Empires in World War I

Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict

Richard S. Fogarty, Andrew Tait Jarboe, Richard S. Fogarty, Andrew Tait Jarboe

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857735850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Soon after the guns in Belgium and France had signalled the commencement of what would become the world's single most destructive conflict to date, the British, Ottoman, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, French and Belgian Empires were at war. Empires in World War I marks a turn away from the pre-eminence of the Western Front in the current scholarship, and seeks to reconstitute our understanding of this war as a truly global struggle between competing empires. Based on primary research, this book opens up new debates on the effects of the Great War in colonial arenas. The book assesses the effects of the war on Native Americans in the United States for example, as well as on the relationship between India and Pakistan, the British justice system in Palestine and the 'imperial scramble' in the Asia-Pacific region. Empires in World War I will be essential reading for students and scholars of the twentieth century.

PART I

MYTHS AND REALITIES OF
IMPERIAL EXPANSION

CHAPTER 1

DIGGING-IN: THE GREAT WAR
AND THE ROOTS OF BELGIAN
EMPIRE¹

Matthew G. Stanard

The Germans shot and killed Belgian nurse Gabrielle Petit at dawn on 1 April 1916. The occupiers had arrested her the preceding February, accusing her of passing secrets to the English (which she had indeed been doing). Despite great pressure and promises of leniency if she cooperated, Petit refused to divulge information about her collaborators, so she faced the firing squad. She was 23 years old. Unlike British nurse Edith Cavell, also executed in Belgium by the Germans, Petit's story was not well known during the war. But in a major ceremony in 1919 the Belgians exhumed her body, and reburied her in the presence of Queen Elisabeth, transforming her into a national hero embodying the country's courageous defiance in the face of German aggression (Figure 1.1).²

Figure 1.1 Statue of Gabrielle Petit in Brussels. Photograph by Adolf and Meredith Spangenberg (used with permission).

The day Petit faced the firing squad, officers of the Force Publique in the Congo, 4,000 miles away, were preparing the offer of an armistice for German East Africa governor Heinrich Schnee. The ceasefire's terms, delivered on 5 April, ‘would have fulfilled Belgian objectives to the letter’; these were compensation, territory and acknowledgement that Germany had started the war.³ Sensing a ruse, Schnee played for time. One week later, Force Publique soldiers, commanded by Charles Tombeur, opened fire along the Belgian–German colonial border at the Rusizi River, and in June Belgian forces took Ruanda–Urundi. By 19 September, Force Publique troops had captured Tabora, the capital of German East Africa, giving Belgium its greatest field victory of the entire war.

As Petit sat in St Gilles prison in Brussels, and while Tombeur prepared his troops for the eastward assault, the French, British and Italians were asking Russia to launch an attack on the Eastern Front to relieve pressure at Verdun and Trentino. At a meeting presided over by the Tsar on 14 April, Aleksei Brusilov persuaded his reluctant peers of the need for an attack along the Austro–Hungarian front, to be launched in June.⁴ The offensive became one of Russia's greatest victories, but the resources needed for Brusilov's and other such offensives pushed the Tsarist regime to the limits. By January 1917 strikes had broken out, followed by large-scale demonstrations and a revolution in March that terminated the Romanov dynasty.

Although taking place thousands of miles apart, these three events and the conflict that gave rise to them restructured the nature of Belgian imperialism in central Africa. Scholars have generally overlooked the years 1914–18 when exploring the interrelationship between Belgium and the Congo,⁵ but this chapter argues that World War I reshaped the trajectory of Belgian empire, not only by recasting Belgium as a legitimate colonial power but also by provoking a more conscious empire-building effort and giving rise to a more imperialistic identity in Belgium. Moreover, the conflict changed the character of the colonial economy and Belgium's relationship to it. In these and other ways, the war was a transformative moment in the history of Belgian imperialism.

World War I has not to date taken centre stage in studies of Belgian empire, for several reasons. First, Belgian combat – although consequential – was limited. In August 1914, German forces overran the country except for a tiny corner in western Flanders, situated behind trenches running from Nieuport past Ypres and across the French border near Armentières. Other than slowing Germany's advance, the Belgian army played a minor role in determining the course of the war, and the Congo's direct participation in the European theatre was negligible. The colonial administration did not send troops to Europe, and the number of Congolese in the metropole in August 1914 was very small. Joseph Droeven – son of a Belgian gunsmith and his Congolese wife – was highly exceptional; he became the first black Belgian soldier in December 1912. Only two dozen Congolese fought in Europe, including Paul Panda Farnana, Albert Kudjabo and Joseph Adipanga, all of whom joined the Corps des Volontaires Congolais, led by Colonel Louis Chaltin, which saw heavy fighting around Namur. Many if not most were captured in 1914 and spent the war in a German POW camp.⁶ In Africa, the Force Publique – a police force rather than an army, and barely the size of one 15,000-man German division – also saw limited fighting in Cameroon, Rhodesia, on Lake Tanganyika and in German East Africa.

