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Colonial Encounters in a Time
of Global Conflict, 1914–1918

This volume gathers an international cast of scholars to examine the


unprecedented range of colonial encounters during the First World War.
More than four million men of colour, and an even greater number of white
Europeans and Americans, crisscrossed the globe. Others, in occupied areas,
behind the warzone or in neutral countries, were nonetheless swept into
the maelstrom. From local encounters in New Zealand, Britain and East
Africa to army camps and hospitals in France and Mesopotamia, from cafes
and clubs in Salonika and London, to anti-colonial networks in Germany,
the USA and the Dutch East Indies, this volume examines the actions and
experiences of a varied company of soldiers, medics, writers, photographers
and revolutionaries to reconceptualise this conflict as a turning point in
the history of global encounters. How did people interact across uneven
intersections of nationality, race, gender, class, religion and language?
How did encounters – direct and mediated, forced and unforced – shape
issues from cross-racial intimacy and identity formation to anti-colonial
networks, civil rights movements and visions of a post-war future? The 12
chapters delve into spaces and processes of encounter to explore how the
conjoined realities of war, race and empire were experienced, recorded and
instrumentalised.

Santanu Das is Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls
College, Oxford.

Anna Maguire is a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen


Mary, University of London.

Daniel Steinbach is a historian of European colonial history and teaches at


the University of Copenhagen.
Routledge Studies in First World War History
Series Editor
John Bourne
The University of Birmingham, UK

The First World War is a subject of perennial interest to historians and is often
regarded as a watershed event, marking the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the ‘modern’ industrial world. The sheer scale of the
conflict and massive loss of life means that it is constantly being assessed and
reassessed to examine its lasting military, political, sociological, industrial,
cultural and economic impact. Reflecting the latest international scholarly
research, the Routledge Studies in First World War History series provides
a unique platform for the publication of monographs on all aspects of the
Great War. Whilst the main thrust of the series is on the military aspects of
the conflict, other related areas (including cultural, visual, literary, political
and social) are also addressed. Books published are aimed primarily at a
post-graduate academic audience, furthering exciting recent interpretations
of the war, whilst still being accessible enough to appeal to a wider audience
of educated lay readers.

Spain and Argentina in the First World War


Transnational Neutralities
Maximiliano Fuentes Codera

The Global First World War


African, East Asian, Latin American and Iberian Mediators
Edited by Ana Paula Pires, Jan Schmidt, and María Inés Tato

After the Armistice


Empire, Endgame and Aftermath
Edited by Michael J.K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava

Colonial Encounters in a Time of Global Conflict, 1914–1918


Edited by Santanu Das, Anna Maguire and Daniel Steinbach

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/


history/series/WWI
Colonial Encounters in a Time
of Global Conflict, 1914–1918

Edited by Santanu Das, Anna Maguire


and Daniel Steinbach
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa


business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Santanu Das, Anna Maguire
and Daniel Steinbach; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Santanu Das, Anna Maguire and Daniel Steinbach to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors
for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-08210-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-07210-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-11267-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315112671
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of figures vii


Acknowledgements ix

Colonial encounters in a time of global conflict:


an introduction 1
SANTANU DAS, ANNA MAGUIRE AND DANIEL STEINBACH

PART I
Spaces: camp, city, colony 35

1 ‘A pageant of empire?’: untangling colonial encounters


in military camps 37
ANNA MAGUIRE

2 Urban spaces of cultural encounters: the Greek city


of Salonika in the First World War 57
NICOLE IMMIG

3 The British military occupation of Jerusalem, 1917–1920:


soldiers as tourists and pilgrims 79
MAHON MURPHY

4 Between intimacy and violence: imperial encounters in East


Africa during the First World War 98
DANIEL STEINBACH
vi Contents
PART II
Process: experience, commonalities and politicisation 123

5 Precarious encounters: South Asia, the war and


anti-colonial cosmopolitanism 125
SANTANU DAS

6 Songs of war and dissent: Maori anti-war activism and


its cultural legacy 149
RACHEL GILLETT

7 Blues in the trenches: John Jacob Niles’ Singing Soldiers 170


MICHAEL HAMMOND

8 The YMCA and West Indian pan-African encounters


during the First World War: the Drury Lane Club for
‘Coloured Sailors and Soldiers’ 190
RICHARD SMITH

PART III
Instrumentality: propaganda, resistance and the
post-war world 215

9 African American soldiers in a black world: the politics


of cultural interactions 217
JENNIFER D. KEENE

10 Influencing the Muslim world: the British propaganda


newspaper Al-Haqīqah 238
SADIA McEVOY

11 ‘Neutral colonials’ and the global war: the role of the


neutral Dutch East Indies and Indonesian intellectuals
in the German ‘Programme for Revolution’ 262
TESSA LOBBES

12 Germany’s Global East: worldmaking in The New Orient 287


JENNIFER JENKINS

List of contributors 310


Index 314
Figures

0.1 Two soldiers of the South African Native Labour Corps


seen during a ‘war dance’ and sports day. © Imperial War
Museum (Q 2382). 2
0.2 A page from the Gallipoli diary of Private Charles Stinson,
where an Indian had signed his name in English, Urdu and
Gurmukhi. Australian War Memorial, Canberra, PR 84/066. 7
0.3 A Maori lumber worker talking to a Frenchwoman. Forest
de Nieppe, March 1917. © Imperial War Museum (Q 4740). 8
0.4 Official photograph of the Dardanelles Expedition: French
Senegalese soldier giving a drink to a wounded French
soldier. No 2728, 1915. HAMILTON 7/12/168. King’s
College London Archives. 9
2.1 French colonial cavalry from Morocco on parade in
Salonika. © Imperial War Museum (Q 32800). 62
2.2 Allied and Greek officers entering a decorated hut for a
concert given by a French colonial regiment at their camp
near Salonika in March 1916. © Imperial War Museum
(Q 31856). 63
2.3 Framework of the Zeppelin LZ 85 set-up for public
exhibition near the White Tower, Salonika, May 1916.
© Imperial War Museum (Q 32031). 66
4.1 A cosmopolitan group: England, India, Africa, China.
© Imperial War Museum, A.F. Bowden, Documents.10049. 99
4.2 Anonymous photograph, Kigoma. Special Collections &
Galleries, Leeds University Library, AFE 02. 113
6.1 Te Puea. © Emily Johns, with thanks to Peace News.150
8.1 The YMCA hut at Seaford. By permission of YMCA
England and Wales/Cadbury Research Library, University
of Birmingham, YMCA/K/1/21/125. 198
8.2 Two white women YMCA workers pose with black
soldiers and sailors outside the Coloured Men’s Club,
London. Australian War Memorial, H01356. 203
viii Figures
8.3 American and British soldiers and sailors outside the
YMCA Coloured Men’s Club buying badges from black
women volunteer workers, London 1919. Australian War
Memorial, H01350. 204
10.1 ‘This cannon throws its great shells in an arch trajectory
over mountains and forests hitting enemy installations,’
Al-Haqīqah. © British Library Board, Or.Mic.10535.
(Digitized as B20192–26). 244
10.2 ‘Indian askari guarding some wells in Palestine so they are
not damaged by Ottoman spies,’ Al-Haqīqah. © British
Library Board, Or.Mic.10535. (Digitized as B20192–27). 245
10.3 ‘Indian soldiers fighting with the English army in
Arab Iraq,’ Al-Haqīqah. © British Library Board,
Or.Mic.10535. (Digitized as B20192–28). 246
10.4 Feisal and Ronald Storrs (top), The Hashemite flag
designed by Mark Sykes and carried by Arab soldiers
(bottom), Al-Haqīqah. © British Library Board,
Or.Mic.10535. (Digitized as B20192–29). 248
10.5 Distribution of Satya Vani and Jangi Akbar from a
houseboat at the Hindu Mela Festival in India, 1918.
© British Library Board, IOR L/PS/10/581/567.
(Image taken by author). 254
Acknowledgements

We would like to thank, above all, the contributors for their patience, enthu-
siasm, good humour and commitment to this volume. We would also like to
thank Routledge and particularly Max Novick and Rob Langham for their
warm support and encouragement.
This volume is one of the outcomes of a three-year, collaborative research
project Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict: Colonials, Neutrals
and Belligerents During the First World War (CEGC) that ran from
2013 until 2016 and was funded by HERA (Humanities in the European
Research Area). Throughout the three years of the CEGC project’s duration,
we were fortunate to work alongside our wonderful co-investigators at
Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań), Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
(Berlin) and Utrecht University. It was a very intense but thrilling period.
Our special gratitude goes to Natasha Awais-Dean, our project manager,
whose tremendous work with us at King’s College London, overseeing all
the project’s strands, was vital to its success. We thank Jan Brauburger,
Geert Buelens, Tessa Lobbes, Martyna Kliks, Heike Liebau, Larissa Schmid,
Natalia Stachura, Hubert van den Berg and Jennifer Wellington. We thank
the project’s associate partner organisations and collaborators, especially
Suzanne Bardgett (Imperial War Museum), Dominiek Dendooven (In
Flanders Fields Museum) and Elisabeth Tietmeyer (Museum of European
Cultures) for their invaluable help. We are grateful to all of the contributors
to the project’s digital sourcebook (http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu): this
book mobilises ideas and content which first found a home there.
The book originated at a conference held at King’s College London in
January 2016 in conjunction with the German Historical Institute. We
would particularly like to thank Andreas Gestrich, then director of the GHI,
for his support facilitating the conference and the generous funding. It was
a memorable conference and we warmly remember all those who took part
and gave papers for their intellectual curiosity and generosity, which stimu-
lated many of our ideas for this volume.
Thank you to the Australian War Memorial, the British Library, the C­ adbury
Research Library, the Special Collections at the University of Birmingham,
the Imperial War Museum, the King’s College London Archives and the Leeds
University Library for granting permission to reproduce images in this book.
All efforts have been made to contact the copyright holders.
Colonial encounters in a time
of global conflict
An introduction
Santanu Das, Anna Maguire and Daniel Steinbach

In a rare testimony from sub-Saharan Africa, Stimela Jason Jingoes –


a labourer from Lesotho who served on the Western Front – recalled, in an
interview towards the end of his life, his first encounter with the ‘mother
country’ on his way to France:

We disembarked at Liverpool at about ten in the morning, delighted


to find an electric train waiting for us on the docks, under a large shel-
ter, so that we did not have to go out in the rain. It was, for me, as
though all my geography lessons at school were coming alive. I knew,
for instance, that when the wind came from the Atlantic, we would get
snow at home, and now I had sailed on the Atlantic. I had learned at
school that England is a beautiful place, and I was pleased to find that
my teachers had been right. Cape Town is a lovely city, but not as excit-
ing as a place like Liverpool.
Thrilled by the speed of the train, I watched the lush countryside race
by. English mountains are so different from ours, being covered with
grass and rounded, with not a stone or rock in sight. Its trees are of a
different green, and very beautiful.1

Jingoes was a member of the Swazi community and a self-identified ‘member


of the British Commonwealth.’ Stories of the imperial centre, gathered from
school lessons, as well as comparisons with his native landscape, framed his
perception of the English countryside and industrial modernity: knowledge,
imagination, memory and cognition are fused and confused in this enigma
of arrival in a land at once strange and familiar. He had read about the war
in his local Bantu newspaper and heard about ‘men doing battle in trenches
in the mud and the cold of France [which] fascinated and horrified [him].’
He joined up in 1917 and, as he sailed to Britain for the first time, his sense
of excitement jostled against painful racial memories of his ancestral past:
‘I felt misgivings, but I reminded myself I was not sailing as a slave, but as
a proud volunteer, and I soon cheered up again. We had accomplished a
great deal in three generations.’2 Jingoes’ careful distinction is important,
particularly given the post-war comparison of the experiences of some of

DOI: 10.4324/9781315112671-1
2 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach

Figure 0.1 Two soldiers of the South African Native Labour Corps seen during a
‘war dance’ and sports day.
Source: © Imperial War Museum (Q 2382).

the African soldiers in the First World War, especially those forcibly con-
scripted, to ‘literally slavery’ (see Keene, Chapter 9).3
Jingoes was among the two million Africans (including West Indians and
African Americans) who served in the war – as volunteers, conscripts and
mercenaries, or a combination of all three – and for many of whom, histories
of slavery and the war and empire were inextricably entangled.4 The impe-
rial call to arms occasioned for a subject such as Jingoes both a re-encounter
with the racial past and a recalibration of that identity, which would, in
turn, shape his subsequent encounters with Europe. He continued:

