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00:00In early November 1914 in Istanbul, the capital of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, a new weapon was
00:13unveiled. It would spread the First World War far beyond the borders of Europe.
00:19Inside the Fatih Mosque, Sultan Mehmet V, recognized by many Muslims as the leader of the Islamic
00:31world, was presented with the sword of the Prophet, symbolizing his authority to call
00:38the Muslim world to arms. This was how the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War,
00:47not just with a declaration of war, but with a declaration of jihad, holy war, against
00:52the powers it now described as the enemies of Islam, Britain, France and Russia.
01:00The declaration of jihad was a vivid signal that the war between the nations of Europe
01:05would become a global war between empires. A war that would spread to lands far beyond
01:14the mud and the trenches of the Western Front, and its savagery would draw in millions from
01:20across the world. In Africa, a rogue German general would lead his army of Africans on a bloody
01:28odyssey, leaving a trail of death, starvation and disease. In Libya and in Darfur, tribal rebellions
01:40would be sparked in the name of religion. While on the borders of mighty empires, plots would
01:47be laid for insurrection and invasion. And all the while, on the Western Front itself, the
01:56pace and scale of industrialized warfare would intensify. More and more men from all over the
02:02world would be pulled in to service the machinery of mass slaughter.
02:08This was a place where Senegalese and Vietnamese soldiers fought in the same trenches. Chinese
02:17laborers supplied Indian cavalrymen. And black American troops served under white French officers.
02:25As the war spread, it drew in millions of diverse people, of every race, every colour and every
02:32religion, and from all over the world. They fought alongside their European comrades, and
02:38they died in terrible numbers. And now all of them have a claim to be remembered as the heroes
02:45and the victims of the world's war.
03:08In the autumn of 1914, the attention of the world was focused on northern France and Belgium. The first
03:26battle of Ypres was grinding to a halt, and the Western Front was forming, a quagmire of blood and mud. For the
03:36next four years, success would be measured in yards, and disaster in millions.
03:47But thousands of miles away, in Istanbul, it was possible to see the war as fluid, expansive.
03:54Germany and her new ally, Ottoman Turkey, were exploring the intriguing possibility of taking the fight to the enemy,
04:02by turning their imperial assets against them.
04:11After the declaration of jihad in the Fatih Mosque, a holy war procession began to march towards the European quarter of the city.
04:19As the demonstrators surged through these streets, they began to attack, to loot, and even to set fire to British and French-owned businesses. And European residents of the city began to flee in fear.
04:38Behind the scenes of riot and disorder, some observers sensed a controlling hand, choreographing the action.
04:47One of those pulling the strings was Max von Oppenheim, maverick archaeologist and self-styled orientalist.
04:57Before the war, Oppenheim had spent years studying and travelling in the Islamic world.
05:06He'd been shunned by the inner circles of the German establishment.
05:09But with the outbreak of hostilities, his unusual private passions suddenly took on global significance.
05:21In August 1914, the German Foreign Office asked Oppenheim to draw up plans for a holy war.
05:27The memorandum he produced was entitled on revolutionising the Islamic territories of our enemies.
05:33And it was basically a blueprint for what he assured everybody would be a global revolution.
05:39His central recommendation was that an intelligence bureau for the East be established.
05:44A sort of German jihad bureau.
05:46It was to be headed by Oppenheim himself.
05:48And its task was to spread propaganda across the world and dispatch secret missions to enemy territories.
05:57Historian Sean McMeekin has studied the evolution of Oppenheim's cloak and dagger plans.
06:05He was really quite an enthusiast for all things Islam.
06:09Up to it including the idea which appealed to him when he lived in Cairo of having his own harem.
06:16In his vision though, the potential of Islam was lethal.
06:21That is, he really thought it could destroy the British Empire.
06:24It really would be a global jihad, a global holy war against the British Empire.
06:30Where the Ottoman Sultan would play possibly the most important role, but obviously not the only one.
06:35So in 1914, there's the scheme that could destroy the British and French empires.
06:39Well that's right. Britain in particular had a great Achilles heel.
