armies

carrying great 60lb loads of food and ammunition.

They were overworked and underfed, and about 20% of them died.

Now that's a casualty rate

that compares to anything on the Western Front.

One British official had no doubt that their treatment

would have been considered a scandal had they not been merely Africans.

"After all," he said, "who cares about native carriers?"

The Germans behaved, if anything, even worse.

When they swept into villages like this,

they simply kidnapped the men.

Lettow-Vorbeck sometimes had men tied together with ropes

and those who tried to escape were simply shot dead.

Before the war, the fertile hinterlands of German East Africa

had provided a surplus of food.

Robbed of men to work the fields and tend the cattle,

food stocks now waned and harvests failed.

GOSPEL SINGING

Lettow-Vorbeck's war of choice brought nothing but disaster.

Up to a third of a million African civilians

are believed to have perished in the famines

caused directly by his campaign.

Ludwig Depper was a German doctor who served alongside Lettow-Vorbeck.

"Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked food stores

"and for the immediate future, starvation."

"We are no longer the agents of culture.

"Our path is marked by death, plundering and abandoned villages."

But that's not the way the story was told in Germany.

The legend of Lettow-Vorbeck and his loyal Askaris

carried on decades after the war.

The myth was reinforced by the German general's own memoirs.

The title, Heia Safari, was the name of the Askari marching song.

And the memoirs gave the impression that Lettow-Vorbeck

was a swashbuckling hero leading a life of derring-do in East Africa.

But I was born on this continent and it's been my home,

and I just can't see it that way.

To me, Lettow-Vorbeck was an obsessive, a fanatic.

He became famous as the man who was determined to fight on

no matter what the cost,

but it wasn't him who paid that cost.

That was paid by hundreds of thousands of Africans

who died in his war, a war that in the end achieved nothing.

Because Lettow-Vorbeck didn't draw British soldiers

away from the Western Front,

and he didn't manage to keep hold of German East Africa.

What he and his mercenary army did succeed in doing

was leaving behind them a trail of famine, disease and death.

The military cemetery in Dar es Salaam

is for me a more fitting monument to the war in East Africa

than the dubious legend of a rogue German general.

This is the West African Frontier Force,

the Gold Coast Regiment, and their list of casualties.

These are men from what's today Ghana,

and there's lots of Ashanti and Fanti names here, Kofi and Kobli.

There's a Musa Grunshi.

The Grunshi people also come from Ghana, but also from Burkina Faso.

Here's a group of names that you can tell are Uraba: Adegun, Adeola.

These are men from Nigeria. The Uraba is my own ethnic group,

and these are men who might have come from Lagos, where I was born.

But over here is a list of casualties,

a long list of casualties from the King's African Rifles.

This is by far the biggest force the British cobbled together

to fight the Germans in East Africa

and they came from across British colonial Africa,

from Malawi, from Kenya, from Zimbabwe.

But it's not just Africans fighting for the British remembered here.

Here are three Askari who were from the Congo,

and they're fighting for the Belgium Army.

And there's even one Askari Palawi,

who's fighting for the Portuguese. He's from Mozambique.

These are men of the British West Indies Regiment.

These are men from Jamaica, Barbados and the other islands

who volunteered to fight

but were never allowed to serve on the Western Front.

So in one of those bizarre twists of imperial history,

they find themselves in Africa fighting for the empire

that took their ancestors from this continent and into slavery.

And all the while, far away in Europe,

the armies on the Western Front had been perfecting the techniques

of industrial-scale slaughter.

By 1917, they'd developed a sophisticated killing machine.

All it required was an infinite number of men to keep it turning,

some supplying the blood, others the sweat and the tears.

There had never been anything like it on the face of the planet.

A few years ago, I asked one of the last veterans of the First World War

what he'd felt, what his emotions had been

when he'd arrived here on the Western Front.

And what he said was this:

he said it was clear that he was entering into

the biggest man-made structure on earth.

And I've never forgotten that description,

cos that's what the Western Front was -

a vast 20th-century military city of encampments and trenches

and dugouts and barbed wire.

With its complex infrastructure of roads, railways,

ammunition dumps, factories, hospitals, brothels and morgues,

the Western Front was a linear city extending 450 miles

from the Swiss frontier to the English Channel.

And with a population to match.

By 1917, this was the most culturally

and ethnically diverse place on earth.