When we boarded the train, before we left Liverpool, the girls of that
place arrived with teapots, cups, and biscuits to serve us with tea. They
were so friendly, and we warmed to their concern for us.
‘Go and fight’, they said, ‘for your country and for your King, but we
think that most of all you will go and fight for us, because you would
not like us to die.’
Although white women had served us with tea in Cape Town, we
know they were only doing it because we were going to war. These girls
were different.
Colonial encounters 3
One of our preachers had told us that we would find no colour bar
in England, but we did not believe him: how could there be a country
where black men were treated the same as white men? On our ship com-
ing over there had been an Indian called Cassim who had told us the
same thing. He seemed very well informed. He had come from German
East Africa with his Captain, whose batman he was.
‘I’ve been there,’ he told us on the ship, ‘and I assure you that there is
no colour bar in England or France.’
‘You tell a good story my friend,’ we mocked him.
‘As you look at me, I am a French-speaker.’
We only laughed louder.
‘You’ll believe me when you get to France!’
The girls at Liverpool talked to us so easily that it seemed Cassim was
right, but it was a little early to judge yet, so we kept open minds on the
subject until we had had more experience of the place.5

His narrative, recalled some 50 years since his demobilisation, nonetheless


works through the minutiae of such vivid recollections – from chance inter-
actions to sustained relationships – and bears testimony to the topsy-turvy
world of the war that facilitated, curtailed or intensified such contact. Mem-
ories of kindness and warmth from British and French civilians jostle with
hierarchies of race, gender, class and empire. Upon arrival in Liverpool, the
absence of racial prejudice, coupled with the presence of women, open up
for the labourer from Lesotho differences within white femininity: the ‘girls’
in Liverpool were ‘different’ – and supposedly more ‘colour-blind’ – than
the white women of Cape Town. But, in addition to these encounters across
the colour line, the war had produced for Jingoes, even before he set foot in
Liverpool, the world of ‘lateral’ encounters with fellow colonised subjects:6
he meets Cassim, the French-speaking Indian batman of a white captain
from German East Africa – another of the war’s entangled subjects, like
himself – who exchanges stories with him about his experiences in England
and France.
Like Jingoes, many of the Indian, African and West Indian troops found
the local people in England and France kinder, warmer and less racially
prejudiced than the white population back in the colonies. While these men
wrote home about ‘colour-blind’ France, recent research has pointed to the
existence of a strong undercurrent of racial prejudice. Even within the colo-
nial subjects of colour, there was a careful racial hierarchy whereby Indians
were ‘allowed’ by the British imperial government to fight on the Western
Front, but not the West Indians, black South Africans or Maoris from New
Zealand, who were classified as ‘non-combatants’ when serving in Europe.7
Moreover, ‘civilised’ African Americans were demarcated from the ‘primi-
tive’ and ‘savage’ Africans from the French colonies.8 Racial prejudice also
intersected in complex ways with questions of rank, class, language and
nationality in wartime whereby Indian combatants, for example, were better
4 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
treated than black South African or Chinese labourers: Cassim and Jingoes
could have found themselves being accorded very different welcomes. Simi-
larly, communal and institutional racism coexisted with stirring accounts
of interpersonal friendships across lines of colour; moreover, with time and
acquaintance, racist fear often modulated and flowered into friendship.9
­Jingoes’ oral history provides a similarly complex narrative: when the South
African Native Labour Corps were demobilised in January 1918, Jingoes
and some of his friends hid in the houses of their French friends; ‘the mili-
tary police caught most of us, but there were others who never went back
to South Africa.’10
Relationships with French civilian society meant not only the wartime
subversion of European racial prejudices and going against the South Afri-
can state’s insistence on the segregation of non-white labourers. It signalled,
above all, the development of sufficient trust and intimacy between these
men of colour and the local community to circumvent wartime authority
and create opportunities to escape a return to racial subjugation. And soon
Jingoes’ memories narrow down to particular people and friendships:

I had met a fellow called William Johnstone of Folkestone on the docks


at Dieppe, where he was also working. We hit it off at once and spent
our breaks drinking tea and talking about our two countries, until at
last we were close friends. After the war we corresponded for many
years, but at last we lost touch and I do not know what became of him.11

War narratives abound with such memories. Alfred Horner, an English


priest who served as a chaplain with a battalion of the British West Indies
Regiment, described the initial atmosphere of suspicion with which his men
were greeted when they arrived in France and how they gradually earned
for themselves the moniker of the ‘friendly coloured soldiers’ by virtue of
their interactions with local civilians.12 Bakary Diallo, a Pullo soldier from
Senegal who served in France,13 wrote in a rare published account, Force
Bonté (1926), of the welcome offered to the ‘tirailleurs’ arriving in Cette,
and how a local family had shown him ‘a current of affection that until
then he had never experienced.’14 Writing about his experiences as an Indian
medical orderly turned prisoner of war in the Middle East in the remarkable
Bengali memoir Abhi Le Baghdad (1962), Sisir Prasad Sarbadhikari recalled
Indian soldiers bringing up, in hiding, an Armenian child whose parents
had been killed (Das, Chapter 5).15 The mobilisation of multi-ethnic empires
and improved transport links created a dizzyingly wide range of wartime
encounters that defied imperial centre-periphery or East-West affiliations.
Jingoes’ powerful testimony captures the themes of entanglement, encoun-
ters and exchanges – and the complex intersections between them – that lie
at the heart of this volume. Exceptional, though by no way unique, this oral
history raises a set of broader issues that cluster around these themes and
are addressed in subsequent chapters: the role of imperial war propaganda
Colonial encounters 5
(which alerted Jingoes to the war); movement as a catalyst for contact;
inherited racial memory and identity, and their intersections with issues of
gender, class and nationality; the role of narrative, media, photographs and
other art forms as both mediators and repositories of contact; the combina-
tion of different impulses – racism, suspicion, warmth, affection – coexisting
or evolving from one to the other; politically instrumental contacts, both
interpersonal and mediated, ranging from imperial propaganda to anti-
colonial networks in both belligerent and neutral countries to lateral con-
tact between racially similar but different national groups (North and West
Africans, West Indians and African Americans); and finally the importance
of non-conventional sources, with both their promises and limitations (as
with Jingoes’ much-belated oral testimony), if we are to seriously investigate
the extra-European dimensions of the war at a time when the majority of
the world’s populations was non-literate.
Over the last several decades, there has been a powerful reconceptu-
alisation of the war from male combat on the Western Front to a global
conflict that profoundly affected men, women and children, soldiers, non-
combatants and civilians, belligerent, colonised and neutral. While the war
is increasingly conceptualised as a military conflict between multi-ethnic
empires,16 we argue in this book that it could equally be understood as a
turning point in the global history of encounters.17 More than four million
men of colour, including two million Africans and one and half million Indi-
ans, were recruited into the belligerent armies of the European empires and
the USA for the war.18 Between 1914 and 1918, hundreds of thousands of
combatants and non-combatants, white people and people of colour, offic-
ers, auxiliaries and privates, doctors, nurses, journalists, translators, writers,
photographers, painters travelled to different parts of the world, all caught
up in the maelstrom of war. They served in places as diverse as France and
Belgium, East Africa, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Salonika, Palestine, Egypt
and Persia, resulting in an unprecedented range of encounters and entangle-
ments: direct and indirect, personal and mediated, fleeting and sustained,
forced and unforced.
What particular opportunities and special pressures did the war create
for encounters? How did people interact across the uneven intersections
of nationality, race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion and language (to men-
tion only a few categories)? What kinds of entangled histories predating
the war – geopolitical, racial and cultural, among others – informed such
encounters and how did such encounters, in turn, shape a range of issues,
from notions of cross-racial intimacy and identity formation to anti-colonial
movements, civil rights movement and visions of a post-war world? Context
and nuance, this volume argues, remain key to an understanding of these
encounters: the meeting of two people in a military camp is fundamentally
different from those same people meeting as prisoners of war in enemy ter-
ritory, which again would be very different from their meeting on neutral
territory to discuss the shape of a post-war world. Wartime violence, though
6 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
not always obvious, was never far away and shaped encounters, directly or
indirectly. But such moments and processes left traces behind in the cultural
and artistic consciousness of the time: what role do cultural forms such as
literature, songs, or the visual arts play, including their own entanglement in
such processes, as mediators, repositories or points of contact? It is to these
questions, in various combinations, that this volume turns, using a number
of geographically, culturally and methodologically diverse case studies.

‘Cosmopolitan dumping-ground’: contexts, contacts, traces


If the Western Front continues to retain its grip on the cultural imagina-
tion of the First World War, it was also an extraordinary zone of contact.19
As Dominiek Dendooven and Piet Chielens observed in their book World
War I: Five Continents in Flanders, there were people from more than 30
different nationalities and 50 ethnic groups present in the area around
Ypres.20 On 13 October 1914, Father Achiel Walleghem – a Belgian priest
who remained in Ypres for the duration of the war and kept a daily diary –
observed: ‘We had seen the troops of four different armies in a single day:
German, Belgian, English and French.’ In course of the next few months, he
would record the arrival of Indian, Australian, New Zealander, West Indian,
Algerian and Moroccan troops.21 Similarly, the 1919 demobilisation issue
of the YMCA journal Red Triangle noted the ‘marvellously cosmopolitan
dumping-ground’ of the war, adding that it has brought about ‘the most
astonishing democratization [as] French, British, Italian, American, Austral-
ian, Indian, African troops have all mingled together.’22 ‘Mingled’ was an
exaggeration and a misrepresentation as the structures of racial discrimina-
tion and social hierarchy remained largely intact (Maguire, Chapter 1). The
British policy was to keep colonial troops separate and occasionally in even
segregated camps (as with black South African labourers) according to their
race and nationality, in contrast to the French policy of having mixed regi-
ments of white French infantrymen and black ‘tirailleurs’ Senegalese. The
macabre cosmopolitanism of some of the British cemeteries of Northern
France and Belgium may thus create a false picture of diverse armies from
across the seas commingling daily in the Empire’s cause, when many of the
areas, including entertainment spaces, were kept out of bounds for men of
colour. However, there was some interaction: archival photographs reveal
Scottish and Indian soldiers manning trenches together while the ­Gallipoli
diary of an Australian soldier shows the name of an Indian combatant
signed in three languages.23 There was occasional conflict too, as between
the Chinese and North African labourers over food rations, or between the
Chinese and a group of French workers at Le Creuse in November 1916.24
Meanwhile, behind the trenches, a whole new world of cultural contact
was opening up – in camps, markets, towns – where excitement, eroticism,
vulnerability, suspicion and racist prejudice were fused and confused, or
evolved from one to the other with time and acquaintance. Indian, African
Colonial encounters 7

Figure 0.2 A page from the Gallipoli diary of Private Charles Stinson, where an
Indian had signed his name in English, Urdu and Gurmukhi.
Source: Australian War Memorial, Canberra, PR 84/066.
8 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach

Figure 0.3 A Maori lumber worker talking to a Frenchwoman. Forest de Nieppe,


March 1917.
Source: © Imperial War Museum (Q 4740).

and West Indian troops billeted with elderly French women whom they
referred to as their ‘mothers’: a photograph of a Maori lumberjack and a
local Belgian woman reveals the combination of goodwill and awkwardness
that underlay many of these meetings.
Dendooven uses the resonant phrase ‘living apart together’ to describe
the relationship between colonial troops and the local Belgian people.25
Occasionally, deeper relationships developed. Consider the following two
accounts:

Of her own free-will she washed my clothes, arranged my bed [and]


polished my boots. Every morning she used to prepare and give me a
tray with bread, butter, milk and coffee. [. . .] When we had to leave that
village the old lady wept on my shoulder. Strange that I had never seen
her weeping for her dead son and yet she should weep for me. More­
over, at [our] parting she pressed on me a five franc note.26
Of her own free-will she washed my clothes, arranged my bed, and
polished my boots daily for three months. [. . .] Each morning she
Colonial encounters 9
prepared me a tray with bread, butter, milk and coffee. When we had
to leave that village the old lady wept on my shoulder. It is strange that
I had never seen her weep for her dead son, but she wept for me. Moreo-
ver at parting she would have had me take a fi-farang [five franc] note
for the expenses.27

The first extract, from the letter of Sher Bahadur Khan, an Indian sepoy,
testifies to the rich terrain of inter-racial relationships forged not on the
basis of war camaraderie or sexual longing but wartime loneliness and
bereavement; the second extract is from the writer and imperialist Rudyard
Kipling’s war fiction, The Eyes of Asia, published in New York in 1918,
showing how such personal letters were not just accessed by the censors in
the British War Office but unscrupulously repurposed for imperialist propa-
ganda purposes.28
However, the Western Front and its narratives were by no means an
exception for being the ‘cosmopolitan dumping-ground.’ The campaigns in
Mesopotamia, East Africa and Gallipoli were equally diverse, with soldiers
and labourers from almost every part of the world.29 In Gallipoli, the Maori