06:43In the Indian subcontinent, in the Gulf states, in Egypt, Britain ruled over, depending on which estimate you trust,
06:50upwards of a hundred million Muslim subjects.
06:53By some reckoning, Britain was actually the greatest Muslim power in the world.
06:56And you simply judge by numbers.
06:58The French also ruled over a Muslim empire in North Africa.
07:02So all of Germany's potential enemies in a great power war have this potential Achilles heel of Muslim subjects.
07:13With the Ottomans as their junior partners, and with the jihad unleashed against their enemies,
07:17the Kaiser and his followers dreamed of spreading German power, of driving the British out of India,
07:23and of redrafting the map of Africa to create a vast German colony in the centre of that continent.
07:30For those who wanted to believe it, this whole intoxicating vision suddenly seemed possible.
07:39Oppenheim had worked hard behind the scenes to secure the declaration of jihad at the Fatih mosque.
07:45But his most significant contribution was a piece of political theatre that took place on the other side of town.
07:54Here at the German embassy, in front of a crowd of demonstrators,
07:5814 Muslim soldiers, men from the French colonies in North Africa,
08:02were theatrically paraded out onto that balcony by the German ambassador himself.
08:08These men were prisoners of war who'd been captured on the Western Front in the first battles of the First World War.
08:15The Germans had then recruited them and transported them secretly right across Europe on the Orient Express.
08:22The German cover story was that these men were acrobats in a travelling circus.
08:27And now here at the embassy, with the crowd looking up at them,
08:31they were made to shout slogans in Arabic and Turkish in praise of the Ottoman Sultan.
08:37And they declared oaths, promising that they would personally take part in the jihad against their former colonial masters.
08:45And Istanbul was just the start.
08:50Oppenheim had plans for something on a global scale.
08:55A special camp designed to turn prisoners of war into jihadists.
09:00It was located 1,000 miles away in Germany.
09:06Zossen, a small town just outside Berlin, had a busy 20th century.
09:23Until the mid-1990s, it was home to the largest Soviet army base in East Germany.
09:34Before that, secret Nazi bunkers had been built, disguised as village houses.
09:39And Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was planned from here.
09:49But buried beneath these layers of history lies an even stranger story.
09:54During the First World War, Zossen was home to a prisoner of war camp called the Hauptmundlager.
10:03The Half Moon, or Crescent Camp.
10:07Historian Heike Leibau has studied the history of this unusual place.
10:13The camp was meant for basically prisoners from North African countries and from India.
10:23So prisoners from the French and the British colonial army.
10:29And the number of prisoners who were kept there is about 4,000 to 5,000 at one time.
10:34And it's called the Half Moon Camp because the Half Moon is the symbol of Islam.
10:41It's called the Half Moon Camp because this prisoner of war camp was meant for Muslim prisoners
10:45and it was part of the German jihad strategy.
10:51German propaganda railed against its enemies' deployment of colonial soldiers.
10:57What it called savages.
10:58But at the Half Moon Camp, these same soldiers were being recruited for a war against their imperial masters.
11:10When they were captured, they may have thought that their war was over.
11:15Instead, they were entering a new theatre of conflict where they were bombarded with jihadist propaganda.
11:22So these officers, these propaganda intelligence officers, what are they doing?
11:30How are they getting their message across to the prisoners?
11:33One idea was to have a camp newspaper.
11:37It was called Al Jihad.
11:39And the idea was to convince as many prisoners as possible to become so-called jihadists.
11:47Oppenheim took a personal interest in the day-to-day running of the Half Moon Camp.
11:52Ensuring that the dietary and religious sensitivities of the camp inmates were catered for.
11:59But Oppenheim wanted to do something that would prove beyond doubt that Germany was the true friend of Islam.
12:07In the beginning of 1915, they started to discuss the idea to build a mosque for the prisoners of war in the Half Moon Camp.
12:15It was not built just out of religious ideas. It was built out of political ideas and it was built out of the expectation that it would serve the propaganda purposes which Germany had.
