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In popular memory and on the big screen, the First World War was fought in the mud

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of northern France — or maybe in the skies above it. But what about the

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war beyond the irreverently-nicknamed trenches? I’m Lucy, and in this episode

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of Footnoting History, I’ll be looking at the non-Western fronts of World War One.

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The ways in which the First World War was collectively and individually traumatic can hardly

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be overstated. But although even the name by which we know it indicates the conflict’s global scale,

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images of this world war tend to concentrate on the scarred landscapes of northwestern

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Europe — sometimes even the same few miles of France and Belgium. In this podcast,

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I’ll be taking a look at how the war was fought and remembered in other places, from the harbors

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of East Africa to the fields of Eastern Europe. The scope of the conflict owed much to the fact

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that it was an imperial war. The infamously narrow strips of blood and mud and metal on

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the Western Front were fought over not only for their own sakes, but also very much for the sake

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of which of the empires in the conflict would have the power to draw the maps of the future.

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The war began in East Africa, in fact, before hostilities were joined in Europe,

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with the British bombing of a German radio station in Dar-es-Salaam. The European powers were divided

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between a reluctance to commit troops to the African front, and a still deeper reluctance

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to let their rivals gain a more secure foothold in the lucrative continent. It was a German

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invasion of what is now Mozambique that drove Portugal to abandon its position of neutrality.

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White populations of distinct colonies tended to elide their differences at the call of empire.

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Most of the campaigns themselves, however, were fought by non-white troops.

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The monument to Askari troops in Nairobi boasts an inscription by Rudyard Kipling, which concludes:

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“If you fight for your country, even if you die, your sons will remember your name.” It appears in

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Swahili as well as English, and was tailored to appeal to a local rather than imperial sense of

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legacy — it contrasts notably with the patriotic pieties of similar monuments erected in Britain

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(“Dulce et decorum est,” etc.) But it also pinpoints a grim and obvious irony: while

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many of the Askari troops were indeed fighting on the soil and in defense of their homeland,

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they were fighting in a war between two exploitative foreign powers.

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Kenyan scholar Lydia Waithira Muthuma has suggested that, since it preserves and heroizes

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a political minority, it deserves more intentional conservation than has hitherto been accorded it.

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In contrast with monuments affirming British imperial hegemony,

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it instead commemorates the agency — however fraught — of a political minority.

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I should take a moment to observe that African troops in colonial armies were not a novelty,

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and voluntarily became career soldiers in order to escape enslavement or better their social status.

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During the First World War, however, conscription would become the norm.

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Over 1 million African soldiers and carriers were mobilized for the war; over 15% of those men died.

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Some conscripts were enlisted as a form of forced labor; elsewhere, it was responded to as a matter

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of honor: Alaafin Ladigbolu of Oyo, for instance, told the British at the outset of the war that he

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could guarantee thirty thousand troops from among his people — and that the British

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“should not treat this as an idle boast.” The experiences of these conscripts, especially,

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would help to mobilize African nationalism as a political movement in the period between the wars.

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The exploitation of African raw materials, taxation, and inflation all rose markedly during

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the war, rendering the cost of imperialism both more acute, and more acutely visible,

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in all-too-stark contrast with the rhetoric of duty and solidarity binding the colonies

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to the nations at war. In Sénégal and French West Africa, the military collaboration — and

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conscription — of African troops would be invoked in arguments for rights to French citizenship.

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Surprising exactly no one, these were withheld, because imperialism is terrible like that.

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Mobilization itself, at the outset of the war, had often been constructed as a moral duty of African,

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rather than colonial patriotism; an editorial in The Nigerian Pioneer wrote that “The African is

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taught from early childhood the duty we owe one to the other…. In times of sorrow and sadness he

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shares in the grief of his neighbors. In times of distress and want he is taught to contribute

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towards the relief of those affected.” The ways in which imperialist agendas affected

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Africa during the First World War are particularly visible in Cameroon. A German possession since the

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infamous Berlin Conference, Cameroon was ruled — ineffectively — by an Anglo-French coalition,

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and finally divided between British and French forces in 1916.

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The complexity of these imperial conflicts is indicated in part by the fact that Nigerian

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and Indian troops formed a significant part of the British forces in the Cameroon campaigns.

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Within Cameroon, certain tribes allied themselves with the German army

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in hopes of preserving the status quo against violent and prolonged upheaval.

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In the aftermath of the war, while colonial infrastructure became even more dense, the lack

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of regard for African subjects — and the potential for African political self-determination — became,

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increasingly, matters at the forefront of debate. Similar dynamics are visible at play in Arab

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nations: in modern Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Egypt, and not least Iraq. Britain, France, and Germany

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all sought alliance with the Ottoman Empire at the war’s outset, and scrambled to claim its former

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territories in the aftermath. The independence of Iraq, to take but one example, was fostered by the

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British as a way of protecting themselves from other imperial ambitions. During the war itself,

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the so-called Middle Eastern campaigns commanded the largest geographic scope of any of the war’s

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theaters. (So-called because they extended well into the Caucasus and Persia.) It is worth noting

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that, during the war and its immediate aftermath, this did command a more proportional place

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in collective consciousness. How World War One as it has been imagined has narrowed to

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Flanders Fields could be a subject for a podcast in its own right. But in multiple theaters of war,

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the conflicts of transnational empires inevitably created ethnically and religiously diverse armies.

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The clashes of imperial armies could become the pretext for acting on local rivalries,

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and attempting to establish local dominance.

