Martial Races The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire

We think we know the First World War -

the trenches, the barbed wire, the shell holes...

the machine guns, the gas,

the high explosives...

the mud and the blood of Flanders Fields.

HEAVY ARTILLERY FIRE

But the first shot fired by a soldier of the British Army

was fired by an African, here in Africa,

three days after war was declared.

That soldier's name was Alhaji Grunshi.

He'd been born in the British colony of the Gold Coast,

modern day Ghana,

and in 1914 he was a regimental sergeant major

in the British West African Frontier Force.

In 1914 they were attacking the Germans in their colony of Togoland.

Now, from the moment Grunshi fired that first shot,

the Great War became the World's War.

More than 4 million non-European, non-White soldiers

and auxiliaries were sucked into the World's War.

1.5 million from British India,

more than 2 million from the French colonies

in Africa and Indochina,

400,000 African-Americans,

100,000 Chinese labourers.

They came as professional soldiers, conscripts,

volunteers and mercenaries,

but all had to grapple not just with a new and terrible kind

of warfare, but with the fears and prejudices

that swirled around the questions of race in the 20th century.

Now, history has rightly remembered the millions of Europeans

who died on the Western Front and elsewhere.

But fighting alongside them were millions of others,

men from every continent, of every race and every religion -

the human capital of the European empires.

It was their war too, and this is their story.

In the first week of August, 1914,

the empires of Europe went to war.

Six weeks later, the first contingent of 30,000 troops

from British India began to disembark here,

at the French port of Marseille.

It's probably impossible now, a century later,

to even imagine the level of disorientation they must have felt.

These were men from villages in rural India,

they'd never left their homeland before,

and many of them will have known very, very little

about the outside world.

To make matters much worse, when they left India

they hadn't even been told where they were going.

It was only in the last days of their journey

that they were told the truth -

that they were coming here to France, to fight.

The spectators who flocked to see the Indians

as they marched from the port had little idea of the sheer complexity

of the army they were cheering on.

Alongside units from the regular British Army,

it was made up of men from a dozen different ethnic groups,

led by White British officers

who had made their army careers in British India.

Below them in the chain of command were Indian officers

who had risen through the ranks.

It was an army designed to guard the Raj,

and the decision to bring it to fight in Europe's war

was regarded at the time as a "hazardous experiment."

But in the crisis of 1914,

a good year before Kitchener's mass armies entered battle,

Britain needed all the professional soldiers it could lay its hands on.

And so they marched out of town to their base camp,

and for a few short weeks, Marseille's fashionable racecourse

became a little India.

This is an incredible picture of the Lahore division

of the Indian Army in Marseille on this racecourse

in September or early October 1914,

and it is a panorama of all the different peoples

that made up the British Indian Army.

In the corner, there are huge

brass Indian cooking pots.

Very Indian pots - the sort of pots

you'd see anywhere

in a market in India today.

Beside them are sacks,

maybe of flour for cooking chapatis

or maybe rice, beside the Indian cooking pots.

Down here you can see some goats,

which I'm afraid look like

they're being slaughtered, according to the rules of Halal.

This was an army that expected to eat Indian food

no matter where it was on duty in the world,

and the British were very good

at realising that they got

the best out of their men

when they were sensitive to their needs - cultural,

religious and dietary.

On the old racecourse itself,

we've got the British officer on his horse.

It's a tiny little detail

in a big photograph.

This could be me projecting it onto him,

but there's something about his bearing that is haughty,

which is arrogant, it's confident.

This is a man who is a soldier within the Indian Army

who feels that he knows the men he's commanding,

that he understands their cultures, that he's in charge.

He's very much an authority figure within this frame.

The authority of the India Corps' British officers

drew much of its self-confidence from a racial theory

that was rooted in the Imperial experience of British India.

It took its cue from the Indian caste system

and was known as the theory of the "Martial Races",

a distillation of the received wisdom of the Raj

concerning the inherent qualities

of the sepoys, subadars and risaldars -

the privates, sergeants and captains of the India Corps.

This is a copy of The India Corps in France.

It was written during the war by two White British officers

who served with the India Corps.

The most interesting part is right at the end, the appendix.

This was the work of JWB Merewether, who was a lieutenant-colonel

and he was a real advocate of the Martial Races theory.

And he writes that, "the majority of the population of India

"are people without physical courage and unfit for any military service."

With a stroke he dismisses 90% of the population of India.