12:32This Half Moon Camp was a show camp and we have lots of postcards showing the mosque in the camp.
12:45Showing the prisoners doing sport games, doing religious festivities which were sent around the world.
12:54But despite the mosque, despite the special treatment and the daily indoctrination, volunteers for jihad from the Half Moon Camp would be counted in tens, not thousands.
13:07After the horrors of trench warfare, most prisoners of war were more interested in surviving than fighting new wars.
13:20And even those who did volunteer sometimes had their own private motivations.
13:25That seems to be the case with one of the most intriguing characters to emerge from the shadows of the world's war.
13:40Mir Mazd was a Muslim from a small mountain village on the border of Afghanistan and India.
13:46He was a Jemadar, a platoon commander in the 58th Thorns Rifles, part of the India Corps, who had been sent to fight in France at the start of the war.
14:00By the spring of 1915, Mir Mazd had already endured a bitter winter in the trenches.
14:07He'd seen fierce fighting and been awarded the Indian Distinguished Service Medal for gallantry and devotion to duty.
14:17One rainy night in early March, a week before the start of the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle, he crept out of his trench and led 20 of his men silently across no man's land.
14:29Not to attack the enemy, but to desert.
14:35This was the first leg of an incredible journey.
14:38One canny soldier with a strong instinct for survival was about to be pitched into a world of intrigue and conspiracy.
14:50What I've got here arranged in front of me is the paper trail, the documents left behind by Mir Mazd in archives in London and Delhi and Berlin.
15:01In the London Gazette is the formal announcement of Mir Mazd's Indian Distinguished Service Medal.
15:08But by the time his award was announced, this gallant officer was already being debriefed by German officials.
15:15These are the notes from the interrogation of Mir Mazd by a German official on the 7th of March 1915 in Lille in France.
15:27So this is just a few days after he's defected and brought other soldiers with him over to the German lines at Neuve-Chapelle.
15:35The most important page is this one.
15:39This is a map of the Khyber Pass, perhaps drawn by Mir Mazd himself.
15:43It certainly comes out of his interrogation and it lists the numbers and the locations, the dispositions of the British and Indian troops on the Khyber Pass, the critical route between Afghanistan and British India.
15:56So clearly, having deserted to the Germans, Mir Mazd was determined to prove to them just how useful he could be.
16:02From Lille, Mir Mazd was taken to the half moon camp, where his cooperation would have brought him to the attention of agents of the Jihad Bureau.
16:14They were on the lookout for volunteers for one of the most audacious and dangerous missions of the war.
16:21An expedition to Kabul to persuade the Emir of Afghanistan to switch sides and join a holy war against British India.
16:32The mission was made up of German and Turkish diplomats, Indian nationalists and volunteers from the half moon camp, whose local knowledge would be invaluable.
16:43The expedition would set off from Istanbul, heading first towards Baghdad.
16:58From there, they'd cross the salt deserts and mountains of Persia, before dropping onto the dusty plains of Afghanistan.
17:07And their final destination, Kabul.
17:11The most intriguing piece of evidence in this whole story is this photograph.
17:22We know it was taken by the Germans, and it shows six Indian soldiers wearing what looked like Turkish uniforms.
17:29On the back of the original photograph was the title Six Patans, along with four names, one of which Izmi amassed.
17:35He's the guy on the far left, a guy who set himself slightly away from the others.
17:42But it's his face. This guy has the face of a man who's lived the life of me amassed, who's lived between empires, who's lived a life of intrigue.
17:51It's the face of a born survivor.
17:53The mission set off in May 1915.
18:05Dodging Russian and British patrols, running short of water and supplies, more than half of the expedition were lost to exhaustion, disease and defection.
18:19But a core group did reach Kabul.
18:22They were eventually granted official audiences with the Emir.
18:27He weighed up his options, calculating which imperial power was likely to come out on top.
18:33But the British were past masters of the great game, and were able to undermine all the inspiring talk of holy war.
18:43Well, the British are quite aware, of course, of what the Germans are up to.
18:47They know that the Germans are there, and they know what the Germans are trying to do.