Figure 0.4 Official photograph of the Dardanelles Expedition: French Senegalese


soldier giving a drink to a wounded French soldier.
Source: No 2728, 1915. HAMILTON 7/12/168. King’s College London Archives.
10 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
soldier Rikihana Carkeek, while queuing for hours in water fatigue, noted
with exasperation ‘the whole army [. . .] getting water; Australians, Tom-
mies, New Zealanders, Maoris and Gurkhas,’ while the celebrated Austral-
ian stretcher-bearer John Simpson Kirkpatrick remembered fondly how he
used to stay with Indian mule drivers and have their freshly prepared food.30
In East Africa (Steinbach, Chapter 4), Francis Brett Young, a British doc-
tor with the Royal Army Medical Corps, served alongside soldiers not only
from different parts of Africa, but also with different Indian regiments from
the Punjab, Kashmir and Baluchistan. In his writing and letters to his wife,
he recorded the soldiers’ different customs and languages, and his study of
Swahili, Hindi and Pashto.31 The mobilisation of empires meant that these
encounters did not always follow the traditional direction of the colonial
frontier or tourist explorations but saw new and unexpected geographic
locations inflected with significance as a consequence of the mapping of war,
as with the cities of Salonika (Immig, Chapter 2) and Jerusalem (Murphy,
Chapter 3) explored in this volume. The ‘global conflict’ could have remark-
ably specific regional resonances and galvanise local resistance, as examined
here through the enigmatic figure of the Maori queen and anti-conscription
activist Te Puea in a remote part of New Zealand (Gillett, Chapter 6).
Different groups and ethnicities also coexisted side by side, ‘living apart
together,’ in adjacent military camps (Maguire, Chapter 1), in cities under
occupation (Immig, Chapter 2 and Murphy, Chapter 3); and sometimes
they came together as a family, as in a war hospital in Baghdad where Indi-
ans, Syrians and Armenians shared food and stories together (Das, Chap-
ter 5). Often, these interpersonal connections were infused with a certain
‘anticolonial cosmopolitanism’;32 sometimes they would be repurposed for
explicitly political means, as the trio of chapters exploring the experiences
and contested meanings of black soldiers’ service in the First World War
show. Indeed, Hammond (Chapter 7), Smith (Chapter 8) and Keene (Chap-
ter 9) mine the rich terrain of encounters between diverse black troops (West
Africans, West Indians and African American) in a variety of forms (inter-
personal, musical, textual) which would feed into the post-war discourses of
pan-Africanism and American civil rights movements.
The spontaneous encounters in military and POW camps, fields, towns,
occupied cities and hospitals were complemented by a range of complex and
covert encounters, both actual and mediated, propelled by wartime impe-
rial propaganda and its counterforce, anti-colonial revolutionary networks.
A particular – and long-overlooked – part of the global propaganda effort
were the activities in colonial and neutral territories. The belligerent nations
flooded the colonies, both their own and those of their enemies, with a vari-
ety of cultural products harnessed to political ends: newspapers, illustrated
magazines, war posters, photographs, film screenings, translations of texts
(novels, poems, songs) and often the commissioning of new works.33 Many
reached beyond the boundaries of the empire and the war; for example,
the British propaganda newspaper, Al-Haqīqah, was circulated in neutral
Colonial encounters 11
countries such as Persia, Abyssinia and China as well as amongst British and
Ottoman Muslims in an attempt to appeal to a universal ‘Mohammedan
mind’ (McEvoy, Chapter 10).34
The same kind of cultural infiltration of the non-belligerent ‘homefront’
in Europe was particularly pronounced in the neutral countries such as Swit-
zerland, Sweden, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands. They became inter-
national contact zones as rival belligerent states tried to win them over by
exploiting or enticing the media, funding cultural institutions and trying to
influence writers, artists, filmmakers and opinion-makers. These politically
motivated ‘exchanges’ led to the resurgence of international collaboration
and exchange within a propaganda context in which all partners were not
always equally aware of the political cross-currents. They occurred at differ-
ent levels, from translation projects and tours of international expressionist
artists in neutral countries, secretly financed by the German propaganda ser-
vices, to the creation of bilateral cultural societies such as the ‘Netherlands-
France’ and ‘Sweden-France,’ funded by French officials.35 Such techniques
could be subtle and insidious; the ethnographic interest of a German docu-
mentary film like The Bayram Feast at the Muslim Internment Camps in
Wünsdorf (1916) was less of a blunt instrument for Dutch audiences than
the British film The Battle of the Somme (1916).36
The role of anti-colonial revolutionaries and their complex and ambiva-
lent relationship to a range of subjects from rival belligerent and neutral
European states open up one of the most compelling and convoluted dos-
siers in the twinned histories of war and cross-cultural encounter. While
France and Britain ran their propaganda campaigns in their colonies and
the neutral states, the German Foreign Office, with the conjunction of Otto-
man officials, created one of the most ambitious and dense networks with a
range of anti-colonial intellectuals, revolutionary agents and underground
‘independence’ societies (including those of India, Persia, Indonesia, Algeria,
Tunisia), whose ambitions all varied within the broad spectrum of national-
ist aspiration.37
In 1915 and 1916, there were a series of ‘missions,’ comprising German
and Ottoman officials and Indian anti-colonial revolutionaries, across Cen-
tral Asia to neutral Afghanistan to persuade its emir to support the Central
Powers with an attack on British troops in India. Collaborative newspa-
pers sprung up: Hindostan, for example, was produced by members of the
Indian Independence Committee in Berlin and the ‘Nachrichtenstelle für den
Orient’ for the Indian POWs in the Half Moon Camp. Brotherhood, edited
by the Indian Muslim revolutionaries Abdul Jabbar Khairi and Abdul Sattar
Khairi in Istanbul in 1918, drew on international anti-British sentiment, and
published poems by Irishman Denis Florence MacCarthy alongside photos
depicting hunger, starvation and disease in India during the war.38 Booklets
like Is India Loyal?, originally produced by the Indian Independence Com-
mittee, with contributions from German officials and anti-colonial Indian
revolutionaries based in Berlin, were translated into Dutch by the German
12 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
embassy in The Hague to target the Netherlands and its colonies as part of
the incitement of unrest in British India (Lobbes, Chapter 11).39 While the
extensive anti-colonial network was funded by the German Foreign Office
with the single aim of undermining British and French influence, what it
did create were spaces with varying degrees of colonial agency, visibility
and visions of alternative post-war world orders where Europeans and anti-
colonial nationalists worked together. The efforts of revolutionary com-
mittees and their supporters offer us a window into, in Adom Getachew’s
phrase, ‘worldmaking after empire’ (Jenkins, Chapter 12).40

Concepts and methodology


Rather than provide a history or even a survey of encounters during the First
World War, the volume delves into a selection of cases to explore the nature
of contact in a time of global conflict in all its messiness, minutiae and asym-
metries. Different terms – ‘impressions,’ ‘contact,’ ‘coexistence,’ ‘encoun-
ter,’ ‘exchange’ and ‘entanglement’ – describe partly or fully the substantial,
shifting and variegated area we are trying to map here. Over the last several
decades, there has been a turn to ‘histoire croisee’ as a way of understanding
global modernity with its complex webs and connections, often obscured
by national or comparative perspectives or the strict binaries of coloniser
and colonised: the concepts of ‘encounter,’ ‘exchange’ and ‘entanglement’
have emerged with particular resonance.41 Often used interchangeably and
employed for different ends, their very slipperiness is both problematic and
productive. In each of these crossing of borders, the people involved ‘per-
ceived, influenced, stamped, and constituted one another,’ in one way or
the other;42 at the same time, they equally highlight the frequently asym-
metric nature of such interactions, often tunnelling back to deeper sociopo-
litical, economic or cultural histories.43 In Cultures in Conflict: Encounters
between Europeans and Non-European Cultures, Urs Bitterli has suggested
the concept of ‘entangled cultures,’ delineating the three stages of ‘Kul-
turbeziehung’ (cultural contact) – ‘Kulturbegegnung, Kulturkontakt, Kul-
turaustausch’ (encounter, contact, exchange) – connected at various points
even if the connections have often been unequal and contradictory.44 On
the other hand, the political historian Kris Manjapra has acutely suggested
that the idea of entanglement might be best placed in a colonial context to
ask ‘what do different groups, some stronger, some weaker, get out of their
political relations together?’45
While compiling our online sourcebook, ‘Cultural Exchange in a Time
of Global Conflict,’ which grew out of the same research project as this
­volume, we reflected further on the concept of ‘entanglement’:

[Entanglement] registers the complexities and long-term effects of the


intercultural process; it leaves room for varying degrees of agency for
the partners; it shows how the contact during wartime affected men
Colonial encounters 13
and women; and it recognises moments of intimacy and contact, while
being wholly alert to various asymmetries, hierarchies, and differences.
It is thus used in the sourcebook as a critical tool that leaves room for
agency, for unbalanced power relationships, for possible exchanges and
effects on and between all participants, as well as their longer-term post-
war effects – vital elements to thoroughly understand a ‘histoire croisée’
in all its subtlety. [. . .] The concept of ‘entanglements’ in the context of
the sourcebook is not so much a question of ‘getting’ or ‘benefitting’ but
is more about the very processes of intercultural contact and how they
happen and, in turn, are remembered and represented.46

As in the sourcebook, we remain attentive to the conceptual reach and criti-


cal work of ‘entanglement,’ particularly with reference to the importance of
‘process’ highlighted in Part II of this volume. However, we decided to adopt
the concept of ‘encounter’ as our over-arching framing category in order to
recognise, in accordance with the findings of the subsequent chapters, the
role of contingency, serendipity and dislocation in times of war, in addition
to the geopolitical entanglements and racial hierarchies. Moreover, the idea
of ‘encounter’ also captures the sharp focus, in many of the chapters, on
relations between individuals and groups, on an interpersonal, cultural or
textual level, even when there are organisational networks, political stakes
and complex translations involved.
We recognise that the boundaries between these three terms – ‘encounter,’
‘exchange’ and ‘entanglement’ – are porous; it is important, we felt, to retain
these distinct if overlapping categories at play to leave maximum critical
room for understanding the range of wartime contact. Though no single
term can capture the complexity of a given historical situation, we have
found the idea of encounter relatively capacious and flexible for understand-
ing the creation and experiences of frontline and civilian ‘contact zones’
(to use Mary Louise Pratt’s celebrated phrase) – spaces for subjectivity,
agency and intimacy as well as for the networks of ideologies, politics and
propaganda circulating during the war.47 While, in the past, the framing of
these encounters through the charmed lens of cross-cultural and inter-racial
exchange has tended to obscure the various hierarchies at play, the idea of
‘contact zone’ is increasingly being used to understand power dynamics and
political interests, the individual, intellectual and social ‘yields’ from these
points of exchange as well as pockets of intimacy and cross-pollination. By
retaining the term ‘encounter,’ we seek to stress in this volume the sheer
range and kinds of contact, both direct and indirect – the scope for the acci-
dental, the unanticipated and the unforeseen, as well as those encounters
that were sought and engineered by the state or political activists. We want
to establish an approach that accommodates moments as when a ­Senegalese
patient dropped scented cigarette cards down the French-Canadian nurse
Alison Mullineaux’s neck as she went about her night-time rounds; the
love song performed by the Moroccan prisoner of war Kadr Ben Hamed
14 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
at the Halfmoon Camp in Wünsdorf, recorded by the Royal Prussian Pho-
nographic Commission; or Frederik van Eeden’s translation into Dutch the
religious songs and poems of Kabir, a fifteenth-century Indian poet, from
Rabindranath Tagore’s English version, as part of his vision of a global
internationalism.48
In their introduction to the excellent volume Militarized Cultural Encoun-
ters in the Long Nineteenth Century: Making War, Mapping Europe, Joseph
Clarke and John Horne note:

Whereas comparatively small professional forces conducted earlier


colonial campaigns, in the Americas or India, the mass mobilization
that began with the Revolutionary wars and climaxed in the twentieth
century changed that. [. . .] These expeditions took men further afield,
and in larger numbers, than any conflicts before them, and had previ-
ously been accessible only to an elite of explorers, diplomats and mer-
chant adventurers. In the century and half before the advent of mass
tourism transformed the nature of travel, these soldiers were Europe’s
most numerous, and most intrepid, travellers.49