But he then goes on to describe the various abilities,

the strengths and weaknesses of the martial peoples,

the men who have been recruited into the British Indian Army.

He begins with the Sikhs, who are to him the perfect martial people.

"The Sikhs are tall men of strong physique and stately bearing",

he tells us.

"The chief trait of the Sikhs

"is a love of military adventure and a desire to make money."

Merewether was also a fan of the Jats, who come from the Punjab.

He considers them to be "a thoroughbred race."

He says, "in appearance they are large-limbed and handsome

"and they are unusually remarkable for their toughness

"and their capacity to endure the greatest fatigue and privation."

Next are the Pathans who are a people from the tribal regions

of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"The Pathan is a handsome man," Merewether tells us,

"as a rule built in an athletic mould.

"His easy but swaggering gait speaks of an active life in the mountains.

"This makes him an ideal raider or skirmisher full of dash, but..."

and this is the important part,

"..but is often wanting in cohesion and the power

"of steady resistance unless..." critically,

"..he is led by British officers."

Finally there's the Gurkhas, the most famous of all of the units

of the old British Indian Army.

"There is much about the Gurkha which especially appeals

"to the British soldier.

"His friendliness, cheeriness and adaptability

"make him easier to get on with than any of the other Indian groups.

"His native weapon is the kukri, a long, carved knife

"with a keen cutting edge and a heavy back.

"With this," Merewether says, "he can cut down trees or a man

"as easily as he can sharpen a pencil."

Every group is given its vices and virtues,

it's determined how reliable they are.

This is a micro-dissection of the British Army of India.

By mid-October 1914, the India Corps were in northern France and Belgium,

about to get their first taste of battle.

The war had developed into a frantic race to the sea,

as the Germans pushed towards the Channel ports

and the French, British and Belgians fell back before them.

Everything was in flux.

There were cavalry battles in the wheat-fields,

refugees at the crossroads,

and hastily improvised barricades

in the towns and villages.

Still in their tropical uniforms,

the India Corps units were thrown into battle

with orders to hold the line at all costs.

At the Belgian city of Ypres, they played a crucial part

in the first of five battles that would be waged there.

After Ypres, the German advance ground to a halt.

The armies dug in and a new and terrible kind of warfare

came to Europe...

trench warfare.

The India Corps were among the first to experience the grim realities

of industrialised trench warfare -

ruled by the machine gun, barbed wire,

high explosives and gas.

And alongside the murderous new weapons

was the sheer misery of life in the trenches

as the autumn of 1914 turned into the first winter of the war.

The winter of 1914 was one of the coldest

that's ever been recorded in northern Europe.

There's a photograph of a group of Indian soldiers

in the trenches in the winter of '14.

They're huddled together, wrapped in blankets.

They look more like vagrants than soldiers.

The photograph was taken by the Daily Mirror,

the same newspaper that had taken photographs of the Indians

as they'd arrived in Marseille just a few months earlier.

By now they were a different army.

They became veterans, old soldiers in their 20s,

of a new sort of warfare that had never been seen before in the world.

We know a little about what they were going through

thanks to a remarkable cache of official documents.

The Reports of the Censor of the Indian Mails,

held at the British Library.

The Censor's office was established in late 1914

to vet letters received and sent by the Indian troops in France.

The Chief Censor, Captain Evelyn Howell,

was an old India hand, someone who fancied he knew the difference

between a Jat and a Pathan.

Every week, he and the small team under his command

would sample some of the 20,000 letters

that passed between the troops in the front line,

those hospitalised in England,

and family and friends back home,

selecting and making excerpts of the most interesting ones.

"Men are dying like maggots.

"No-one can count them, not in thousands

"but in hundreds and thousands of thousands.

"None can count them."

'Santanu Das has made a close study of the letters.

'For him they are not only a unique historical source

'but also a kind of unacknowledged war poetry.'

In the letters we have some of the first shock of encounter

with Western industrial warfare.

And for example I vividly remember

some of the images

that the soldiers employ to describe their experience.

One sepoy writes, "The shells are pouring

"like rain in monsoon."

"The enemy's guns roasted our regiments

"even as grain is parched.

"Corpses lay at every step

"and the blood ran in little rivers."

So these are men from poor rural villages in the Punjab,

and so that's why we get phrases like "the corn is being ground"?

Absolutely, "The corn is being ground", or for example

"as bulls and buffalos lie in the month of Bhadon so are our bodies."