Near the city of Nancy,

American soldiers trained for their debut in the war.

At Verdun, Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians manned machine guns

as the French struggled to control this strategic citadel.

At Chemin des Dames,

men from Senegal and Vietnam fought side by side.

At Cambrai, Inuit snipers and scouts fought a war of stealth,

while Indian cavalrymen charged into battle.

At Arras, Maori and Pacific Island sappers

dug tunnels under enemy trenches and planted mines.

While Canadian Indians prayed to the sun near Vimy Ridge

before going over the top.

And West Indian, African and Egyptian labourers

resupplied Australians, New Zealanders,

South Africans and Canadians

as they entered the carnage of the Third Battle for Ypres.

This was the moment

when we can truly call the conflict the World's War.

This is an ornate doorway carved in an Arab style

in a concrete shelter in the middle of a cow field in Belgium.

There's an inscription here in Arabic that reads, I'm told,

"There is no god but Allah.

"If you believe in Allah, you will be victorious."

We don't know anything really about the men

who carved their prayer into this doorway.

We know they were Muslim soldiers

and that they were here in the First World War, and that's it.

There's something poignant, there's something almost tragic.

You can imagine men huddling under bombardments in here

turning to their faith and writing in Arabic a prayer

in the middle of a war, not knowing whether they'll ever survive.

To me, this is as much a memorial to unknown soldiers

as any of the others on the Western Front.

Before the war, in the rural backwaters of Belgium and France,

non-white faces would have been seen

only on the pages of books and magazines.

Suddenly, towns and villages filled with strange faces,

speaking unknown languages and eating exotic foods.

CHURCH BELLS CHIME

Watching over this transformation in the Belgian town of Dikkebus

was a young parish priest, Father Achiel van Walleghem.

So this is the church.

Historian and curator Dominiek Dendooven has studied

Father van Walleghem's remarkable diary of those strange times.

What you seem to get from him is

a view of the First World War from behind net curtains.

We actually have through him first-hand accounts,

but first-hand accounts not from one of the parties involved,

but from a bystander, which is... It's very nice,

because that's information that first of all you would never think about,

and secondly, you would never, ever encounter in official reports.

We've got the entry for the 6th of June, a Sunday.

"Several Indian troops have arrived on the parish, black of skin,

"dressed as English soldiers

"with the exception of the hat, which is draped artfully in a towel."

-Artfully?

-Artfully.

-So that's a turban.

-A turban, yeah.

"They speak English and some a bit of French.

"In general, they are very friendly and polite,

"though their curiosity has the upper hand

"and they especially like to see through the windows of our houses.

"They bake a kind of pancake

"and they eat a kind of seed which has a very strong taste.

"They stay here for several weeks."

-So this is going to be chapatis.

-Oh, yeah, they're eating chapatis.

-And flavoured with a very strong tasting spice.

-Oh, yeah.

He says they're eating a kind of seed which is very strong,

so he must have tasted it,

because otherwise he wouldn't have known that it has a strong taste.

So he's one of the first people in rural Belgium to try Indian food.

That's very much so, because local people normally tend to be

chauvinistic regarding food, but he is as least someone

who's open to taste other things.

One group in particular caught the attention of the inquisitive priest.

They'd travelled from the other side of the world

to play their part in the war.

"In the area now, many Chinese have arrived

"and they are employed by the English...the British Army to work.

"Yellow of colour with a flat nose and slanted eyes,

"they always have a foolish grin on their face.

"So it happens that I pass them shortly before noon

"and constantly they were saying, 'Watch! Watch,'

"because they wanted to know how late it was.

"And I believe they were getting hungry,

"because when I show them it was only five minutes to 12,

"they were nodding contently."

Cos they know they're going to get their dinner?

And then he writes, indeed, then he wrote,

"It was nearly time to fill their bellies with their beloved rice."

-Their beloved rice.

-Their beloved rice, they lived on rice.

Recruitment of the Chinese Labour Corps began in 1916,

a desperate attempt to fill the gaping void in British manpower

left by the Battle of the Somme.

Impoverished Chinese peasants were recruited in their thousands

from the country's north-eastern provinces.

They spent months on a journey

that took them across oceans and continents,

and arrived in Europe exhausted and disorientated.

And they were assigned the war's dirty jobs,

digging trenches, lugging ammo, burying bodies.