In many ways, our book is complementary to this volume, with points


of contact and important differences. If Militarized Cultural Encounters
takes a more longitudinal view, focussing on Europe and its peripheries as
seen through the eyes of the European soldier through the long nineteenth
century, culminating in the First World War, ours is more spatial, span-
ning from camps in Europe and Mesopotamia (Maguire, Chapter 1 and
Das, Chapter 5) to European troops in Palestine and colonial East Africa
­(Murphy, Chapter 3 and Steinbach, Chapter 4) to local politics in New Zea-
land (Gillett, Chapter 6) to entertainment spaces in Salonika and London
(Immig, Chapter 3 and Smith, Chapter 8). ‘The accounts from the margins
of Europe,’ Clarke and Horne go on to observe, ‘are fundamentally self-
reflexive.’ Similarly, here, encounters with other people, cultures or lands
occasion a profound ‘self-encounter’; the ‘inescapable violence of campaign-
ing,’ mentioned earlier with reference to European troops, is compounded,
in our case, with the violence of race. How do particular sites such as bat-
tlefields, billets, restaurants, hospitals or prisoner of war camps shape and
determine the nature of interactions, and how do we define and understand
them when many of them inhabit that twilight zone between ‘forced’ and
‘unforced’ encounters? If the historical complexity of the wartime situa-
tion tests critical terms, such complexity is also generated, to a remarkable
degree, through the specificity of situations, starting with location. Part of
the aim in this volume is to try to move beyond strict and at times reductive
categories and showcase the fraught contours of these ambiguous zones,
which admit messy and even painful histories. On the other hand, if impe-
rial strategies and propaganda policies are often studied as a one-way traffic
and from a top-down perspective, some of the subsequent chapters reveal
Colonial encounters 15
the reciprocal, if uneven, exchanges which preceded, accompanied or even
altered the construction of these policies. A focus on individual agency, and
processes of encounters, we argue, can help us to study the reception of
these imperial strategies and propaganda policies in the colonies, dominions
and neutral countries.
The chapters in this volume are necessarily heterogenous in method. Some
recover wartime encounters, ranging from casual impressions to intimate
histories, through the minutiae of testimonies. Some are more discursively
developed accounts of the contexts, including the workings of the organi-
sations or platforms facilitating them and different interests at play. Some
are analyses of the cultural forms through which the encounters took place.
This methodological diversity is something the volume wishes to highlight
as an important dimension of the interdisciplinary scholarship necessary for
a project such as this, impelled by the diversity and asymmetrical nature of
the sources on one hand, and the range and flexibility of the term ‘encoun-
ter’ on the other. The contributors to this volume draw on a wide spectrum
and combination of sources – both newly ‘discovered’ material and pre-
viously known records that are reread and reinterpreted. An obstacle for
all historians but particularly for those trying to excavate colonial history
is the uneven representation of the different protagonists in the surviving
sources, and particularly the silence or erasure of the indigenous voices. This
dilemma of how to overcome a Eurocentric narrative and let ‘the subaltern
speak’ is a problem endemic to the postcolonial field. The years between
1914 and 1918 are, in some ways, a powerful exception. The mobilisa-
tion of millions of people from outside Europe for the war effort required
the belligerent powers to count, assess, inform, transport, house, feed and
entertain these subjects, creating a vast body of official files. These measures,
although carried out by the civilian state or the military, necessitated or
elicited contributions, suggestions or complaints from the colonial soldiers.
These interactions provide an important corrective not just to the image
created by contemporary propaganda, but also to the idea of the colonial
soldier as a voiceless victim of the war machine.
In addition to the violence of the colonial archive, an important prob-
lem facing the historian is how to recover the life stories of people who
did not know how to read or write. In that respect too, the years between
1914 and 1918 were exceptional for the sheer volume of letters and post-
cards written by ‘subaltern soldiers’ and the extensive apparatus of colo-
nial surveillance and the system of censoring letters, which mean that these
documents have survived and colonial subjects of colour step out of the
anonymity of the official files to provide glimpses into their inner world.
While these documents do not ever compare, in scale, scope or fullness to
the sheer abundance of letters, diaries, journals, memoirs or poetry and
fiction of the European troops which form, in Paul Fussell’s celebrated
phrase, the cornerstone of ‘modern memory,’ they nonetheless provide
us with rare collections of voices ‘from below.’50 The archive of censored
16 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
and translated extracts of letters from Indian sepoys at the British Library,
for example, captures not only daily routines but also the extraordinary
experiences of being on military service in a foreign land and their chance
encounters. The uneven spread of literacy pushes us to explore the inter-
action between oral and textual cultures in these testimonies – dictated,
created collectively, translated by colonial censors or told in retrospect.
Several chapters utilise non-textual sources in the form of songs and pho-
tographs. The former, one of the oldest forms of human communication,
was a key medium during the war for non-literate groups to make sense of
the turmoil by incorporating contemporary events into traditional forms.
Yet songs and music did not remain unaltered by the war; exposure to
and exchange with different cultures also changed and diversified the tra-
ditional forms. Photography, one of the newest communicative forms in
1914, captures – literally and figuratively – the elements of modernity that
defined the war. This was the first war to be documented meticulously in
photographs due to the ‘Kodak revolution’; official photographers, but
also ordinary soldiers and civilians, created millions of images recording
events at and behind all the fronts and in the occupied territories.51 In the
absence of written records or memoirs, these hitherto largely neglected
sources help to break the silence.
Movement and mobility in this volume exist on several planes: from the
concrete and personal, to the production and dissemination of thought
and feeling to political collaboration and exchange facilitated by travel
and technology. These planes determine the three sections through which
this volume is organised – ‘Spaces,’ ‘Processes’ and ‘Instrumentality’ – even
though the boundaries are porous. Almost every chapter spills over this
tripartite categorisation and speaks to chapters in other parts: particular
figures reappear, ideas hinted at in one part are investigated closely in
another, processes over time get instrumentalised. Still, the volume rip-
ples outwards in concentric circles of scale and process: we move from
interpersonal encounters which were envisioned and concentrated within a
specific space (Part I) to an exploration of the complex processes, cultural
forms and shifts in consciousness (Part II) – to instrumental encounters
designed to transmit, galvanise and incite new modes of thinking, being
and doing through the spread of ideas, words and images on a global scale
(Part III).

Part I. Spaces: camp, city, colony


In his seminal work The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre notes:

Every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and
many contributing currents, signifying and non-signifying, perceived
and directly experienced, practical and theoretical. In short, every social
space has a history.
Colonial encounters 17
He further notes how, ‘around 1920, just after the First World War,’ there
was a twofold shift in the thinking of space: first, a sharper consciousness of
a ‘global space’ and a more definite linking between ‘industrialisation and
urbanisation, between workplaces and dwelling-places.’52 More recently,
while thinking about ‘contact zones’ in an imperial world, the postcolonial
historian Mary Louise Pratt spoke to the ‘space in which peoples geographi-
cally and historically separated come into contact with each other.’53 For
both, space is not merely a discursive site but a finely nuanced, densely
populated, sociocultural reality, marked by the intersection of histories,
perceptions and practices. In a global war marked by mass mobilisation of
bodies, advanced technology and improved telecommunications, such spa-
tial imaginaries became even more complex and diverse, each with its dis-
tinct ‘culture.’ In fact, the terms ‘frontline’ and ‘homefront,’ coined during
the war, show how fundamental and enduring our spatial understanding of
the world’s first global war has been and its influence on First World War
historiography.54
Part I focuses on the intricate sociocultural minutiae of specific spaces –
embodied and heterogenous – as a way of understanding cultural encoun-
ters. In doing so, it responds to two impulses in how we write and think
about the spatial dimensions of the war: first, the burgeoning interest in
the understanding of the ‘homefront’ as a crucial site of the war experience
and having regular points of contact with the ‘front’; second, a remarkable
expansion from Europe into the rest of the world, particularly the colonies,
as part of the ‘global turn’ in First World War studies. This volume builds
on such interest to refine and examine the cultures of specific spaces – ships,
camps, cities, streets, cafes, hospitals – as a way of understanding how war-
time populations, both the enlisted and civilians, encountered each other
or were kept separate, lived, loved or drew apart, experienced new social
relations, and developed new forms of behaviour. Space, we felt, was par-
ticularly helpful to catch both the complex intersectionalities – race, gender,
rank, class, among others – as well as the specific contexts and shifting
hierarchies that shaped interpersonal relations. For example, the authority
of being an ‘occupier’ created different interactions with the city and peoples
of Jerusalem (Murphy, Chapter 3) than the navigation of the ‘neutrality’ of
one’s host city in the bustling cosmopolitanism of Salonika (Immig, Chap-
ter 2). On the other hand, for New Zealand soldiers to be stationed along-
side an encamped battalion of Gurkhas in France (Maguire, Chapter 1) was
very different from troops from across the British Empire meeting in colo-
nial East Africa (Steinbach, Chapter 4). In an imperial world, the dynamics
of spaces determined the very nature of the encounters as well as the stakes
involved in contacts that were brokered by the war. These new or altered
spaces also created new and different modes of power that impacted the
everyday lives of those within that space: military, civic, colonial, imperial.55
In organising this section, we think about how the enlisted occupied and
moved within the locations they were sent to as part of their military service
18 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
and their geographic trajectories, which confronted understandings of cen-
tre and periphery. We start in the military camp, where soldiers spent large
amounts of their time, where they slept, ate and exercised, and where they
attended to the cultural, social and psychological shifts that war required
of them. For those who travelled where military campaigns decreed they
should – drawn from overseas colonies and dominions to serve in Europe or
the Middle East, or leaving European homes for the first time to fight in the
campaigns in Asia and Africa – camps were spaces of central importance to
their sense of belonging. Military infrastructure was overlaid with familiar
signifiers of the world left behind: London’s street names finding new homes
on global fronts, as one example.56 In the potential ‘emotional communities’
of camp spaces, efforts to sustain and restore military fitness and morale
might work to broker more friendly, or even intimate relations with those
they lived alongside. As Maguire (Chapter 1) shows, the distance travelled
by combatants and non-combatants from the British Empire to the Western
Front, where they met their fellow colonials, comrades from the ‘mother-
land’ and their (imperial) allies, was most immediately realised in the per-
ceived pageantry of empires uniting in arms. Yet in these spaces, colonial
troops’ encounters with their fellow servicemen demanded their attention
to the racialised structures of camp life, where militarised jurisdiction and
imperial hierarchy were mutually designed and sustained. Camps were not
the frictionless contact zones that the imperial pageantry usually suggested
but were places where the explicit and implicit rules of colonialism were
elaborated upon and experienced by individuals, which could be evocative,
congenial, violent or painful.
As we shift from the specificity of the camp, to look beyond its bounda-
ries, we remember that camps were not closed spaces. This might be the
porous boundaries of inter-military visiting, as Immig’s (Chapter 2) use of
photographs taken in camps to demonstrate the reciprocal attendance of
concerts, plays and sporting competitions by troops stationed in Salonika.
The photographs remind us of the ‘optical confusion’ of encounters as sol-
diers and civilians alike tried to make sense of the new people and places
they interacted with, using visual signifiers. These images bridge the gap
between military and civilian, as in a football match between Italian soldiers
and the local football club, Aris, in 1917. Camps also accommodated close
contact and exchange with civilian contractors and tradespeople, entertain-
ers or other visitors, who regularly entered the military sphere. From the
presence of YMCA workers to visiting concert parties to the curious civil-
ians who attended sports days and ceremonies, camps created room for
lively conviviality and economic opportunity which jostled alongside the
governing military infrastructure.57 In these interactions, the racial dynam-
ics of encounter were further complicated as understandings of ‘whiteness,’
‘Europeanness’ and ‘colonised’ were tested by the presence of so many
troops in a ‘peripheral’ and formerly ‘neutral’ city.
Colonial encounters 19
If soldiers tried to project notions of civilian city life onto their military
camps, cities themselves became military spaces in the war. Due to the geo-
graphic trajectories of the war, military forces both lived on the outskirts
of and spilled into cosmopolitan centres and enacted new forms of spatial
control through their presence. The pervious boundaries of camp allowed
enlisted men out into the city spaces they lived alongside, though military
restrictions on movement, to prevent racial mixing or the spread of disease
requires the disaggregation of soldiers’ ‘freedom.’58 These cities take us fur-
ther on a longitudinal journey within national and imperial structures as
much as the military. Both cities discussed here, Salonika and Jerusalem,
were multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious places before 1914 and
both represent a different form of imperial control with cultural, economic
and political power constantly contested. The war, and especially the occu-
pation by foreign troops, created new forms of urban life reflecting new,
shifting power structures. Encounters and interactions between soldiers and
civilians did not merely reflect an opposition between occupier and occu-
pied but were also determined by familiarity, expectations and dependency.
Murphy (Chapter 3) takes up this theme as city and (proto-)colony collided
through the British occupation of Jerusalem from 1917. Murphy analyses
how the soldiers’ encounters with the city led to a reshaping of their identity
as tourists, soldiers and pilgrims. Significantly, the occupation of the city
also led to its physical remaking, as the British ‘occupation’ saw the con-
struction of a re-imagined biblical Jerusalem. This physical building helped
the new arrivals to overcome the dissonance of ancient and modern. Mur-
phy enables us to ask questions about what it means to occupy, to take up
space in wartime, to assume the reins of colonial governance, through the
experiences of the men on the ground, who marched and toured and created
new frames of ‘knowing’ for their readers at home.
The multi-directional waves of travel move us through each of these
spaces, shifting the political framing and colonial relations of empire and
their influence on the encounters which took place. The final chapter in this
section moves us further along still on our version of the journey ‘out’ from
the ‘heart’ of Europe on the Western Front, through a European ‘periph-
ery,’ to Africa where the imperial powers mobilised their colonial subjects
to fighting each other. As Steinbach (Chapter 4) demonstrates, the inhabit-
ing of inherited colonial mentalities and the enactment of white superiority
and violence, in their writing and behaviour, were essential to the exertion
of order in British troops’ encounters with ‘Africa.’ In doing so, Steinbach
moves far beyond the charms of encounters to their brutalising impact. Brit-
ish soldiers responded to their encounters in East Africa with articulations
of racially ‘justified’ authority and control in their behaviour and interac-
tions, which descended into savage violence. As we delve into these spatially
bounded zones of contact, these case studies offer both the ‘messy’ experi-
ence of encounters and attempts to implement order within this messiness,
20 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
so that we begin to turn to the politics of encounters’ occurrence during the
First World War from which action could evolve.