So these are people, these are peasant warriors,

because they have largely been drawn,

or in the first months of the war,

exclusively drawn, from the Martial Races,

or what the British termed as the Martial Races,

and they are the peasant warriors.

And they fall back on these agrarian metaphors and similes

in order to express their innermost feelings.

"Here it rains always.

"Sometimes the noise of the rain is 'bang'

"and sometimes it is the noise of wind.

"The rain that sounds like wind is always falling,

"but the banging rain comes only now and then.

"And the corpses cover the country like sheaves of harvested corn."

It's very important for us to listen to the letters

rather than just read the letters.

When we listen to them, perhaps we can hear the echoes

of the sepoy heart.

The censor was also interested in the sepoy's heart,

but not for literary reasons.

Captain Howell wanted to know how the theory of the Martial Races

was standing up under the stress of battle.

The lyrical language used by some of the soldiers

gave him cause for concern.

"Many of the men show a tendency to break into poetry,

"which I am inclined to regard as a rather ominous sign

"of mental disquietude."

So we have an army that's been recruited

according to the Martial Races theory

and we still see that theory in action

in the monitoring of their letters -

that certain groups, certain races will behave in certain ways

according to this great theory.

Yes, absolutely. It's like a big structure with which

the British, kind of, colonial army can work with.

"It is instructive to note the different behaviour

"of men of different races under pressure of despair.

"The Sikh either grows sulky or tries to malinger.

"The Muhammadan of the Punjab wails and prays.

"The Pathan also believes in the efficacy of prayer,

"but being a man of quicker wit than either of the others

"in some cases seems definitely to have taken means to help himself."

What is interesting is that often some of the sepoys themselves

have internalised these constructions,

so that they try pandering to that notion.

for example the Sikhs,

they often think of themselves as lions

because that is how they have been constructed.

Because it's rather flattering.

Yes, it is.

Another power comes along and tells you that you are lions,

you are warrior peoples.

Absolutely, that's why I think the Imperial rule in India

was so very successful,

because it was a combination of flattery

and almost a sort of seduction -

that you are so brave, so go into battle and fight.

In the early Spring of 1915, for most Indian troops,

the fighting was centred here, in Northern France.

Neuve Chapelle looks ordinary enough today,

but the landmarks of a battle that claimed thousands of lives

can still be seen.

A dense area of woodland called the Bois du Biez,

where the Germans were dug in, in unknown numbers...

..and the Layes Brook, a narrow, but deep canal

that bisected the battlefield

and which was to become a killing zone.

Here of course we have the memorial to the Indians missing

on the Western Front at Neuve Chapelle.

There are round about 4,700 names of the missing here.

Military historian Geoff Bridger has made a close study

of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle,

which took place here over three days

from the 10th to the 12th of March, 1915.

So, in March 1915, why was there a battle here?

We were trying to establish that we were indeed a capable army,

capable of defeating the Germans.

The purpose was to get our lads away from the wet trenches.

They had been static for the winter.

From about the end of November, 1914, right the way through

to the end of February 1915,

there hadn't been a great deal of fighting.

The men were wet, cold and miserable,

and it was intended to prove their fighting spirit,

push the Germans back and hopefully more than push them back,

break through.

The ultimate aim was to get through to Lille.

If we could have got through to Lille,

which was a vital pivotal transport station,

we would have gone a long way to, sort of, shortening the war.

So this is the battlefield?

This is the official history battlefield

showing the situation on the first day, 10th of March, 1915.

And these are the German lines?

The German lines are in green and the British lines are in red.

The British lines are running along here,

the Indian lines are running along here.

The objective, essentially, is to push through the German lines,

which were forming a salient.

So the idea was to straighten the line and to curl off

to the right-hand side towards the Bois du Biez.

So this is the greatest attack that the Indians launch

in the First World War on the Western Front.

How significant was their role in the battle of Neuve Chapelle?

Very significant indeed.

They were excellent fighting soldiers,

especially in hand-to-hand combat.

The long-range rifle of the British forces wasn't that useful,

you needed to get into hand-to-hand fighting using improvised weapons -

clubs, knives - whatever was to hand -

and of course, the kukri was an ideal weapon.

This is the weapon of the Gurkhas?

It's the weapon of choice of the Gurkhas.

That and other things were used in the trenches,

to the terror of the Germans opposite.

They really thought that the Gurkhas were going to slice their ears off

as a body tally and they were extremely frightened of them.

So it was a good plan with a good objective,

it made strategic and tactical sense?

It was an excellent plan and it should have succeeded.