But as the war continued, many found themselves propelled

into new, unexpected roles as skilled mechanics

on a military technology that was making its debut in the war.

This is Deborah, a British D51 tank.

In the winter of 1917,

she was one of more than 300 of these strange new beasts

that lumbered towards the German lines.

Deborah was dug up and recovered 80 years later

by her proud owner, Philippe Gorcynski.

For him, the story of the tank

and the story of the Chinese Labour Corps are inseparable.

So in the First World War, this is the most hi tech,

most complicated piece of machinery on the battlefield?

Yes, it was like Formula 1, it was a new design,

modern equipment with an engine.

It was the new technology of the beginning of the century.

The tanks were submitted to very hard condition of driving,

but also of fighting. So when the tanks went into action,

you have to imagine that those that were inside

sometimes asked the maximum of their engine of their tank.

So as soon as the action was finished,

the tank has to be completely repaired,

re-put into fighting condition.

So for most of its time,

a tank wasn't in the hands of soldiers and tank crews,

it was with engineers behind the line being repaired and rebuilt?

Yes, because I think that every tank went into Chinese hands.

In fact, they were crucial in the involvement of the tank

in the First World War.

This was hard work and it was dangerous work,

but it was also skilled mechanical work.

Yes, because it need very careful attention just for the engine,

just for the gear box of the tanks, just for all this kind of adjustment.

So it needs people who are very careful and very meticulous.

And also surprisingly, they have to work on both sides,

very heavy and difficult task and also very meticulous work.

They have to work a seven-day week and sometimes more than ten hours.

And many of them suffered from wounds, some were killed.

So it was really hard treatment and always in the middle of the mud,

always in the middle of the grease.

It was...it was also a kind of hell.

The story of the Chinese Labour Corps

did not end with the end of the war.

Many stayed on afterwards to clear up the mess.

They filled in the trenches, recovered bodies,

dug cemeteries,

carved headstones.

And many succumbed to the Spanish flu epidemic

that raged after the war.

There is, I think, something specially tragic about this place,

a Chinese cemetery in the middle of a French farm.

And most of these men were themselves just farmers

from tiny villages, and all they wanted to do

was to earn some money and see a little bit of the world.

But 2,000 of them never made it home.

It was their muscle and their ingenuity

that kept the wheels of industrial warfare turning.

But all of that, everything they'd done,

everything they'd been through, quickly slipped from memory.

Of all the many peoples who came to the Western Front

in the First World War,

the Chinese labourers are probably the most forgotten of the forgotten.

BIRDSONG

In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.

By the end of the year, tens of thousands of fresh troops

were arriving in France to reinforce the weary Allied ranks.

This is the grave of Freddie Stowers,

an American corporal who was killed in action in September 1918

taking part in the Meuse-Argonne offensive,

one of the key turning points in the whole of the First World War.

What's different about Corporal Stowers

from most of the men buried in this American cemetery

was that he fought his war in a French helmet,

he carried a French rifle,

he took orders from officers who were Frenchmen.

And the reason for that -

Freddie Stowers was an African-American.

BIRDSONG

The commander of the American Expeditionary Force,

General John Pershing,

had refused to lead black soldiers into battle.

Most of the third of a million African-Americans

drafted into the US Army had been sent to work

behind the lines in segregated labour battalions.

There were a handful of black combat units

and General Pershing's refusal to lead them

turned them into an orphaned army.

The French called them Les Enfants Perdus, The Lost Children.

First, the British were asked to train them

in the arts of trench warfare, but they said no.

But the French Army welcomed them into their ranks,

ranks that, after all, were full already

of black soldiers from the French Empire.

Most of the black American soldiers who came to France

were from the south. And what they encountered here

was a society that had its own prejudices,

but that was still radically more tolerant and integrated

than segregation-era America.

In 1914, 54 black men had been lynched in the States

and in the south, black people lived under a set of racial laws

that were really not that dissimilar

from the laws of apartheid-era South Africa.

What astonished the black troops when they got here

were the simple things, that they could go out to the cafes,

that they could travel in the same railway carriages as whites,

that they could talk to white women on the street,

and that's something that could get you killed in the American south.

One soldier wrote home to his mother

saying the only time he was ever reminded in France that he was black

was when he looked at his own face in the mirror.

Something of a love affair developed between France and black America.