Part II. Process: experiences, commonalities and


politicisation
If every social space, for Lefebvre, ‘is the outcome of a process,’ the social
contact within such spaces during the war tunnelled back into, enacted and
in turn led to further processes – historical, sociocultural, political – as eve-
ryday experiences often resulted in shifts in consciousness and points of
action.59 It is now generally accepted that, while the world was dragged
into war under the banner of vast European empires, the war also prepared
the stage for the collapse of the imperial world order. However, as Smith
(Chapter 8) notes, ‘wartime politicisation was an uneven process.’ In Part II
of the volume, we develop on the spatial imaginaries of Part I to investigate
the complex processes of particular encounters, with their varying politi-
cal impulses, to trace the gradual evolution of a more racialised conscious-
ness. Closely allied to this, and highlighted here, are the intricate processes
of cultural representation. The chapters examine interpersonal and com-
munity encounters unfolding through the formal processes of the sources –
photographs, lectures, memoirs, literature and, above all, songs – which are
at once repositories of and entangled in wartime encounters, necessitating
the reconceptualisation of the role of the ‘archive.’
In the introduction to Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the
Global Circulation of Ideas, Kris Manjapra notes:

In the context of a world symbolically dichotomized by imperial power


and European racism into center and periphery, North and South, East
and West, white and coloured, anticolonial cosmopolitanisms chal-
lenged this cartographic imagination and showed the violence at the
heart of colonial universalism. [. . .]
To frame the global circulation of ideas within the lone axis of center
versus periphery is to view the world through the colonial state’s eyes
and through its archive. As theorists of interregional and transnational
studies have pointed out, the practice of taking sideways glances towards
‘lateral networks’ that transgressed the colonial duality is the best way
to disrupt the hemispheric myth that the globe was congenitally divided
into an East and West, and that ideas were exchanged across that fault
line alone.60

Though Manjapra does not mention the First World War, some of his ideas
are particularly germane for this volume. What we have here is a more polit-
icised and aspirational version of cosmopolitanism which, rather than being
defined in opposition to nationalism, is powered by the spirit of anti-colonial
resistance.61 Cosmopolitanism in this version provides the ethical ground on
Colonial encounters 21
which ‘zones of conversation’ outside the imperial axis and between dif-
ferent cultural, linguistic and political communities develop not just in the
pursuit of a particular political or nationalist agenda but because of larger,
shared and more intimate histories of subjugation and exploitation.
On 30 July 1914, even before Britain had declared war, the Lahore-based
newspaper Zamindar predicted:

War will not be confined to Austria and Serbia but will be a universal
war in which all the great empires of Europe will be involved; for hav-
ing partitioned Asia and Africa, they have no hunting grounds left, and
will now descend into the arena and hunt each other [. . .] the materials
of war which have so far been used to destroy Orientals will now be
employed in the destruction of Europeans.62

In spite of this ‘politics of anti-Westernism,’63 undivided India ended up


contributing the highest number of troops amongst the European imperial
world. In India, as indeed in many of the other colonies, there was enthu-
siastic support from the nationalist leaders. Even anti-colonial nationalists,
from Mahatma Gandhi in India to Marcus Garvey in the West Indies, sup-
ported imperial war recruitment in the hope of post-war political rewards;
another factor was racial and national pride. ‘As Coloured people we will be
fighting [. . .] to prove to Great Britain that we are not so vastly inferior to
the white’ reported the black Grenadian journal The Federalist and Grenada
People in 1915, a sentiment that was echoed by the Bengali journal Desh:
‘[Indian] active service and the bravery [now would] remove the wrong
impression that Indian soldiers are not equal to European soldiers.’64 The
fact that Asians and Africans would regard the killing fields of France and
Belgium as the ground for racial equality and colonial masculinity points to
the extreme polarisation of the world along the line of colour. In fact, the
African American poet Walter E. Seward wryly reconceptualised no man’s
land as a democratic colour-blind space: ‘Bullets have no special people,/
No one especially they hate;/And the Germans’ large artillery?/Sure did not
discriminate.’65 It is this seething underworld of injuries and aspirations that
intellectuals and soldiers from subjugated population groups brought with
them to the various sites and processes of contact – not so much as defined
political goals but a shared sense of injustice and inequality.
What the en masse wartime mobilisation of colonial troops facilitated was
a twofold process: the creation of ‘lateral networks’ between various subju-
gated groups, both within and outside the imperial centre/periphery axis, and
the translation of shared sentiments into conversations and points of action.
The chapters in this section investigate this complex hinterland of encounters
between different ethnic and racial groups facilitated by imperial networks.
Through a combination of letters, lectures, memoirs and fiction, Das (Chap-
ter 5) highlights the diversity of encounters occurring within a particular
national group through a focus on the Indian experience, ranging from the
22 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
sepoys’ encounter with both European and colonial soldiers on the Western
Front to a Bengali medical orderly and POW sharing food, cigarettes and a
sense of racial injustice with wounded Turkish soldiers in Baghdad to the
Indian writer and Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore having conversa-
tions with European, American and Chinese intellectuals. Smith (Chapter 8),
on the other hand, considers a range of encounters, including those between
West Indian and African American veterans, within the internationalising
and liberal imperialist enterprise of the YMCA, with a particular focus on
its social club for ‘Coloured Sailors and Soldiers’ on Drury Lane in London.
The lateral encounters detailed by both Das and Smith, whether in France,
England or Mesopotamia, crosscut in complex ways with contact across the
colour line, as in Sisir Prasad Sarbadhikari’s relationship with his German
employer as a POW in Aleppo, or the presence of British and American sol-
diers at the YMCA in London. Many of these encounters were social and
spontaneous in nature where men came together for the ‘human touch’ but,
given the dominant racist ideology, these meetings were charged, in varying
degrees, with ‘anti-colonial cosmopolitanism’ and fed into larger movements,
whether that of anti-colonial nationalism or pan-Africanism.
The interwoven strands of vulnerability, resistance and hybridity that
both Das and Smith emphasise get some of their most poignant expressions
in the world of song and music-making. First World War songs, particularly
in a global context, remain one of the most rich and under-researched areas;
such practices range from songs of lament sung by war widows in Punjabi
villages to songs of homesickness and longing sung in ships and trenches
to devotional songs sung in the German POW camps in Wünsdorf. Here,
Gillett (Chapter 6) focuses on the role of song and cultural performance
mobilised by the Maori female leader Te Puea Herangi in New Zealand, for
a spectacular staging of anti-conscription activism, both within the Maori
community and before a wider Pakeha audience. In the process, the chap-
ter opens up two important aspects: how the war resonated in the furthest
reaches of the colonial and multi-ethnic homefront and the role of women
within it. Hammond (Chapter 7), on the other hand, reconceptualises the
male space of the Western Front through the soundscapes of blues, sung by
African American soldiers, examining how different forms and traditions –
ragtime, blackface, minstrelsy songs and sheet music – cross-pollinated
each other. In a further example of intercultural transfer, these songs come
to us as collected by John Jacob Niles, a US ferry pilot. These songs, for
­Hammond, are at once an archive of the African American war experience;
an example of how trench experience informs African American music; and
the way they mark an important step for the internationalisation of jazz and
blues in Europe and North America.
What all four chapters in this section collectively articulate is a growing
sense of discontent and dissent, shared amongst groups of people hitherto
kept separate but with shared histories forged on the line of colour. The war
sets the context for these meetings, in YMCA clubs, POW camps, in trenches
Colonial encounters 23
and local communal spaces, with a call for equality and undermining of
the existing world war through sporadic and uneven sites and processes of
encounter; it is in Part III that we see a more programmatic approach which
exists alongside and sometimes proceeds from these processes.

Part III. Instrumentality: propaganda, resistance and the


post-war world
Even before the ‘Great War’ had concluded, a greater war, stretching from
the streets of Calcutta and Canton to Cairo and Harlem, had begun: for a
more equitable world order, marked by racial equality and political self-
determination. ‘The gateway to our freedom,’ wrote Mahatma Gandhi in
July 1918, ‘is situated on the French soil.’66 As soon as peace was declared
on 11 November 1918, nationalist leaders such as Sa’d Zaghlul from Egypt
and Lajpat Rai from India had sent excited telegrams to US President Wood-
row Wilson, reminding him of his promise for the self-determination of
nations.67 And as the peace negotiations in Paris started, he published on
the very first page of his influential journal Young India a map of the world:
India, Ireland, Korea, parts of Southeast Asia and almost all of Africa were
shaded black and termed ‘dependencies’; for South Africa, he wrote: ‘Nomi-
nally republic; Whites free; natives dependent.’ The map was titled: Here
Are the Oppressed Nations of the World; What Will the Peace Conference
Do for Them. ‘Europe is not the only place that is to be made safe for
democracy,’ Rai noted.68 Meanwhile, in a speech at the Carnegie Hall in
New York in 1919, Marcus Garvey, who had emigrated from the British
West Indies to the USA during the war, gave one of his fiery speeches:

They took 2,000,000 black men from America, from the West Indies
and Africa, to fight for this farcical democracy they told us about; and
now we are after winning the fight, winning the battle, we realize that
we are without democracy; and we come before the world, therefore,
as the Universal Improvement Association, to demand our portion of
democracy.69

As Keene (Chapter 9) notes, Garvey ‘gave great speeches, but he also offered
concrete strategies for building fleeting wartime cultural encounters into
something more lasting.’ It is with these ‘concrete strategies’ for political
alliances and change that the chapters in Part III examine.
These chapters testify both to the vision of a more equitable and demo-
cratic post-war world – evident in pan-African and pan-Asian movements,
and in the burgeoning of anti-colonial and civil rights movements – and
the ways these aspirations, in turn, were manipulated by different stake­
holders and power groups. Rather than the contingent or spontaneous
encounters behind the battle lines, camps or cities, as explored in Parts
One and Two, the complex affiliations – interpersonal or textually and
24 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
visually mediated – examined here were ideologically motivated. Keene thus
examines the political potential of the kinds of encounters described by
­Hammond and Smith through the way the achievements of the West African
combatants were drawn upon by African American veterans and activists
in newspaper articles, pictorial books and wartime lectures to forge a com-
mon black combatant experience and consciousness. She investigates both
the politics of these strategic translations and their complex appropriation,
with inner differences, by key black intellectuals – the Jamaica-born Marcus
Garvey, the African American war veteran Rayford Logan and the US civil
rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois. Together, the chapters by Hammond, Smith
and Keene form a triumvirate that examines the contested meanings and
spaces of black war service and their role in the ‘dawning of black world’;
in the process, they bear testimony to the expansiveness and complexity of
the term ‘encounter.’
If these three chapters explore the commonality of black experience and
its contribution to a pan-African consciousness, the final chapters (Chap-
ters 10, 11 and 12) explore an alternative imaginary where issues of race,
ethnicity and nation were similarly intertwined. In The Politics of Anti-
Westernism in Asia, Ceymil Aydin notes the rise in the nineteenth century
of ‘strategic essentialism against the European discourses of race, orient,
and empire and a legacy of the universalism inherited from the non-Western
humanistic traditions of Islam, Confucianism or Buddhism.’70 The war
seemed to provide confirmation of the moral crisis of the Eurocentric world
order and strengthened the appeal of pan-Asian and pan-Islamic ideas on
the global stage; but, unlike the pan-African movement and because of the
enlistment of Ottoman Empire on the side of the Central Powers, these aspi-
rations were strategically manipulated by the German Foreign Office, defy-
ing any neat divisions across the line of race and ethnicity.71
The three chapters document the range of encounters, personal or textual,
in all their covert politics, aspirational idealism and moral murkiness, struck
between unequal partners with widely divergent aims, drawn in varying
combinations from the belligerent, neutral and colonised countries. At the
outbreak of the war, the British and the French empires ruled over 120 mil-
lion Muslim subjects: how will the Allied states retain the loyalty of these
men when they were being made to fight their co-religionists in Mesopota-
mia or the Middle East? As early as 14 November 1914, in Constantinople,
the Ottoman sultan in his role as caliph declared a ‘holy war’ against Britain
and its allies. As Hew Strachan observes, ‘This was a call to revolution which
had, it seemed, the potential to set all Asia and much of Africa ablaze.’72
Consequently, the world’s Muslim population became an important pawn
in the propaganda wars between the Entente and Central Powers, the target
of various journals, magazines, films and lectures; but what they, in the pro-
cess, allowed was intense engagement with and greater visibility of the Mus-
lim world, feeding into discourses of pan-Islamism. McEvoy (Chapter 10)
focusses on the British propaganda publication – the illustrated newspaper
Colonial encounters 25
Al-Haqīqah – to counter German propaganda; yet what this elaborate
propaganda inadvertently reveals is the wartime Western construction of
the ‘Mohammedan mind,’ with its discourses of Orientalism, pan-Asianism
and strategic essentialism. What Lobbes (Chapter 11) and Jenkins (Chap-
ter 12) examine is exactly the same space but seen through the other end
of the telescope, facilitated by Germany’s ‘Programme for Revolution,’ in
conjunction with various colonial actors, resulting in something altogether
rich and strange.
One of the most shadowy yet tantalising areas in this lateral network of
instrumental encounters is the relationship between the anti-colonial actors
and activists belonging to different racial and national groups: were the
encounters physical and interpersonal, or were they largely discursive and
mediated through articles and journals? For example, in wartime Berlin,
there were societies for Indians, Tunisians, Indonesians and Algerians. Did
they compete among themselves to get their voices heard or secure access to
the key actors in belligerent or neutral states? Lobbes (Chapter 11) uncov-
ers this endlessly intriguing world through the enigmatic figure of Ernest
­Douwes Dekker, the anti-colonial intellectual and politician from the politi-
cally neutral Dutch East Indies. Revealing the East Indies as a ‘hub of Indian
anti-colonial activities,’ Lobbes places Dekker at the centre of an intricate
web of anti-colonial encounters, both mediated and intertextual: journals
such as Het Tijdschrift and De Indiër that he founded were in dialogue with
the activities of nationalists in India, the Philippines, China and Egypt while,
in 1915, he made an extraordinary journey to meet Indian nationalists, Jap-
anese sympathisers and Chinese nationalists in San Francisco, Tokyo and
Shangai. Even if circumscribed within the workings of the German Foreign
Office, Dekker is an example of how the war did not just foster these com-
plex networks but created considerable space for their agencies and agendas.
The shifting, complex and deeply ambivalent relationship that many of
these colonial intellectuals had in relation to the German programme is
explored further by Jenkins (Chapter 12) with her focus on the journal The
New Orient, a German foreign policy publication with pieces by both Ger-
man officials and anti-colonial intellectuals, which provides the counterpoint
to Al-Haqīqah. Neither merely a propaganda mouthpiece nor the learned
Orientalist scholarly publication it was assumed to be, Jenkins examines
how this journal became ‘an arena for the encounter of the [anti-colonial]
activists with German officialdom and a political weapon in their struggle.’
In spite of the unequal balance of power, what is particularly remarkable,
as Jenkins notes with reference to the case of Persia, is the seriousness with
which it debated different visions and versions of post-war worldmaking,
ranging from questions of empire and ‘self-determination’ (often exclusively
associated with Wilson) to a ‘new Orient’ beyond Islam and Orientalism.
In her introduction to World War One in Southeast Asia, Heather Streets-
Salter called for attention to relationships beyond metropole and colonies,
to ‘the many other structures, flows, and processes that were neither wholly
26 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
defined by such bilateral relationships nor limited by national-colonial bor-
ders.’ Instead, Streets-Salter suggests a conceptualisation ‘that is messier and
more multilateral.’73 Through the 12 chapters of this volume, we examine
encounters as the spaces and processes through which this multi-directional
mess was lived in wartime, experienced, recorded and instrumentalised. In
doing so, we suggest the rich potential and possibility of this approach in
its multiple iterations and locations. From their entanglement with past his-
tories to the bold imagination of a more equitable post-war future, these
encounters allow us to see how the world was understood in the midst of a
global conflict.