The first day is a considerable success.

The bulge, the village was taken, which was the first objective.

Unfortunately, because of confusion and primarily lack of communication,

the second and third days were not such a success at all.

In fact, the second day was a day of confusion

and the third day pretty much a day of disaster.

By the end of the first day,

Indian and British troops

had reached the edge of the Bois du Biez.

The woods appeared to be empty of Germans,

but without conformation of this,

the attackers were ordered to fall back to the Layes Brook

and dig in for the night.

And what happens overnight?

Overnight they are staying where they are,

but the Germans are not idle.

During the course of the night,

they brought up massive reinforcements.

They had units further back here, they bought them up,

they passed through the wood.

They occupied the wood at night-time,

so that we couldn't see what was happening.

Then, during the course of the night,

they moved out from in front of the Bois du Biez

and dug a trench right in front of it.

That trench was then heavily occupied

and once more was able to cut straight into the lines

of the Indian soldiers.

But the real disaster for the India Corps at Neuve Chapelle

is not that initial successes are reversed,

it's the loss of officers.

Indeed so.

The First 39th, for example, lost all their White officers

in that initial attack.

Any reinforcements that were brought in,

they were not familiar with the units,

they didn't speak the language, for a start.

The Indian Army was a unit and once it was depleted,

I'm afraid those depletions could not be made up

during the course of the war, and indeed they never were.

DRUMS STRIKE UP

By the autumn of 1915, the "hazardous experiment"

of bringing Indian troops to fight for Britain in Europe

had paid off,

at least as far the generals and the top brass were concerned.

At Ypres they had held the line at a moment of dire peril.

At Neuve Chapelle they'd shown that the German trench line

could be broken.

Most importantly of all, they helped to buy the time

needed to recruit and train Lord Kitchener's New Army.

A century on, it's a record worthy of remembrance.

So your grandfather was among some of the first troops,

the Indian troops to fight on the Western Front?

-Yes.

-And this is...?

-The Sitara medal.

-The Sitara medal.

And on the back it has his name, Bur Singh.

He was a sepoy, he was number 400... 4,874.

Yes.

And his regiment is the 59 Rifles.

59 Rifles.

Wilde's Rifles.

So your grandfather was among the soldiers

who stopped the German advance in 1914, saved the British Army,

maybe saved Britain.

And this is his...?

-Pension book.

-His pension book. So this is your grandfather?

-Yes.

-Wow.

And this is his service record with his pension,

how much he gets in his pension.

Five rupees, not a lot of money.

And he's fighting with the turban, always. He refused the helmet.

The British government tell,

"You take the helmet for your safety."

He say, "My safety is in the turban."

He don't remove turban.

You must be very proud of him.

Yes.

THEY PLAY "LAST POST"

A year on the Western Front almost broke the India Corps.

By the winter of 1915, nearly 35,000 officers and men

were listed as dead, wounded or missing.

Around the same number that had disembarked at Marseille

just a year earlier.

Along with the human cost came the destruction

of something less tangible -

the Corps' delicate web of cultural, religious and linguistic diversity,

which had been held together by relationships

between White officers and their men.

The Censor of the Indian Mails

had been warning for months that the Corps was reaching breaking point.

Finally, the decision was made

to pull out all but the cavalry units from Europe

and redeploy them in the Middle East.

One last photograph,

taken just days before the India Corps left northern France.

When we look at these faces, war weary and battle-hardened,

we see a group of individuals who've been to hell and back.

But for the Imperial system that sent them there,

they were never seen as much more than useful "types."

The Western Front was 450 miles of misery and suffering,

stretching from the Channel to the Swiss Alps.

Britain and her Imperial forces

never held more than a quarter of it.

Most of the rest was fought over by the French and the Germans,

a bitter struggle that left deep scars,

still visible a century later.

To understand the ferocity of that struggle,

come to Vauquois in Argonne.

This crater-pocked valley was once a hill-top village.

The French call this "un village disparu" -

a disappeared village.

It's not difficult to see why.

It was in killing fields like Vauquois

that the French were confronted with an uncomfortable truth,

one which they'd been struggling with ever since

a united, powerful Germany had risen on their eastern borders -

the disturbing realisation that if it came again to war with Germany,

they would be outnumbered.

By the end of 1914, France had lost a third of a million men.

More Frenchman died in that first year of the war than any other,

even though there was only fighting for five months.

The Western Front became a meat grinder that consumed men,

and for the French this awoke a deep national paranoia,

a fear that had haunted her politicians and her generals

for a generation - that the country could simply run out of men.