18:51And so all the British really have to do is make it clear to the Emir that it's worth his while not to switch sides, to increase his subsidies somewhat.
19:03In the end, a lot of gold was kind of flying around in all directions in the war.
19:09In the end, the Emir decided to stick with the devils he knew, and the Jihad Bureau's schemes unraveled in the cold Afghan winter.
19:18There were limited uprisings in Libya, where Senussi tribesmen marched on the Suez Canal, and in Darfur.
19:27But Kabul was to be the swan song for Oppenheim's much vaunted strategy of revolutionising the Muslim subjects of the enemy.
19:36Failure for the elaborate strategies of nations doesn't necessarily mean failure for the more modest strategies of individuals.
19:49This document is the final piece in the jigsaw in the remarkable life of Mia Mast.
20:00This is a secret British report into the nominal role of Indian prisoners of war suspected of having deserted to the enemy.
20:08It's from October 1918, near the end of the war.
20:10As well as giving the regiments and the names of these soldiers, this document critically also gives us the latest information that the British have received on what happened to them.
20:22And for Mia Mast and two of his colleagues, what it says is these three accompanied the Turco-German mission to Afghanistan,
20:29and are reported to have returned to their homes in June 1915.
20:35So there you have it, evidence that the British, at least, are convinced that Mia Mast made it all the way from the Western Front back to his home.
20:42The north-west frontier wasn't the only potential flashpoint on the imperial map.
21:01Africa, with its patchwork of imperial holdings stitched together during the so-called scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th century,
21:09was also ripe for conflict.
21:13Here in German East Africa, present-day Tanzania, the sparks from Europe's war would start a conflagration
21:21that would ultimately consume the lives of millions of Africans.
21:27In the decades before the war, German East Africa was booming.
21:32Gold had recently been discovered, and vast coffee and rubber plantations fueled the engine of imperial commerce.
21:39The capital, Dar es Salaam, bustled with shipping, and was held up as a model of what a colonial city should be.
21:50German East Africa had only got to this point, because the Germans had brutally enforced their will over the local African people.
21:58And they'd achieved that through the creation of an army of local African recruits.
22:02The Askari, the key Swahili word for soldier, had been recruited from those tribes who had fought most effectively against the Germans in the early years of the colony.
22:13So it was, if you like, a sort of backhanded compliment.
22:16They were well paid, they were highly disciplined, and they were extremely well trained.
22:20When the war came, German East Africa was cut off, surrounded by the colonies of Belgium, Portugal, and Britain.
22:34Military resistance appeared futile.
22:40This was the view held by the colony's civilian governor, Dr Heinrich Schnee.
22:47As a colonial administrator, Schnee wanted to protect German East Africa from the destruction of war,
22:53so that once the fighting was over, it could quickly get back to making money.
22:57But the colony's military commander had other priorities.
23:04Paul von Lethoff-Fauberck was one of Germany's colonial hard men.
23:09With the fatherland at war in Europe, he believed the colonies had a duty to fight,
23:15if only to divert resources away from the Western Front.
23:21According to all accounts, Lethoff-Fauberck was cultured and personally charming.
23:25But by the time he arrived here, in East Africa, it was clear that he was also a man with a streak of ruthlessness.
23:33A character trait that was to prove disastrous for literally millions of people on this continent.
23:42The first major action in this disastrous war came in November 1914,
23:47when a British flotilla approached the coast of German East Africa.
23:50On board was an 8,000-strong expeditionary force drawn from the British army in India.
24:00Their destination was the busy German port of Tanga.
24:06They expected little, if any resistance.
24:10Word had reached them that Governor Schnee was willing to discuss a neutrality pact.
24:15But that news was out of date.
24:19When Lethoff-Fauberck heard about the invasion force,
24:24he immediately dispatched Escara units to Tanga with orders to dig in and resist.
24:30The stage was set for the first major offensive of the war in East Africa.
24:35It's difficult to think of a battle that better illustrates just how strange things can get
24:44when global empires go to war in other people's countries.