Notes
1 Stimela Jason Jingoes, A Chief Is a Chief by the People: The Autobiography of
Stimela Jason Jingoes, ed. John and Cassandra Perry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), p. 80.
2 Ibid., p. 78.
3 Emily Balch, Secretary of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
to Mary White Ovington, 16 March 1921, folder ‘Senegalese Soldiers’, quoted
in Jennifer D. Keene, Chapter 9.
4 The figure of ‘two million’ comes from Hew Strachan, The First World War
(London: Penguin, 2005), p. 67 (particularly see the chapter ‘Global War’,
pp. 67–95); for war and memories of slavery, see Mark Whalan, The Great War
and the Culture of the New Negro (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida,
2008); Norman Clothier, Black Valour: The South African Native Labour Con-
tingent, 1916–1918 and the Sinking of the Mendi (Pietermaritzburg: University
of Natal Press, 1987), p. 12.
5 Jingoes, A Chief Is a Chief by the People, p. 80.
6 It is worth noting that ‘colonial’ is employed variously to include those who
were colonised and racialised as of colour, those white people from the domin-
ions who participated in processes of settler colonialism and self-identified as
‘colonial’ in contemporary writing, and white British people who worked as
part of the colonial administration. The capacious use of the term requires atten-
tion to the intention and analytical weight it carries as it is applied differently
throughout this book. The historical interchange of this term and the ‘shifting
imaginings’ of colonial frontiers are well articulated by Bill Schwarz, Memories
of Empire, Volume I: The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), p. 109.
7 See Timothy C. Winegard, Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the
First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Anna Magu-
ire, ‘ “I Felt Like a Man”: West Indian Troops Under Fire During the First World
War’, Slavery & Abolition 39 (2018), 602–621. We use the term ‘people of col-
our’ here due to its encompassing nature and ability to describe those racialised
as ‘not white’ by who they were rather than who they were not. However, we
remain conscious that this term does not disaggregate the experiences and differ-
ent oppressions of people of colour (including for example, anti-Blackness) and
can collapse them into a falsely singular category: where we can be more specific,
we are.
8 Richard S. Fogarty, Race and Empire in France: Colonial Subjects in the French
Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008),
p. 3. Also see Christian Koller, ‘Representing Otherness: African, Indian and
Colonial encounters 27
European Soldiers’ Letters and Memoirs’, in Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire
and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
pp. 127–142.
9 Dominiek Dendooven and Piet Chilens (eds.), World War I: Five Continents in
Flanders (Ypres: Lanoo, 2006). See Santanu Das, India, Empire and First World
War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018) for such a mixture in British and French responses to Indian sepoys,
pp. 119–173, 176–177.
10 Jingoes, A Chief is a Chief by the People, p. 93.
11 Ibid.
12 Alfred Horner, From the Islands of the Sea: Glimpses of a West Indian Battalion
in France (Kingston: The Guardian, 1919), p. 55.
13 Nicole M. Zehfuss, ‘From Stereotype to Individual: World War I Experiences
with Tirailleurs Senegalais’, French Colonial History 6 (2005), 137–157.
14 Bakary Diallo, ‘Force-Bonté’, in David Beus (trans.), Cultural Exchange in a
Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu/items/show/270
accessed 10 December 2020).
15 Sisir Prasad Sarbadhikari, Abhi Le Baghdad [On the Road to Baghdad], trans.
Upasana Dutta (Calcutta: Privately Printed, 1957), quoted in Das, India, Empire
and First World War Culture, Chapter 5.
16 Hew Strachan, ‘The First World War as a Global War’, First World War Stud-
ies 1 (2010), 3–14; Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing; Robert
Gerwarth and Manela Erez (eds.), Empires at War (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2014); Richard S. Fogarty and Andrew Tait Jarboe (eds.), Empires
in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).
17 This central thesis informed our 3-year collaborative research project (2013–
2016) ‘Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict: Colonials, Neutrals
and Belligerents in the First World War’, https://cegcproject.eu, and our online
sourcebook (http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu). See also Anna Maguire, Contact
Zones of the First World War: Cultural Encounters across the British Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
18 For the statistical breakdown, see Das, Race, Empire and First World War Cul-
ture, p. 27: ‘The figure of over four million is arrived at easily by adding up the
1.4 million Indians, 2 million Africans, 400,000 African Americans, 100,000
Indochinese and 140,000 Chinese labourers, mentioned above. To this should be
added, among other groups, the numbers of Maori, Aboriginal Australians, First
Nations Canadians, West Indians and Amerindians. Not all of them saw active
service though.’
19 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 2008), p. 8.
20 Dendooven and Chielens, World War I; John Horne, ‘Workers in France During
World War I’, French Historical Studies 14 (1985), 57–88. See also Dominiek
Dendooven, Asia in Flanders Fields: A Transnational History of Indians and
Chinese on the Western Front, 1914–1920 (unpublished PhD thesis, University
of Kent, Universiteit Antwerpen, 2018).
21 We are grateful to Dominiek Dendooven for bringing these notebooks to our
notice and translating the above passages. It was published in three volumes
in the 1960s: Achiel Van Walleghem, De Oorlog te Dickebusch en omstreken
1914–1918 (Brugge: Genootschap voor Geschiedenis, 1964–67). See vol. I,
pp. 54, 109 and vol. III, p. 92.
22 Vivian G. Simmons, ‘Brotherhood in War Time’, Red Triangle 2 (1919), 353,
quoted in Richard Smith, Chapter 8.
28 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
23 Diary of Private Charles Stinson (1st Australian Light Horse Brigade), Austral-
ian War Museum, PR 84/066.
24 See Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing, pp. 45–46, 150.
25 Dominiek Dendooven, ‘Living Apart Together’, in Santanu Das (ed.), India,
Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 143–157.
26 Letter from Sher Bahadur Khan, 9 January 1916, Censor of Indian Mails 1914–
1918, Part 2, British Library, India Office Records [IOR], L/MIL/826.
27 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Fumes of the Heart’, in The Eyes of Asia (New York:
Doubleday, 1918), p. 36.
28 See Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture, p. 190.
29 See Leila Fawaz, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Anne Samson, World War I
in Africa: The Forgotten Conflict Among European Powers (London: I.B. Tauris,
2012); Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia, Colonialism
and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2017); Jenny McLeod, Gallipoli: Great Battles (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015); Justin Fantauzzo, The Other Wars: The Experience and
Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020).
30 Rikihana Carkeek, Home Little Maori Home: A Memoir of the Maori Contin-
gent, 1914–1916 (Wellington: Totika, 2003), p. 74; Peter Stanley, ‘Remembering
the Contribution of Indian Troops’, www.sbs.com.au/radio/article/2015/04/25/
remembering-contribution-indian-troops-gallipoli (accessed 22 June 2020).
31 Francis Brett Young, ‘Letter by British Author Francis Brett Young to His Wife
in England’, Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.
cegcproject.eu/items/show/173 (accessed 10 December 2020). See also Daniel
Steinbach, ‘Shifting Tides: The Port City of Mombasa and the First World War’,
Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 5 (2021), 1–18.
32 Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South
Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), p. 2.
33 See Sadia McEvoy, The Construction of Ottoman Asia and Its Muslim Peo-
ples in Wellington House’s Propaganda and Associated Literature, 1914–1918
(unpublished PhD thesis, King’s College, 2016).
34 Ibid.
35 See for example Kate Winskell, ‘The Art of Propaganda: Herwarth Walden and
“Der Sturm”, 1914–1919’, Art History 18 (1995), 315–344.
36 Militärische Film- und Photostelle (Berlin), ‘Bayramfest im Mohamedaner-
Gefangenenlager (Halbmond- und Weinbergslager) zu Wünsdorf bei Zossen
(1916)’, Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.
cegcproject.eu/items/show/68 (accessed 10 December 2020).
37 Jennifer Jenkins, Heike Liebau, and Larissa Schmid, ‘Transnationalism and
Insurrection: Independence Committees, Anti-Colonial Networks, and Germa-
ny’s Global War’, Journal of Global History 15 (2020), 61–79.
38 Abdul Jabbar Khairi Abdul Sattar Khairi, ‘India Under British Rule’, Cultural
Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu/items/
show/32 (accessed 10 December 2020).
39 Indian National Party, “ ‘Is Indië Loyal?’,” Cultural Exchange in a Time of
Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu/items/show/22 (accessed 10
December 2020).
40 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-
Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Colonial encounters 29
41 Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking
Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colo-
nial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1997); Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals
across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Michael Wer-
ner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the
Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory 45 (2006), 30–50.
42 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (eds.), Comparative and Transnational
History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York,
Oxford: Berghan, 2009), p. 20.
43 Ibid., p. 2; Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander, and Douglas T. McGetchin
(eds.), Transcultural Encounters Between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in
the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 3.
44 Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-
European Cultures, 1492–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).
45 Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, p. 6.
46 ‘Introduction’, Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://source
book.cegcproject.eu/introduction/ (accessed 10 December 2020).
47 Joseph Clarke and John Horne (eds.), Militarized Cultural Encounters in the
Long Nineteenth Century: Making War, Mapping Europe (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), p. 19.
48 Private Papers of Mrs Alison Mullineaux, 13 September 1918, Imperial War
Museum, Documents 6867; Hubert Grimme, ‘Liebeslied Marokkanisch’,
Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcpro
ject.eu/items/show/67 (accessed 10 December 2020); Kabir Evelyn Underhill
Rabindranath Tagore Frederik van Eeden, ‘Kabir’, Cultural Exchange in a Time
of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu/items/show/62 (accessed 10
December 2020).
49 Clarke and Horne, Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Cen-
tury, p. 5.
50 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975).
51 Jay Winter, War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great
War to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 36.
52 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), pp. 110
and 124.
53 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 8.
54 See, for example, Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas, ‘Home Fronts, Gender,
War and Conflict’, Women’s History Review 26 (2017), 523–527; Krisztina
Robert, ‘Constructions of “Home”, “Front”, and Women’s Military Employ-
ment in First World War Britain: A Spatial Interpretation’, History and Theory
52 (2013), 319–343; Bill Nasson, ‘Sometimes Somnolent, Sometimes Seething:
British Imperial Africa and Its Home Fronts’, Historical Research 89 (2016),
363–374; Yigit Akin, When the War Came Home: The Ottoman’s Great War
and the Devastation of an Empire (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press,
2018).
55 Burton and Ballantyne, Bodies in Contact, p. 6; Myra Rutherdale and Katie
Pickles (eds.), Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colo-
nial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), p. 3.
56 See Rachel Richardson, Home Away from the Home Front: The British in the
Balkans During the Great War (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London,
2014).
30 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
57 Peter Chen-main Wang, ‘Caring Beyond National Borders: The YMCA and Chi-
nese Laborers in World War I Europe’, Church History 78 (2009), 327–349;
Amanda Laugesen, ‘More Than a Luxury: Australian Soldiers as Entertainers
and Audiences in the First World War’, Journal of War & Culture Studies 6
(2013), 226–238.
58 Mario M. Ruiz, ‘Manly Spectacles and Imperial Soldiers in Wartime Europe,
1914–1919’, Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2009), 351–371; Phillipa Levine,
‘Battle Colours: Race, Sex and Colonial Soldiery in World War I’, Journal of
Women’s History 9 (1998), 104–130; Tyler Stovall, ‘The Color Line Behind the
Lines: Racial Violence in France During the Great War’, The American Histori-
cal Review 103 (1998), 737–769.
59 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 110.
60 Bose and Manjapra, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones, p. 2.
61 The reference point in this debate is of course Martha Nussbaum, For Love of
Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1996). See
Amartya Sen, ‘Is Nationalism a Boon or a Curse?’, in Sugata Bose and Kris
Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global
Circulation of Ideas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 23–37; Kwame
Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, in Pheng Cheng and Bruce Robbins
(eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 91–116.
62 Zamindar, 30 July 1914, Reports on Punjabi Newspapers (RPN), IOR,
L/R/5/195, 914.
63 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007).
64 The Grenada Federalist, 27 October 1915, quoted in Glenford Howe, Race,
War and Nationalism: A Social History of West Indians in the First World War
(Kingston: James Currey, 2002), p. 17. Desh, 4 December 1915, IOR, RNN,
L/R/5/196, 728.
65 Walter E. Seward, ‘Who Went Over the Top?’ in Negroes’ Call to the Colours
and Soldiers’ Camp-Life Poems (Athens, GA: Knox Institute Press, 1919), p. 46.
66 Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. IV
(Ahmedabad: Government of India, 1965), p. 489.
67 See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the Interna-
tional Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
68 Ibid., p. 20.
69 UNIA Meeting at Carnegie Hall, 25 August 1919, New York (State), quoted in
Jennifer D. Keene, Chapter 9.
70 Aydin, Politics of Anti-Westernism, p. 201.
71 See Prasanta Duara, ‘The Discourse of Civilisation and Pan-Asianism’, Jour-
nal of World History 12 (2001), 103–104; also see Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Indian
Nationalism and the “World Forces”: Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions
of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War’, Journal of
Global History 2 (2007), 325–344.
72 Strachan, The First World War, pp. 99–100.
73 Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia, p. 6.