Unlike France's own black troops, recruited from West Africa

and regarded by many French civilians

as uncultured and primitive,

America's black troops were seen as sophisticated,

urbane, and as irresistible as their new style of music.

Behind-the-lines parties would sow the seeds

for the post-war passion for le jazz.

But the American military viewed this love affair

with mounting horror.

French acceptance of black Americans as equals

threatened to undermine the foundations of segregated America.

The music had to stop.

This is a copy of The Crisis, which was the magazine

of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People,

the NAACP, which is an American civil rights movement

that still exists today.

And this edition from May 1919 is a celebration of what it calls

"the American Negroes' record in the Great World War,

"a record of loyalty, valour and achievement."

But on page 16, there is a section called Documents of the War.

And the most important document is this one,

Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.

This was written by the French military mission

on the orders of the Americans.

And what this is is a list of instructions,

of demands placed on the French by the Americans

on how they were expected to treat black American soldiers.

It begins, "Although a citizen of the United States,

"the black man is regarded by white Americans as an inferior being,

"with whom relations of business or service only are possible.

"The black is constantly being censored for his want of intelligence and discretion.

"For his lack of civic and professional conscience

"and for his tendency towards undue familiarity."

"We must prevent," it says, "the rise of any pronounced degree

"of intimacy between French officers and black officers.

"We must not eat with them,

"must not shake hands or seek to meet or talk with them

"outside of the requirements of military service.

"We must not commend too highly the black American troops,

"particularly in the presence of white Americans.

"We must make a point of keeping the native population" -

they mean the white French population -

"from spoiling the negroes.

"White Americans become greatly incensed

"by any expression of intimacy between white women and black men."

But French officers had more pressing concerns

than shoring up America's race barrier,

and the so-called French directive was suppressed.

By September 1918, they and their black American troops

were involved in what became known as the 100 Days Offensive,

the final bloody push to drive the Germans back to the Rhine.

Early on the morning of the 26th September,

Freddie Stowers and his company received orders

to take a heavily-defended hill

infested with German machine-gun nests.

When the German troops appeared to surrender,

Stowers led his men forward, but it was a trap.

The machine guns opened up and he was hit twice.

But somehow, he managed to lead his men and take the German positions.

He died on the battlefield, an American soldier in a French helmet.

Stowers was recommended for the highest US military accolade,

the Medal of Honor.

But it would be more than 70 years

before the recommendation was processed.

His sisters finally received the medal on his behalf...

in 1991.

The 100 Days Offensive ended with a crippled Germany

signing an armistice on the 11th of November.

With the fighting over,

the black regiments returned to the United States,

many with French medals pinned to their chests.

Some marched down New York's 5th Avenue as proud heroes.

But the American south marked their homecoming in other ways.

Within a year, eight black veterans

who had survived the horrors of the Western Front

were hanged by white lynch mobs.

Two others were burnt alive.

In one case, the victim's only offence

was to refuse to take off his army uniform.

During four years of fighting,

Europe's imperial powers had broken all the rules of the game of Empire.

They'd armed their colonial subjects,

brought them to the heart of Europe and ordered them to kill whites.

The carefully constructed myth of white superiority

had been dismembered in the carnage of the fighting.

But the war didn't lead to the disintegration of empire.

In the years after 1918, the genies were put back in their bottles.

The victorious empires of Europe continued to grow.

Colonial soldiers were told, "Thanks very much,

"now back to your villages, back to inequality,

"back to how things were. Let's forget it ever happened."

A history was constructed which quietly eclipsed their contributions

and left a collective memory of an almost exclusively white conflict.

If you want to see a fitting memorial to the World's War,

you have to travel to present-day Zambia,

deep in the bush near the Chambeshi River.

It was here that General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck

and the ragged remnants of his Askari army

were persuaded to lay down their arms by a British bureaucrat.

He told them that the guns of the Western Front

had finally fallen silent three days earlier.

The World's War was fought by African Askaris,

the men who took part in the very last engagements

of the conflict in these fields. It was fought by the Indians

who'd held back the German advance of 1914.

By French tirailleurs who took part in the recapture

of Fort du Mont at Ver Dunne.

By the Chinese Labourers who dug the trenches and repaired the tanks.

And by the men at the Crescent Camp,

who found themselves recruited into the Kaiser's strange jihad.

And now, a century later,

we are just beginning, perhaps,

to write them back into the history of the First World War.