24:48On paper, the battle here at Tanga was a fight between the British and the Germans.
24:52But the army that Britain landed on these beaches was mainly made up of Indians,
24:58men from Kashmir, men from Bangalore and the princely states of the Raj.
25:02While the defenders of German East Africa, the army dug in around the town of Tanga over there,
25:08they were mainly Africans, Askaris from across East Africa.
25:11The situation on the ground was complicated by a set of racial theories in the heads of those in charge of the battle.
25:21The British commander, Major General Aitken, was a man who knew little about this continent and little about its people.
25:27But what he did know about was the idea of racial hierarchies, one of those theories that underpinned imperialism.
25:35And he was convinced that British-trained Indians were far superior to German-trained Africans.
25:42The Indian troops landed without opposition, but waiting for them on the outskirts of town were the Askaris.
25:52Outnumbered, but well-armed.
25:54As the Indian and British soldiers got within 600 yards of the town of Tanga, the German machine guns opened up.
26:02Whole units were mowed down.
26:08In two days of fighting, more than 800 Indian and British troops were killed or wounded.
26:14German casualties numbered 150 men.
26:19The British were forced to accept that the invasion had failed.
26:30They sent a party of officers to negotiate with the Germans here at Tanga's hospital.
26:36According to one eyewitness, they discussed the battle as if it had been a football match.
26:41The unexpected victory of Letov Warbeck and his Askaris marked the birth of a myth that was to live on in Germany for decades.
26:54After Tanga, the German public became fascinated by every detail of the war in Africa.
27:01The Kaiser sent personal commendations to the East African army.
27:06And the German press and the German propaganda machine set about transforming a little-known colonial hard man into a living legend and a Teutonic hero.
27:16But set-piece battles like Tanga would be the exception.
27:36Cut off from regular supply lines, Letov Warbeck's tactics were for the most part to avoid major engagements.
27:48Instead, he launched hit-and-run raids over as wide an area as possible.
27:55Letov Warbeck and his Askaris troops set off on a thousand-mile journey.
28:00Armies from South Africa and the British, Belgian and Portuguese colonies all set off in pursuit.
28:07And he drew them deeper and deeper into East and Central Africa.
28:15This was a war of endless marches where the deadliest enemies were climate, exhaustion and disease.
28:22Of the 20,000 South African troops sent after Letov Warbeck, half were invalided home due to illness.
28:36For all its well-documented horrors, the Western Front was at least a narrowly defined killing zone.
28:43But the war in Africa passed directly through countless villages like a plague of locusts.
28:52And for the civilians, caught in its chaotic path, there was nothing romantic about this blood-stained safari.
29:02Many were press-gammed as porters, forced to carry the war forward on their backs.
29:07British alone recruited about a million Africans into the carrier corps.
29:15These were men who were made to march alongside the armies, carrying great Β£60 loads of food and ammunition.
29:21They were overworked and underfed, and about 20% of them died.
29:26Now, that's a casualty rate that compares to anything on the Western Front.
29:31One British official had no doubt that their treatment would have been considered a scandal
29:35had they not been merely Africans. After all, he said, who cares about native carriers?
29:42The Germans behaved of anything even worse.
29:46When they swept into villages like this, they simply kidnapped the men.
29:50Letov Warbeck sometimes had men tied together with ropes,
29:54and those who tried to escape were simply shot dead.
29:56Before the war, the fertile hinterlands of German East Africa had provided a surplus of food.
30:12Robbed of men to work the fields and tend the cattle, food stocks now waned and harvests failed.
30:18Letov Warbeck's war of choice brought nothing but disaster.
30:29Up to a third of a million African civilians are believed to have perished in the famines caused directly by his campaign.
30:36Ludwig Depper was a German doctor who served alongside Letov Warbeck.
30:43Behind us, we leave destroyed fields, ransacked food stores, and for the immediate future, starvation.
30:54We are no longer the agents of culture. Our path is marked by death, plundering, and abandoned villages.
31:10But that's not the way the story was told in Germany.
31:14The legend of Letov Warbeck and his loyal Ascaris carried on decades after the war.