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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Recollections
of James Anthony Gardner, commander R.N.
(1775–1814)
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Recollections of James Anthony Gardner, commander


R.N. (1775–1814)

Author: James Anthony Gardner

Editor: Sir R. Vesey Hamilton


John Knox Laughton

Release date: February 16, 2024 [eBook #72974]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Naval Records Society, 1906

Credits: Richard Tonsing, MWS, and the Online Distributed


Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK


RECOLLECTIONS OF JAMES ANTHONY GARDNER,
COMMANDER R.N. (1775–1814) ***
Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.
PUBLICATIONS
OF THE

NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY

Vol. XXXI.

RECOLLECTIONS
OF

James Anthony Gardner


RECOLLECTIONS

OF

James Anthony Gardner


COMMANDER R.N.

(1775–1814)

EDITED BY

SIR R. VESEY HAMILTON, G.C.B.


ADMIRAL

AND

JOHN KNOX LAUGHTON, M.A., D.Litt.


HON. FELLOW OF CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON
PRINTED FOR THE NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY

MDCCCCVI
THE COUNCIL
OF THE

NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY


1906–1907

PATRON

H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES, K.G., K.T., K.P.

PRESIDENT

EARL SPENCER, K.G.

VICE-PRESIDENTS

Bridge, Admiral Sir Cyprian A. G., G.C.B.


Desart, The Earl of, K.C.B.
Firth, Professor C. H., LL.D.
Yorke, Sir Henry, K.C.B.

COUNCILLORS

Atkinson, C. T.
Clarke, Col. Sir George S., K.C.M.G.
Corbett, Julian S.
Custance, Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald N., K.C.M.G.
Dartmouth, The Earl of.
Drury, Vice-Admiral Sir Charles C., K.C.S.I.
Field, Captain A. M., R.N., F.R.S.
Ginsburg, B. W., LL.D.
Godley, Sir Arthur, K.C.B.
Gordon, The Hon. George.
Gray, Albert, K.C.
Liverpool, The Earl of.
Loraine, Rear-Admiral Sir Lambton, Bart.
Lyall, Sir Alfred C., G.C.I.E.
Markham, Admiral Sir Albert H., K.C.B.
Newbolt, Henry.
Prothero, G. W., Litt.D., LL.D.
Seymour, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Edward H., G.C.B.
Slade, Captain Edmond J. W., R.N., M.V.O.
Tarleton, Lieutenant A. H., R.N., M.V.O.
Thursfield, J. R.
Watts, Sir Philip, D.Sc., K.C.B., F.R.S.
White, Commander J. Bell, R.N.R.
White, Sir William H., K.C.B., F.R.S.

SECRETARY

Professor J. K. Laughton, D.Litt., King’s College, London, W.C.

TREASURER

W. Graham Greene, C.B., Admiralty, S.W.

The Council of the Navy Records Society wish it to be


distinctly understood that they are not answerable for any opinions
or observations that may appear in the Society’s publications. For
these the responsibility rests entirely with the Editors of the several
works.
INTRODUCTION

In many respects the present volume differs from the most of


those which have been issued by the Society; there is in it very little
history, as commonly understood. The author, it is true, lived in a
stirring time, and was himself an actor in some of the incidents
which have shed a glory on our naval records; but his account of
these is meagre and of little importance. The interest which attaches
to his ‘Recollections’ is entirely personal and social; we have in them
sketches roughly drawn, crude, inartistic, and perhaps on that
account the more valuable, of the life of the time; of the men who
were his companions in the berth, or the gunroom or the wardroom;
on deck, in sport or in earnest.
In all this, there is perhaps little that we did not know before in
an otiose sort of way. We knew that the men of the time were often
coarse in speech, rude in action; but it may be that the reality, as
portrayed by Commander Gardner, exceeds anything that we had
imagined. It seems to carry us back to the days of Roderick Random,
and to suggest that there had been but small improvement since
Smollett wrote his celebrated description. A closer examination will
correct this impression; will convince us that there had, on the
contrary, been a good deal of improvement; that the life was less
hard, the manners less rude; and if the language does not show very
much difference, it has to be considered that Smollett was writing for
the public and Gardner was not; that Smollett’s dialogues are more
or less literary, and Gardner’s are, for the most part, in the
vernacular.
Occasionally, indeed, the language has been modified, or its
undue strength merely indicated by a ——; but where oaths and
expletives formed such a large part of the conversational currency
between intimates; when ‘son of a bitch’ was the usual equivalent of
the modern ‘chappie’ or ‘Johnnie’ or ‘rotter’; when ‘damned’ was
everywhere recognised as a most ordinary intensitive, and ‘damn
your eyes’ meant simply ‘buck up,’ it has been felt that entirely to
bowdlerise the narrative would be to present our readers with a very
imperfect picture of the life of the day.
Independent of the language, the most striking feature of the
portraits is the universal drunkenness. It is mentioned as a thing too
common to be considered a fault, though—if carried to excess—an
amiable weakness, which no decent commanding officer would take
serious notice of. Looking down the lists of old shipmates and
messmates, the eye is necessarily caught by the frequency of such
entries as ‘too fond of grog,’ ‘did not dislike grog,’ ‘passionately fond
of grog,’ ‘a drunken Hun,’ a term of reprobation as a bully, rather
than as a drunkard, ‘fond of gin grog,’ ‘mad from drink,’ ‘insane from
drink,’ and so on, passim. For the officer of the watch to be drunk
scarcely called for comment; it was only when, in addition to being
drunk, he turned the captain out at midnight to save the ship, that he
narrowly escaped being brought to a court martial; ‘but we
interceded for him, and the business was looked over’ (p. 217).
It is, of course, familiarly known that during the later years of
the eighteenth century, such drunkenness was almost more common
on shore than afloat; and when more than half the peerage and the
most distinguished statesmen were ‘habitual drunkards,’ there was,
from the social point of view, some excuse for the many of Gardner’s
messmates. For good or ill, the navy has always been very
conservative in its customs; and at a much later date, when hard
drinking was going out of fashion on shore, except among very young
men, it still continued prevalent in the navy. Some of our older
officers will remember at least one instance in which a great public
scandal was averted only in consideration of the social connections of
the principal offender; and courts martial, bringing ruin and disgrace
to the individual, long continued to be painfully frequent. Absolute
reform in this direction was slow; but there are few things more
remarkable than the change which has come over the service during
the last quarter of a century.
But in the eighteenth century this hard drinking brought in its
train not only the terribly frequent insanity, such as is recorded in so
many of Gardner’s pages; not only the gross lapses, some of which
Gardner has indicated, but also numerous irregularities, which we
may suspect where we do not know’, and of which, quarrels and free
fights in the wardroom or in the steerage—such, for instance, as
brought on the series of Phaëton courts martial (pp. 73–4)—were
only one type. Coarse practical joking among men no longer young
was another characteristic of the life which seems subversive of true
discipline. Here, of course, we are met by the great change which has
everywhere taken place; and the horse-play of Billy Culmer and his
friends—stupid vulgarity as it now appears—can scarcely be
considered more childish than the pranks and hoaxes of Theodore
Hook or Grantley Berkeley twenty or thirty years later. But the very
serious objection to such practices on board ship was that—as is now
common knowledge—the most inveterate practical joker is the most
annoyed when the tables are turned and he himself is made the
victim of the joke; that quarrels are certain to arise, which, in a small
society and among armed men, are both dangerous in themselves
and detrimental to the service. It is, too, difficult to draw the line
between practical joking, ragging, or ‘hazing’ and actual bullying.
There is no doubt that they merge into each other, and, in the
present state of public opinion, could not possibly be tolerated.
Gardner himself, so far as we can judge from his own story, was
a good, capable man, who took the life around him as quite a matter
of course, without falling into its worst characteristics. He seems,
too, to have been a man of singularly equable temper; and it is
worthy of special notice that, amid much to annoy and irritate him,
he has preferred to say what is good, rather than what is bad, of his
messmates and superiors. It used to be so very much the custom to
speak evil of dignities, that it is quite refreshing to meet with a young
officer to whom his captain did not necessarily seem a bullying,
tyrannical blockhead; who could see that the senior might have a
proper motive and have formed a correct judgment, even though he
did thwart the junior’s wishes or act contrary to the junior’s opinion.
Gardner had, for instance, no particular cause to love Calder, but he
could still speak of him as ‘a brave and meritorious officer, and of
first-rate abilities, a man that had the service at heart’ (pp. 101, 107).
Leveson Gower he did not like—no subordinate did; but, though he
relates several incidents, which of themselves are sufficiently
damning, he does not seem to have set down aught in malice, nor has
he made any spiteful commentary. His worst remark is ‘I have said
enough of him’ (p. 90).
First lieutenants were, of course, the natural enemies of a
youngster; but with few exceptions his comments, even on them, are
good-humoured. Of one only does he speak bitterly; it is Edward
Hamilton (p. 172), whose celebrated recapture of the Hermione
might induce us to suspect that Gardner was merely expressing the
spleen roused by the loss of his kit, did we not remember that, at this
time, Hamilton was only 23, and that he was but 30 when his active
career was brought to a premature end by a court martial dismissing
him the service for cruelty and oppression. It is true that he was
specially reinstated six months later, but he never afterwards
commanded a sea-going ship, nor, as an admiral, did he ever hoist
his flag. It is indeed a remarkable fact, and one giving much food for
thought, that other young captains, whose brilliant courage before
the enemy won for them a reputation little, if at all, inferior to that of
Hamilton, were also tried by court martial for tyrannical and
excessive punishments. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this
was in great measure due to utter want of training in the art of
command. The way in which the ships’ companies were raised, the
vicious characters of the men, almost necessarily led to severity
which easily might and too often did degenerate into brutality.
On all this, however, Gardner offers no opinion. He took the
service as he found it, content to do his duty honestly and faithfully.
The story of his career, which is related at length in the following
pages, may be summarised from the memoir in O’Byrne’s Naval
Biographical Dictionary, the first draft of which was almost
certainly written from information supplied by himself.