France, with a population of 40 million,

seemed destined to lose when pitted against Germany, with 67 million.

But France had something Germany did not -

access to an overseas empire.

She may have been a republic at home,

but on the world stage, France counted as an empire,

and in a Paris suburb,

Le Jardin Colonial bears witness

to the material wealth that once flowed into France

from her former colonies in Indochina,

the Caribbean, North and West Africa.

When war came, France, just like Britain,

drew on her imperial holdings for something that had become far

more valuable than material wealth - manpower.

France had called on her colonial troops before.

In the 1870s, in the war against Prussia, North Africans spahis -

Berber and Arab cavalrymen -

had been brought over to fight in Europe.

But in the crisis of 1914, for the first time,

France decided to bring over infantrymen

from sub-Saharan West Africa.

Recruited in colonies like Mali, Mauritania and Niger,

they were known collectively as the Tirailleurs Senegalais - riflemen -

named after France's largest West African colony, Senegal.

At the Albert Kahn Museum in Paris,

there's a unique collection of colour photographs of the

Tirailleurs Senegalais - soldiers who, like the troops from British

India, were recruited according to elaborate theories of race.

This is a photograph that, quite incredibly,

we actually know the name of this soldier.

His name was Amadou Sar, and one of the reasons that

he in particular is here on the Western Front is because his people,

the Wolof tribe of West Africa, were one of those peoples that

the French colonial theorists had

decided were a naturally warrior people - a "race guerriere".

And this theory directly influenced not just who's recruited,

but how they're used on the Western Front,

whether they're put into a labour battalion,

whether they're a support division or whether, like the Wolofs,

they're seen as shock troops, troops who should lead an assault.

It's not just a textbook theory.

Work's been done to look at the casualty rates among soldiers

who came from the warrior races and we know that Wolofs,

men from his community, were about three times more likely to

die in combat than White soldiers fighting in the same campaigns.

And when I look at this young guy, Amadou Sar,

he looks like half my relatives from Africa,

he looks like people in my family.

That brings it home, this idea that somebody came to his country

with an expertise, supposedly, in the nature of his peoples,

the characteristics of his tribes,

and made decisions that determined whether he would live or die,

whether he would fight or be left in Africa.

And I've read a lot, most of my life, about racial theories,

about colonialism, and when I look into his eyes,

I can't help seeing him as a victim of just the craziness

of the ideas that surrounded race in the 20th century.

The Kahn collection contains other clues about what can happen

when the madness of war is overlain

with the craziness of racial prejudice.

Oh, this is incredible.

This is two French West African soldiers in their full uniforms,

they're combat soldiers, with the Adrian helmets and the

coupe-coupe, which was a kind of machete

that the West African soldiers used,

and it became an obsession of German propaganda.

This idea the idea that this was a barbaric weapon

used by uncivilised, savage soldiers in Europe, which is ludicrous

in a war where there was poison gas and flame-throwers and U-boats.

But it's really important to understand that

when the French decided to bring men like this

into the Western Front to fight for them,

they were breaking all of the rules of Empire.

The first rule is that White life was sacrosanct.

Everywhere in the Empire, but especially in Africa,

when there was violence against white people, it was met with

the most extreme responses, the most extreme violence.

But in the middle of a war of national survival,

which is what the First World War became,

the French have to abandon that taboo.

And to bring black Africans,

Africans from below the Sahara, into Europe and order them,

ORDER them to kill white men,

is an abandonment of everything that Empires were built upon.

The French general, Charles Mangin, was one the most vocal champions

of recruitment from France's African colonies.

He was as tough as they come and the impression made by his portrait

is confirmed by the nickname given to him by the troops -

the Cannibal.

Mangin hated Germans.

As a child, he'd been driven from his family home when the provinces

of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed during the Franco-Prussian War.

He was raised in the spirit of revanchism - revenge -

against the hated Boches

and with a burning desire for the re-conquest of the lost provinces.

He joined the army and made a name for himself

policing France's Empire,

leading native troops against tribal uprisings and suppressing them,

as the Mangin family album reveals, with ruthless brutality.

This initiation into the harshness of colonial rule led to the

formation of one of his core beliefs.

France, as Mangin's statue proclaims,

"Is a nation of 100 million."

He believed that France's 60 million colonial subjects

could be part of the French Republic

if they were prepared to fight and die for it.

In 1910, Charles Mangin published this book,

La Force Noire - the Black Army.