31:19The myth was reinforced by the German general's own memoirs.
31:26The title, Haya Safari, was the name of the Ascari marching song.
31:31And the memoirs gave the impression that Letov Warbeck was a swashbuckling hero,
31:37leading a life of daring do in East Africa.
31:39But I was born on this continent, and it's been my home, and I just can't see it that way.
31:54To me, Letov Warbeck was an obsessive, a fanatic.
31:57He became famous as the man who was determined to fight on, no matter what the cost.
32:02But it wasn't him who paid that cost.
32:05That was paid by hundreds of thousands of Africans who died in his war.
32:09A war that, in the end, achieved nothing.
32:11Because Letov Warbeck didn't draw British soldiers away from the Western Front.
32:16And he didn't manage to keep hold of German East Africa.
32:20What he and his mercenary army did succeed in doing,
32:23was leaving behind them a trail of famine, disease and death.
32:26The military cemetery in Dar es Salaam is, for me, a more fitting monument to the war in East Africa,
32:41than the dubious legend of a rogue German general.
32:47This is the West African Frontier Force, the Gold Coast Regiment, the mere list of casualties.
32:52These are men from what's today Ghana.
32:55And there's lots of Ashanti and Fanti names here.
32:57Kofi and Kobli.
32:59There's Musa Grunchi.
33:00The Grunchi people also come from Ghana, but also from Burkina Faso.
33:04Here's a group of names that you can tell are Yoruba.
33:07Adegon, Adiola.
33:09These are men from Nigeria.
33:10The Yoruba is my own ethnic group.
33:12And these are men who might have come from Lagos, where I was born.
33:15But over here is a list of casualties, a long list of casualties, from the king's African rifles.
33:20This is by far the biggest force the British cobbled together to fight the Germans in East Africa.
33:26And they came from across British colonial Africa, from Malawi, from Kenya, from Zimbabwe.
33:32But it's not just Africans fighting for the British, remembered here.
33:35Here are three Asghari who are from the Congo, and they're fighting for the Belgium army.
33:39And there's even one, Asghari Palawi, who's fighting for the Portuguese. He's from Mozambique.
33:45These are men of the British West Indies Regiment. These are men from Jamaica and Barbados and the other islands, who volunteered to fight, but were never allowed to serve on the Western Front.
34:00So, in one of those bizarre twists of imperial history, they find themselves in Africa, fighting for the empire that took their ancestors from this continent and into slavery.
34:12And all the while, far away in Europe, the armies on the Western Front had been perfecting the techniques of industrial scale slaughter.
34:35By 1917, they developed a sophisticated killing machine. All it required was an infinite number of men to keep it turning. Some supplying the blood, others the sweat and the tears.
34:53There had never been anything like it on the face of the planet.
34:57A few years ago, I asked one of the last veterans of the First World War what he'd felt, what his emotions had been, when he'd arrived here on the Western Front.
35:10And what he said was this. He said it was clear that he was entering into the biggest man-made structure on Earth.
35:16And I've never forgotten that description, because that's what the Western Front was, a vast 20th century military city of encampments and trenches and dugouts and barbed wire.
35:25With its complex infrastructure of roads, railways, ammunition dumps, factories, hospitals, brothels and morgues, the Western Front was a linear city extending 450 miles from the Swiss frontier to the English Channel.
35:44And with a population to match. By 1917, this was the most culturally and ethnically diverse place on Earth.
35:55Near the city of Nancy, American soldiers trained for their debut in the war.
36:02At Verdun, Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians manned machine guns as the French struggled to control this strategic citadel.
36:14At Chaman Dedam, men from Senegal and Vietnam fought side by side.
36:25At Cambrai, Inuit snipers and scouts fought a war of stealth while Indian cavalrymen charged into battle.
36:36At Arras, Maori and Pacific Island sappers dug tunnels under enemy trenches and planted mines.
36:51While Canadian Indians prayed to the sun near Vimy Ridge before going over the top.
36:57And West Indian, African and Egyptian laborers resupplied Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Canadians as they entered the carnage of the third battle for Ypres.