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Imperial actors themselves often portrayed the conflicts in these ancient landscapes

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in positively apocalyptic terms. T.E. Lawrence (admittedly a figure whose loyalties were complex,

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not to say ambivalent, in the extreme) recounted the mining of a German railway as follows:

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“When the front driver of the second engine was on the bridge, I raised my hand to Salem. There

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followed a terrific roar, and the line vanished from sight behind a spouting column of black dust

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and smoke a hundred feet high and wide. Out of the darkness came shattering crashes and long,

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loud metallic clangings of ripped steel, with many lumps of iron and plate;

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while one entire wheel of a locomotive whirled up suddenly black out of the cloud against the sky,

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and sailed musically over our heads to fall slowly and heavily into the desert behind.”

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This sinister, lyrical passage reads almost like a creation in reverse.

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Lawrence recounts the subsequent slaughter via machine gun almost dispassionately, but also

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gives narrative space to the plundering which Bedouin troops viewed as their just reward, and

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on the terror of the wounded, refugees, and women who — it turned out — had been traveling on the

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train alongside its cargo of weapons and food and blankets, underneath its nests of machine guns.

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It’s a story in which Lawrence himself appears as a sort of anti-hero, in which,

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he seems to suggest, imperial rivalries must inevitably implicate and injure local populations.

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The Ottoman Empire — nominally the highest religious authority for Sunni Muslims — called

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a jihad against the British. It failed signally. Nationalism, rather than faith, proved to be the

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most powerful animating spark within the failing empire’s territories — and, indeed, within those

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of its powerful rivals. In India, imperial and national identities were negotiated in ways

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remarkably diverse even for the subcontinent. While Indian soldiers fought in the Caucasus,

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in Egypt, and as far away as France, domestic political interests coalesced around the questions

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of what this service would mean for the men who undertook it, and what it should, or could mean,

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for the relationship of the British Empire to its Indian subjects. India was, of course,

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from the British perspective, the proverbial jewel in the crown — a geographical lynchpin, securing

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their power against Russian and Ottoman rivalries. With the disintegration of Ottoman power, the path

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to India lay open to Germany. This possibility was not a universally disturbing one. In Chota Nagpur,

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the Kaiser was referred to as a father figure, a near-deity who would liberate India and its

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peoples from the British yoke. Knowing the historical rapacity of the German empire,

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this may strike us as shocking, even ludicrous. But it is not that the Indian populace was

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credulous or naive; rather, in a society where most information was transmitted orally, rumor and

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legend used news from the distant battlegrounds to construct a myth surrounding a desired liberator.

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Ambivalence towards empire is also visible on Europe’s Eastern Front.

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As both the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires came apart at the seams,

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what exactly this meant for the people and lands of central Europe and Turkey

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was up for debate. For Russia, too, this front was part of an imperial story — at least at the

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outset, with newsreels recording Czar Nicholas II inspecting his troops. The Russian army unraveled

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spectacularly, however; horrendous losses were suffered; retrenchment became so habitual that it

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became known as the Great Retreat; many men just decided to go home. (If you’ve seen Dr. Zhivago,

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you may have at least some idea of the sheer confusion involved in this.) In the Balkans

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and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, borders were up for grabs and refugees were everywhere.

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The ambivalence of local responses is reflected and refracted in contemporary cultures of memory

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surrounding the First World War. Did the fighting represent the last gasp of a noble empire?

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The birth of a new nation? A time of chaos best forgotten? Romania entered the war in

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hopes of overthrowing the German empire — and almost succeeded; allegedly, at least,

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the Kaiser reacted to the news by exclaiming “The war is over!” This was understood by Germany as

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nothing less than a betrayal of alliance — a betrayal explained by German authors as due

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to the pernicious influence of French culture — luxurious, elitist, and immoral — rather, than,

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say, that of the Ottoman Empire. With no fewer than four empires in free fall,

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Central and Eastern Europe became what one historian has called a “shatterzone.” Some

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towns in what is now the Ukraine changed hands as many was twenty times. Joachim von Puttkaner has

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wryly observed that the immediate legacy of the First World War in Eastern Europe

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appears to be “a nearly impenetrable jungle of overlapping revolutions and national conflicts.”

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Without the stable coalitions of the Western Front, the violence was still more chaotic,

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and arguably more extreme. And with empires in crisis, decisions about tactics and administration

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were often left to the armies themselves. The regional refugee crisis galvanized civilian

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action and social engagement, in ways that accelerated the formation of national identities.

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However, as nation-states struggled towards formation in the aftermath of empire,

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ethnic tensions and ethnic violence rose sharply. Military occupation was the norm. The home front

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and the battlefront, in many places, blurred to the point of being indistinguishable.

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The attempts to recover from violence, and to forge new identities in its aftermath,

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created troubled legacies — and, in contrast to the English-speaking world,

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the conflict was never touted as the war to end all wars.

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Obviously, this podcast has only begun to explore the complexities of how the First World War was

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fought on multiple continents, as a conflict with global stakes. It has been my goal to

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show at least some of the scope of how the war was fought and imagined — and by whom. It is,

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obviously, a story dominated by imperial violence. But it is also a story of how,

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even in the midst of war, new ways of forging identity and forming societies could be imagined.

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this has been Footnoting History. If you like the podcast, be sure to visit our

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website footnotinghistory.com where you can find links to further reading suggestions

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related to this week's episode as well as a calendar of upcoming podcasts. You can also

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like us on facebook and follow us on twitter at historyfootnote until next time remember

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the best stories are always in the footnotes.