James Anthony Gardner, son of Francis Geary Gardner, a


commander in the navy, who died at St. Lucia in September 1780,
was born at Waterford in 1770–1. Francis Geary Gardner, captain of
marines, was his brother. Sir Francis Geary Gardner Lee, who began
life as a midshipman (p. 202) and died a lieutenant-colonel of
marines, was a cousin. Two other cousins—Knight and Lee—captains
in the 17th regiment, are mentioned (p. 208), and yet another, ‘son of
the late Alderman Bates of Waterford’ (p. 221). His grandfather,
James Gardner, who died, a lieutenant in the navy, in 1755, was, in
1747–8, a lieutenant of the Culloden, with Captain, afterwards
Admiral Sir Francis, Geary, the godfather of James’s son, who, on 2
February, 1768, married Rachel, daughter of Anthony Lee of
Waterford, and niece of Admiral William Parry. It will be noticed
that the younger Gardner, having been born in Ireland, son of an
Irish mother, considered himself Irish, is especially Irish in his
sympathies, and that throughout his ‘Recollections’ the word ‘Irish’ is
very commonly used as denoting ‘exceptionally good.’
From 1775, when he was not more than five years old, Gardner
was borne, as his father’s servant, on the books of the Boreas, the
Conqueror, and the Ætna; and he might, according to the custom of
the day, have counted these years as part of his time at sea. As,
however, when he went up for his examination (p. 174), he had more
sea time than enough, he only counted it from his entry on board the
Salisbury in December 1783 (p. 41). Really, he first went to sea in
May 1782 (p. 19) in the Panther, and in her, under—in succession—
Captains Thomas Piercy and Robert Simonton, he saw the loss of the
Royal George, and was present at Howe’s relief of Gibraltar and in
the ‘rencounter’ with the combined fleets of France and Spain off
Cape Spartel on 20 October, 1782 (pp. 24, 27, 30 seq.).
During the ensuing peace he served on the Newfoundland and
Home stations, as midshipman and master’s mate in the Salisbury,
50, flagship of Vice-Admiral John Campbell (pp. 41–55); Orestes, 18,
Captain Manley Dixon (pp. 56–63); Edgar, 74, flagship of Rear-
Admirals the Hon. John Leveson Gower and Joseph Peyton (pp. 64–
96); Barfleur, 98, bearing the flags of Admirals Roddam, the Hon.
Samuel Barrington, Sir John Jervis, John Elliot and Jonathan
Faulknor (pp. 97–120), and Queen, 98, Captain John Hutt (pp. 121–
5). After a further service, chiefly in the Mediterranean in the
Berwick, 74, Captains Sir John Collins, William Shield. George
Campbell and George Henry Towry (pp. 126–154); in the Gorgon, 44,
Captain James Wallis, for a passage to England (pp. 155–171); and in
the Victory, 110, Captain John Knight, at Portsmouth (pp. 172–7), he
was promoted, 12 January 1795, to be lieutenant of the Hind, 28,
Captains Richard Lee and John Bazely (the younger), on the North
American and Irish stations, and in January 1797 was sent in to
Plymouth in charge of a prize, La Favorite privateer, of 8 guns and
60 men (pp. 178, 202).
His next appointments were—8 March 1798, to the Blonde, 32,
Captain Daniel Dobree, under whom he assisted in conveying troops
to Holland in August 1799 (pp. 203–225); 13 April, 1801, to the
Brunswick, 74, Captain George Hopewell Stephens, which, after a
year in the West Indies, returned home and was paid off in July 1802
(pp. 226–249). After a short service as agent of transports at
Portsmouth (p. 250), he was appointed, in January 1806, in charge
of the signal station at Fairlight in Sussex, where he continued till 7
December 1814 (pp. 251–263). From that date he remained on half
pay as a lieutenant, till on 26 November 1830, he was placed on the
retired list with the rank of commander.

Reading this summary of Gardner’s service, in connection with


the longer narrative, we are naturally inclined to say: Another
instance of a good man choked out of the line of promotion by want
of interest; there must have been something radically wrong with the
system that permitted want of interest to shelve, at the age of 32, a
sober, punctual and capable officer, with a blameless record and
distinguished certificates. But would such a presentment of the case
be quite correct? Gardner was excellently well connected, and had
relations or good friends—including the comptroller himself (p. 97)—
in many different departments of the public service. He must have
had remarkably good interest; and we are forced to look elsewhere
for what can only be called his failure.
The first reason for it—one, too, that has damaged many a young
officer’s prospects—was his determination to pick and choose his
service. This is apparent throughout. He wasted his interest in
getting out of what he considered disagreeable employments. He
quarrelled with Captain Calder and wearied Sir Henry Martin by his
refusal to go to the West Indies, as it ‘did not suit my inclination’ (p.
97); he scouted McArthur’s suggestion to try his fortune on board the
Victory (p. 148), and got himself sent to the Gorgon for a passage to
England, only to find that his cleverness cost him five months’ time
and the whole of his kit (pp. 172–3). The same daintiness is to be
observed throughout. But if one thing is more certain than another in
calculating the luck of the service, it is that a whole-hearted devotion
to it, a readiness to go anywhere and to do anything, pays the best.
Later on, there was another reason for Gardner’s want of this
readiness. He married early—on 11 December 1798—and his future
career does not contravene the frequently expressed opinion of our
most distinguished admirals, from Lord St. Vincent downwards, that
—as far as the service is concerned—a young lieutenant might as well
cut his throat as marry. ‘D’ye mind me,’ says the old song—
‘D’ye mind me! a sailor should be, every inch,
All as one as a piece of the ship;’

and for a young man, with a young wife at home, that is impossible.
His allegiance is divided; the wife on shore has the biggest share and
continually calls for more, till the husband gets a home appointment
—a guardo, a coast-guard, or a signal station—pleasant for the time,
but fatal to all chance of promotion. No doubt there have been
exceptions. It would not be impossible to cite names of officers who
married as lieutenants and rose to high rank; but either under
peculiar conditions of service, or because the wife has had sufficient
strength of mind to prevent her standing in the way of her husband’s
profession; possibly even she may have forwarded him in it. Exceptio
probat regulam; but Gardner was not one. His direct connection
with the service ended with the peace in 1814. It does not appear that
he either asked for or wished for any further employment; but spent
the rest of his life in a peaceful and contented retirement in the
bosom of his family, at Peckham, where he died on 24 September
1846, in his 76th year. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s,
Newington Butts, where a head-stone once marked the site of the
grave. But the churchyard has been turned into a pleasure-ground,
and the position of the stone or the grave is now unknown.
The ‘Recollections’ which by the kindness of the authors
grandsons, Francis William and Henry James Gardner, we are now
permitted to print, were written in 1836, and corrected, to some
small extent, in later years. We have no information of the sources
from which he composed them. He must have had his logs; and we
may suppose either that these took the form of journals, or that he
had also kept a journal with some regularity. Certainly it is not
probable that, without some register, he could have given the lists of
his shipmates, correct even—in very many cases—to the Christian
names. That their characters and the various highly flavoured
anecdotes were matters of memory is more easily believed.
What is, in one sense, the most remarkable thing about the work
is the strong literary seasoning which it often betrays. The
manuscript is a little volume (fcap. 4to) written on both sides of the
paper, in a small neat hand. This, of itself, is evidence that Gardner—
leaving school, after six or seven broken years, at the age of twelve—
did not consider, or rather was not allowed to consider, his education
finished in all branches except in the line of his profession. Of the
way in which it was continued, we have no knowledge. It is quite
possible that Macbride, the drunken and obscene schoolmaster of
the Edgar, may, in his sober intervals, have helped to inspire him
with some desire of learning. The educational powers of Pye, the
schoolmaster of the Salisbury and of the Barfleur, can scarcely have
stretched beyond the working of a lunar. In the Berwick he was
shipmates with the Rev. Alexander John Scott—in after years
chaplain of the Victory and Nelsons foreign secretary—a man of
literary aptitudes, who was ‘always going on shore to make
researches after antiquities’ (p. 150), and Gardner may sometimes
have been allowed to accompany him in his rambles.
However this may have been, it is very noteworthy that a
tincture of polite learning was shared by many of his messmates. To
those whose notions of life afloat are gathered from Roderick
Random and other descriptions of the seamy side of the service, it
will seem incredible that such should have been the case. We are not
here concerned to prove it as a general proposition. It is enough to
refer to the particular instances before us—that of Gardner and his
messmates. He tells us that Macredie, who was with him in the
Edgar, and afterwards in the Barfleur, was ‘an excellent scholar, well
acquainted with Greek and Latin, ancient history and mathematics’
(p. 80), which must mean something, even if we allow a good deal for
exaggeration. In the Edgar they were with that disreputable but
amiable and talented sinner, Macbride; and it was also in the Edgar
that the assumption of Homeric characters was a common sport, in
which Macredie figured as Ajax Telamon, Culverhouse as Diomede,
and Pringle won the name of ‘Ponderous and Huge’ (pp. 84, 93).
This does not, perhaps, go for very much; but it cannot be lost
sight of that, as concerns Gardner, it was accompanied by a readiness
to apply quotations from Popes Iliad and from the Aeneid,
sometimes in Dryden’s version, sometimes in the original. He was
certainly, also, as familiar with Hudibras as ever Alan Quatermain
was with The Ingoldsby Legends. Shakespeare he does not seem to
have studied; and though it is but a small thing in comparison that
he should have read Ossian and A Sentimental Journey, his
knowledge of, his familiarity with, Roman history may be allowed as
a makeweight, unless indeed—which is quite possible—it was drilled
into him by Scott on each separate occasion. Thus, when the Berwick
goes to Tunis and Porto Farino, he is reminded of the fate of Regulus
(p. 136); he connects Trapani with the destruction of the Roman fleet
under Claudius (p. 137), and knows that the concluding battle of the
first Punic war—the battle which, as Mahan has shown, decided the
result of the second Punic war—was fought off the Egades (p. 138).
Incomparably more attention is nowadays paid to the instruction of
our youngsters; but we are confident that very few of them could
note such things in their journal unless specially coached up in them
by a friendly senior.
In this, again, there have been exceptions. Until recently there
has probably always been a sprinkling of officers who kept up and
increased the knowledge of Latin they brought from Eton or
Westminster[1] or other schools of classical learning; and Hannay, the
novelist, who had a personal acquaintance with gunroom life of sixty
years ago, has represented the midshipmen and mates of his day
bandying quotations from Horace or Virgil with a freedom which
many have thought ridiculous, but which, we must admit, might
sometimes be met with. We were told by an officer who served in the
Hibernia under the flag of Sir William Parker, that it was easy to fit
names to all the principal characters in Hannay’s novelettes; and it
may be assumed that what was true for the captains was equally true
for the midshipmen.
Such familiarity with the Latin poets was, of course, very
exceptional then; it has now, we fancy, entirely dropped out. The
Latin which our present youngsters bring into the service must be
extremely little, and they have no opportunity of continuing the
study of it; and though English history and naval history form part of
the curriculum at Osborne and Dartmouth, there is but little
inducement to a young officer to read more when he goes afloat. But
there are certainly many of our older officers who would say that a
sound and intelligent knowledge of history is more likely to be
profitable to the average captain or admiral than the most absolute
familiarity with the processes of the differential or integral calculus.
A considerable, and what to many will be a most interesting,
part of the volume is occupied by lists of names and thumb-nail
sketches of character. No attempt has been made to amplify these
beyond filling in dates and Christian names [in square brackets]
from Navy-lists and Pay-books. More would generally have been
impracticable, for most of the names are unknown to history; and
where otherwise, anything like full notices would have enormously
swelled the volume, without any adequate gain. It has seemed better
to add a mere reference to some easily accessible memoir, either in
the Dictionary of National Biography (D.N.B.), Charnock’s
Biographia Navalis, Marshall’s Royal Naval Biography, or
O’Byrne’s Naval Biographical Dictionary; sometimes also to
James’s Naval History, Schomberg’s Naval Chronology, or to
Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs—all books which are quite
common, and are or ought to be in every naval library.
It remains only for the Editors to express their grateful thanks to
the Messrs. Gardner, who not only permit them to publish the
‘Recollections,’ but supplied them with a copy of the MS., typed at
their expense; to the Very Rev. the Dean of Waterford, who has most
kindly had all the registers at Waterford searched (though vainly) in
the endeavour to determine the exact date of Commander Gardner’s
birth; and to the numerous friends and even strangers who have so
kindly helped them in answering the various queries which have
presented themselves. These are too many to name; but the Editors
must, in a special degree, mention their obligations to Commander
C. N. Robinson, R.N., whose very exceptional knowledge of the
byways of naval literature has been most generously put at their
service. That some of their queries have remained unanswered and
that explanatory notes are thus sometimes wanting will serve to
emphasise the importance of the assistance referred to. What, for
instance, is the meaning of the phrase ‘My hat’s off’ (p. 108)?
Apparently ‘Not a word!’ but why? or again, what are ‘ugly podreen
faces’ (p. 214)? To a mere Englishman the epithet looks as if it might
be Irish; but Irish dictionaries and three competent Irish scholars are

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