37:11The battle for Ypres.
37:16This was the moment when we can truly call the conflict the world's war.
37:41This is an ornate doorway carved in an Arab style in a concrete shelter in the middle of a cow field in Belgium.
38:08There's an inscription here in Arabic that reads, I'm told,
38:15There is no God but Allah. If you believe in Allah, you will be victorious.
38:19We don't know anything really about the men who carved their prayer into this doorway.
38:25We know that they were Muslim soldiers and that they were here in the First World War.
38:30And that's it.
38:32There's something poignant, something almost tragic.
38:34You can imagine men huddling under bombardments in here, turning to their face and writing in Arabic a prayer in the middle of a war, not knowing whether they'll ever survive.
38:47To me, this is as much a memorial to unknown soldiers as any of the others on the Western Front.
38:52Before the war, in the rural backwaters of Belgium and France, non-white faces would have been seen only on the pages of books and magazines.
39:11Suddenly, towns and villages filled with strange faces, speaking unknown languages and eating exotic foods.
39:26Watching over this transformation in the Belgium town of Dicobos was a young parish priest, Father Achille van Vallinghem.
39:32Historian and curator Dominic Dendaufen has studied Father van Vallinghem's remarkable diary of those strange times.
39:46What you seem to get from him is a view of the First World War from behind net curtains.
39:53We actually have, through him, first-hand accounts, but first-hand accounts not from one of the parties involved, but from a bystander.
40:05Which is, it's very nice, because that's information that, first of all, you would never think about.
40:12And secondly, you would never, ever encounter in official reports.
40:20We've got the entry for the 6th of June, a Sunday.
40:25Several Indian troops have arrived on the parish, black of skin, dressed as English soldiers,
40:32with the exception of the head, which is trapped artfully in a towel.
40:39Artfully?
40:40Artfully.
40:41That's a turban.
40:42Yeah.
40:44They speak English, and some a bit of French.
40:48In general, they are very friendly and polite, though their curiosity has the upper hand,
40:55and they especially like to see through the windows of our houses.
41:00They bake a kind of pancake, and they eat a kind of seed which has a very strong taste.
41:07They stay here for several weeks.
41:09So this is going to be chapattis?
41:11Oh, yeah, they're eating chapattis.
41:13And flavoured with a very strong tasty spice.
41:15Oh, yeah, yeah, he says, they're eating a kind of seed which is very strong.
41:18So he must have tasted it, because otherwise he wouldn't have known that it has a strong taste.
41:21So he's one of the first people in Ruval, Belgium, to try Indian food?
41:26Oh, that's very much so, because local people normally tend to be chauvinistic regarding food,
41:32but he's definitely someone who's open to taste other things.
41:36One group in particular caught the attention of the inquisitive priest.
41:43They travelled from the other side of the world to play their part in the war.
41:48In the area now, many Chinese have arrived, and they are employed by the English, the British Army, to work.
42:02Yellow of colour, with a flat nose and slanted eyes, they always have a foolish grin on their face.
42:10So it happens that I passed them shortly before noon, and constantly they were saying,
42:21watch, watch, because they wanted to know how late it was.
42:25And I believe they were getting hungry, because when I showed them it was only 5 minutes to 12,
42:32they were nodding constantly.
42:35Because they know that they're going to get their dinner.
42:36And then he writes, indeed, then he wrote,
42:39it was nearly time to fill their bellies with their beloved rice.
42:43Their beloved rice?
42:44Their beloved rice, who lived and raised.
42:51Recruitment of the Chinese Labour Corps began in 1916,
42:55a desperate attempt to fill the gaping void in British manpower left by the Battle of the Somme.
43:02Impoverished Chinese peasants were recruited in their thousands from the country's northeastern provinces.
43:09They spent months on a journey that took them across oceans and continents,
43:14and arrived in Europe exhausted and disorientated.
43:17And they were assigned the war's dirty jobs.
43:22Digging trenches, lugging ammo, burying bodies.