It's basically a manifesto,

calling for the mass recruitment of Africans into the French Army.

Part of his argument was the familiar one about numbers.

But Mangin went further,

citing experiments by French surgeons who claimed to have

successfully operated on Black Africans without anaesthetics.

Mangin argued that the so-called "warrior races"

were inured to the impact of modern warfare,

thanks to what he called their "primitive" nature

and "underdeveloped" nervous systems.

Mangin got the chance to take his argument

a stage further at Verdun in 1916.

Of all the human meat-grinders of the First World War,

the Battle of Verdun was surely the most pitiless.

Over a ten-month period, from February to December, 1916,

half a million men were wounded,

a quarter of a million killed.

There are more than 15,000 French soldiers buried in this

section alone, including French Muslims,

their gravestones facing towards Mecca.

At least we know their names.

In the ossuary tower that looms on the skyline are the remains

of 150,000 unknown soldiers,

their identities erased by the Armageddon that was Verdun.

Attrition on this horrific scale was precisely what German commanders

had in mind when they unleashed their offensive early in 1916.

A memorial at the city gates recalls a long list of sieges,

sacks and liberations reaching back 1,500 years.

These are the battle honours of a citadel that was of as much

symbolic as strategic importance to France.

By attacking it, the Germans knew they would provoke a furious

counter-attack, and this would be a chance,

in the words of the German commander Falkenhayn,

to "bleed France dry".

The town of Verdun is about ten miles in that direction

and in 1916 it was defended by a ring of fortresses,

and the most important, the centrepiece of the whole system,

was this place - Fort Douaumont.

The fort's underneath my feet.

It's encased under thousands and thousands of tons of concrete,

and its defences included these.

These are retractable steel gun emplacements.

It makes this fort look more like a battleship than a fortress.

They rise up out of the ground and fire in all directions.

There are machine gun emplacements, observation posts,

and underneath here there's a barracks full of soldiers.

And in 1916, in the battle of Verdun,

this place took on the same sort of symbolic importance

as the town itself.

The Battle began disastrously and farcically for the French.

A German soldier scavenging for food

somehow penetrated Douaumont's defences

and found a way into the Fort itself,

where he was quickly joined by his comrades.

With barely a shot fired,

the keystone of Verdun's defences became an enemy stronghold.

Humiliated and shocked,

the French unleashed a torrent of shells at the fort.

But by the autumn, it was clear

that only a full-scale frontal assault would drive the Germans out.

General Nivelle was in overall charge of the Fort's recapture,

but his second in command was Charles Mangin,

and the Cannibal made sure that when units were selected for the assault,

elements of La Force Noire were among them.

EXPLOSIONS

On the 24th of October, 1916, French forces emerged from thick fog.

And after a few hours of fierce hand-to-hand fighting

in the echoing tunnels of the fort,

they retook Douaumont.

When the Senegalese soldiers who had taken part in the

recapture of Fort Douaumont marched off this battlefield,

they were ordered by their White officers not to wash

the mud off their uniforms so that the people of Verdun and the

people of the French villages behind the lines would know that THEY

were the Africans who had taken Douaumont back from the Germans.

BIRD SQUAWKS

And the message got through.

The cover of a popular Sunday magazine

was soon telling its readers that "One black is worth two Boches".

But running alongside the gung-ho patriotism were less

palatable themes - the innate savagery of the colonial soldiers,

their lack of civilisation, their "otherness".

Today, a contemporary statue that honours the Black heroes of

Douaumont stresses their humanity

as well as their courage,

but at the time they were seen

rather differently.

Throughout the war, everything to do with the colonial soldiers -

from the way they were recruited to the way they were

deployed on the battlefields -

was influenced and shaped by ideas of race.

But at the same time, the French liked to believe that their nation

was colour-blind, that in France it was culture

and not skin colour that really mattered.

France, in effect, became trapped between the racial ideas

she used to justify ruling over

millions of people in her colonial Empire

and the ideals of the French Republic,

the revolutionary ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality.

In the midst of battle, there was little time to tease out

these contradictions, but away from the battlefields,

on the home front, they were harder to ignore.

During the war, Frejus,

a small fishing port on the Mediterranean coast,

was an army town, surrounded by military bases, depots and barracks.

And prominent among the soldiers stationed here

during the winter months were the Tirailleurs Senegalais,

as historian Alison Fell explains.

Frejus was a very small town in the First World War,

about 8,000 people, and there was about 40,000

French-African soldiers who spent the winters here.