Belgians refused entreaties from their allies to use Congolese troops on other fronts because of long-standing fears that exposing Africans to outside elements would weaken colonial control. After experiments with bringing Africans to the metropole in the late 1800s, authorities stopped the practice because of their almost desperate fear, lasting into the 1950s, that travel to Europe would undermine white prestige by bringing Congolese into contact with poor or less educated whites, or introduce Africans to dangerous ideas such as communism.⁷ The Minister of Colonies and the Governor General in the Congo strictly opposed using Congolese troops in Asia, Europe or even North Africa, because they believed it would cause ‘serious difficulties’ in the colony.⁸ Their fears were not misplaced, to judge by the case of Paul Panda Farnana, who created the Union Congolaise in Belgium after the war to organise fellow veterans, and who spoke out for African rights at the 1920 Congrès Colonial National in Brussels and at the London Pan-African Congress of 1921. (This probably led authorities to limit the Congolese presence in Belgium even further.)⁹ Although France, Britain and even the United States mobilised hundreds of thousands of non-white or colonial troops, workers and Chinese labourers for World War I, the Belgians took the opposite approach.¹⁰

Although Belgian and Congolese forces saw limited combat, the war reshaped Belgian imperialism by lifting the albatross of the Leopoldian past. Before 1914 Belgium's reputation had suffered even among its future allies. Leopold II's colony in central Africa was a regime of ghastly abuses, including widespread kidnapping, forced labour, murder, and even the cutting-off of children's hands. His misrule was so horrific he was forced to turn the colony over to Belgium in 1908 after the great international humanitarian campaign led by E.D. Morel. The hand-over hardly lessened international criticism, and Belgium faced constant questioning as to the legitimacy of its rule in central Africa.¹¹ Germany's 1914 invasion, however, caused a total shift in Western opinion, for several reasons.

First, although it is doubtful whether Flemings and Walloons single-handedly thwarted the Schlieffen Plan, the Entente powers – surprised at the vigour of the Belgian army's fight – came to view them as having saved civilisation by slowing the advance of the Kaiser's troops. As the US Legation Secretary in Brussels, Hugh Gibson, described the war's early period, ‘The Belgian troops so far had to dam the flood of Germans with little or no help from the allies.’¹² By the time the United States entered the war the Americans cast those first weeks as a major victory:

The decision of Belgium to resist, transformed the character of the whole war … No one who was alive in the August days, when Belgian resistance began, and dwelt outside of German or Austrian frontiers, will ever forget the instant and enduring impression that Belgian heroism created.¹³

One French author asserted that Belgium had transformed the course of world history: ‘The heroic defence of the Belgians and their king falls into the category of those events that we would say changed the face of the earth. Their future impact infinitely exceeded their significance at the moment.’¹⁴ The earliest days of the war led people in Britain, the United States, France and elsewhere to think of Belgians not in the context of central Africa but rather in terms of their valiant defence against Germany's invasion.

While Belgium's army was defending the country, Germany destroyed Louvain, and observers began to see Belgium as a victim. Louvain's Catholic University, with its centuries-old library holding hundreds of thousands of books and ancient manuscripts, was one of Europe's oldest and most famous centres of learning. After the German army entered and devastated the city, including burning down the library, accounts of the destruction – exaggerated or otherwise – found their way into foreign newspapers. As The New York Times reported, ‘The attack upon the unarmed population came suddenly, the Germans firing in the streets, going from house to house, pillaging and setting houses on fire. Neither age nor sex was respected. Almost all the clergy were shot.’¹⁵ Eyewitness A.J. Dawe reported in The Times that ‘The city was a mass of flames, destruction and death … Burning houses were every moment falling into the roads. The dead and the dying, burnt and burning, lay on all sides … In one street I saw two little children walking hand-in-hand over the bodies of the dead men.’¹⁶ These and other reports transformed Germany's invasion into ‘The March of the Huns’ and Belgium into a blameless victim of Germanic ruthlessness.¹⁷

The years-long ‘Rape of Belgium’ that followed Germany's invasion transformed a people associated with Leopold II's atrocities into victims – even saviours of civilisation. Occupation authorities brutalised the inhabitants by forcing them to work in Germany, requisitioning their food and pushing them to ‘the edge of starvation’.¹⁸ Although Gabrielle Petit's execution only gained notoriety after the war, not so the killing of British nurse Cavell, whom the Germans executed several months after Petit. Cavell's death caused outrage in Britain, and her name became a byword for German cruelty. While Leopold II was called the Roi Bâtisseur because he funnelled blood-stained Congo profits into building projects at home, King Albert's determined resistance turned him into the Roi Chevalier, a wartime hero ‘honoured throughout the world’.¹⁹ Outsiders lauded Albert well into the post-war era, such as when Brand Whitlock dedicated to the king his account of his wartime experiences as US minister to Belgium.²⁰ Ironically, the more that reports of atrocities filtered out of the country – of ‘Huns’ eating babies, attacking Red Cross hospitals, bayoneting and shooting civilians, burying a wounded man alive, cutting the hands off women and children – the more such barbarities eclipsed Leopold's violent legacy in central Africa.²¹ (Although anti-German propaganda exaggerated events, we now know the German army inflicted great damage on Belgium's civilian population.)²² The Belgian case offered a stark contrast between a large, militaristic and pitiless empire that was fighting for land and power, and a smaller, neutral, innocent state only defendi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Myths and Realities of Imperial Expansion
• Part II Soldiers of Empire, Far from Home
• Part III Thinking Imperially, Acting Locally
• Part IV Afterlives of War and Empire
• Back Cover