And so this small town on the Cote D'Azur

suddenly has an army camp,

four, five times the size of it, with men from Africa?

Absolutely. It must have been absolutely transformed

and the vast majority of the population

would never have seen a Black man before.

So, Alison, what stereotypes about Africans

and African soldiers were common at the time in France?

Before the First World War,

the common stereotypes were of savage, cannibalistic, highly sexed,

certainly for African men.

And there was a lot of nervousness about the presence

of Black African troops on French soil in the First World War,

which is one of the reasons why

there is an initiative from the top to propagate

the image of the African soldier

as a loyal simpleton soldier,

a "bon enfant", in order to try and allay those fears.

One of the main ways that they propagated this image

was through an advert for a drink called Banania.

It's a very famous advertisement with a grinning Tirailleur

and the slogan is "y'abon", which was the slogan that was most

associated with the Tirailleurs Senegalais.

And that's part of the language,

the simple version of pidgin French,

that the Tirailleurs were taught by the French army?

Absolutely. The French army realised that the officers couldn't

communicate with the African troops.

And also, because they spoke a variety of different languages,

they couldn't communicate with each other,

so they were taught a form of pidgin French.

So y'abon in standard French would be "c'est bon", so "it's good".

-So it's like baby talk?

-It's like baby talk, absolutely.

And they were taught a very, very limited set of set phrases,

so it also really limited their ability to express themselves

beyond the most basic daily needs.

But in Frejus,

the prejudices of the French army came up against someone who saw

things a little differently.

Lucie Cousturier was a Paris-based painter

who had moved to Frejus to escape the war.

When African soldiers came to her house,

looking for odd jobs and scrounging for cigarettes,

she struck up what was, for the times,

an unlikely friendship with them.

She's kind of quite fascinated, I think,

like many of the French civilians, to meet Africans for the first time.

She invites them in, and then she starts,

she asks then the French army if she can teach them,

and it develops from there.

And then she, from that point,

she starts to offer regular French lessons.

She taught them French, she taught them writing and reading,

and it was through her

work with them in a way that some of these stereotypes then were

unmasked as the racist assumptions that they were.

"If I had been swayed by the opinion, commonly held,

"that the intelligence of Negros develops only until the age of 13,

"and decreases after that, I would never have set out

"to teach a 28-year-old to read and write,

"and one who had practised for seven years

"the muddled jargon of the Tirailleur."

She's put her finger on the hypocrisy of the French

deployment of African soldiers,

that it's done in the name of republicanism, equality, fraternity,

a colour-blind nation, but that's not really what's happening.

Absolutely. And there were a lot of objections within the French army,

that...treatment of the Tirailleurs Senegalais

that they considered too soft would spoil them for military action.

So they wanted the Tirailleurs to be savage on the battlefield,

but to be infantilised, to be children,

when they're off duty, when they're in towns like Frejus?

Absolutely. They said that they might need to implement

a policy of what they called "re-Senegalisation",

which was the idea that they would take all these kind of soft,

civilising influences away from them

and they would become the fighters again that they needed to be.

And France would always need fighters until the last German

had been driven from the last trench that scarred French territory.

From 1917 onwards, recruitment of the Tirailleurs Senegalais

grew in scale and intensity.

After the war, a mosque in the West African style was

built in Frejus in memory of those who had rallied to the Tricolore.

But the circumstances of their recruitment

should also be remembered.

French recruitment in Africa in the First World War fell far

short of the country's republican ideals.

Recruitment in West Africa was outsourced to agents,

to intermediaries, to men who worked to a quota system

and were paid by results.

Now what this meant in practice was that men were forced,

coerced into the French army, and they tended to be

from the most powerless sections of their communities -

the poor, orphans, boys who had no-one to protect them.

But it also seems certain that some of the men

forced into the French army were, in effect, slaves.

There's stories of men being forced to the collection stations

bound in chains, and we know that the African agents

carried out raids to seize men from their villages

and take them to the collecting stations.

Those raids were horribly similar to the raids of the slave trade,

a trade that took place in the same parts of Africa

in earlier centuries.

Now, to me, it's really difficult to think of a more bitter,

more uncomfortable irony than that -

that men were taken from their homes, bound in chains,

and sent to Europe to fight for liberty and civilisation.

"Liberty" and "civilisation"

were words often on the lips of

Europe's politicians as the meat-grinder

of the war continued to turn.

And it wasn't just the British and the French who swore by them.

The Germans also believed that these values

were what the fighting was all about.

To her enemies, Germany was clearly the aggressor,

her armies a Teutonic horde with the blood of "poor little Belgium"

on their bayonets and the rubble of Liege under their boots.

But, of course, things looked different

from the other side of the front line.

From Berlin, the aggressors were the mighty Empires who

threatened Germany with encirclement -

France and Britain to the West

and the juggernaut of Russia to the East.

Worse still, Germany was cut off from her own

imperial holdings by naval blockade

and could not do what Britain and France had done -

bring colonial manpower to fight on Europe's soil.

To the German public,

carefully primed by the German propaganda machine,

this was nothing less than a betrayal of civilisation itself -

the modern, hygienic warfare of the white man reduced to mere

savagery by a West African wielding a machete.

That sense of anger, outrage

and betrayal can still be felt,

in all its rawness, in German satirical magazines from the period.

HE SIGHS

John Bull, today, in the satirical German magazine Kladderadatsch.

This is John Bull,

but he's been distorted into an exaggerated, racialised,

stereotypical, prejudiced view of an African.

It's just a horrible image.

So he has the Union Jack tie, as John Bull wore, his pipe,

his top hat, but he has a ring through his nose.

And it's the sort of racialised, hateful image that we

associate with the American deep South.

I really didn't expect to be shocked -

I don't think I'm an easily shockable person -

but this is a really shocking image.

You can still feel the hate that inspired them.

So, "In the name of civilisation, France is employing savages."

All of the cliches,

all of the stereotypes of Africans are represented here.

There's the hint of cannibalism,

and of the mutilation of the dead.

There's wildness, savagery,

and the French White officer is leading

this army of supposedly sub-human savages into war,

pushing them on, pointing them on.

It's a raw nerve, it's a live issue,

this sense of victimhood, that all of these people,

these lesser peoples, are being turned on Germany

in a way that's unfair and uncivilised and unacceptable.

The brutality of these caricatures is a stark

reminder of a simple truth about the experiences of the soldiers

of Empire who were sucked into the World's War.

Not only did they have the conflict and

all its manifest horrors to deal with,

they also had the heavy load of ignorance,

prejudice and racism to carry on their shoulders.

And these experiences were, for the most part, unrecorded.

We have their names, far too many names,

but precious little else, apart from the occasional fragment

preserved by chance - a letter in a censor's report,

a photograph taken behind the front line,

a medal and a proud family memory.

But there is one place where, in the most unexpected way,

you suddenly get heart-stoppingly close to an individual,

and it's as if the forgotten ghosts of the World's War

are suddenly standing there before you.

That's beautiful.

A voice from another world.

-You can hear when he makes mistakes. You can hear his stumbles.

-Yes.

The man, whose voice has been so miraculously preserved

in the Humboldt University Sound Archive, here in Berlin,

is Mall Singh, a soldier with the British India Corps.

He was brought over to France in 1914 to fight for the British

and then taken prisoner by the Germans on the Western Front.

According to the punctilious notes taken at the time,

we know that on the 11th December, 1916,

at four o'clock Mall Singh, aged 24,

from the village of Ranasukhi in the Punjab,

was ordered to stand in front of a horn microphone

and recite his plaintive poem,

which was then recorded directly onto a shellac disc.

For us, the recording brings to life a poignant story of a

man transported across continents and oceans to fight

and to be made prisoner in someone else's war,

but the ethnographers and linguists who made the recording

had no interest in that.

All they wanted was a sample of his Punjabi

dialect to further their research

and cataloguing of racial and linguistic types.

But it's only thanks to their tunnel vision that,

a century later, the ghosts of Mall Singh and hundreds of his comrades

materialise in the sound archive and precious fragments

of their experiences can be recovered.

Here, in a cemetery near Berlin, are the headstones of more

than 200 Indian prisoners of war who died in captivity -

Mall Singh is not among them.

Maybe he made it back to India to eat butter and drink milk once more.

Maybe he was transferred to another camp, where his death,

like the deaths of many others, went unrecorded.

He survives today as a snatch of crackly sound,

recorded for reasons that would have been obscure to him

and preserved for reasons that now probably seem obscure to us -

progress, science,

culture, civilisation.

In remembrance services every year,

we make a promise to the dead of the World's War.

ALL: We will remember them.

Living up to that promise seems even more necessary

when so much and so many have been forgotten.

INDISTINCT, CRACKLY RECORDINGS