43:28But as the war continued, many found themselves propelled into new, unexpected roles,
43:34as skilled mechanics on the military technology that was making its debut in the war.
43:39This is Deborah, a British D-51 tank.
43:56In the winter of 1917, she was one of more than 300 of these strange new beasts
44:03that lumbered towards the German lines.
44:04Deborah was dug up and recovered 80 years later by her proud owner, Philippe Gozinski.
44:14For the French, it was an amazing scene.
44:17For him, the story of the tank and the story of the Chinese Labour Corps are inseparable.
44:23So in the First World War, this is the most high-tech, most complicated piece of machinery on the battlefield.
44:28Yes, it was like a Formula One. It was a new design, modern equipment with an engine.
44:36It was the new technology of the beginning of the century.
44:45The tanks were submit to very hard conditions of driving, but also of fighting.
44:50So when the tanks went into action, you have to imagine that those who were inside sometimes
44:56asked the maximum of their engine, of their tank.
45:01So as soon as the action was finished, the tank has to be completely repaired,
45:06re-put into a fighting condition.
45:08So for most of its time, a tank wasn't in the hands of soldiers and tank crews.
45:13It was with engineers behind the line being repaired and rebuilt.
45:16Yes, because I think that every tank went into the Chinese hands.
45:23In fact, they were crucial in the involvement of the tank into the First World War.
45:30This was hard work and it was dangerous work, but it was also skilled mechanical work.
45:34Yes, because it needed very careful attention just for the engine, just for the gearbox of the tanks,
45:40just for all these kind of adjustments. So it needs people who are very careful and very meticulous.
45:48And that was also surprisingly, they have to work on both sides, very heavy and difficult task,
45:55and also very meticulous work.
45:59They have to work seven days a week, and sometimes more than ten hours.
46:04And many of them suffered from wounds, some were killed.
46:10So it was really hard treatment, and always in the middle of the mud, always in the middle of the grease.
46:18It was also a kind of hell.
46:22The story of the Chinese labor corps did not end with the end of the war.
46:37Many stayed on afterwards to clear up the mess.
46:41They filled in the trenches, recovered bodies, dug cemeteries, carved headstones.
46:47And many succumbed to the Spanish flu epidemic that raged after the war.
46:54There is, I think, something specially tragic about this place.
47:01A Chinese cemetery in the middle of a French farm.
47:04And most of these men were themselves just farmers from tiny villages.
47:09And all they wanted to do was to earn some money and see a little bit of the world.
47:12But 2,000 of them never made it home.
47:18It was their muscle and their ingenuity that kept the wheels of industrial warfare turning.
47:25But all of that, everything they'd done, everything they'd been through, quickly slipped from memory.
47:32Of all the many peoples who came to the Western Front in the First World War,
47:36the Chinese laborers are probably the most forgotten of the forgotten.
47:41In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.
48:01By the end of the year, tens of thousands of fresh troops were arriving in France to reinforce the weary Allied ranks.
48:09This is the grave of Freddy Stowers, an American corporal who was killed in action in September 1918, taking part in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, one of the key turning points in the whole of the First World War.
48:26What's different about Corporal Stowers from most of the men buried in this American cemetery was that he fought his war in a French helmet.
48:36He carried a French rifle, he took orders from officers who were Frenchmen.
48:40And the reason for that, Freddy Stowers was an African-American.
48:43The commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John Pershing, had refused to lead black soldiers into battle.
48:53Most of the third of a million African-Americans drafted into the US Army had been sent to work behind the lines in segregated labor battalions.
49:02There were a handful of black combat units, and General Pershing's refusal to lead them turned them into an orphaned army.
49:14The French called them les enfants perdus, the lost children.
49:18First, the British were asked to train them in the arts of trench warfare, but they said no.
49:21But the French army welcomed them into their ranks, ranks that, after all, were full already of black soldiers from the French Empire.
49:32Most of the black American soldiers who came to France were from the south.
49:36And what they encountered here was a society that had its own prejudices, but that was still radically more tolerant and integrated than segregation-era America.
49:45In 1914, 54 black men had been lynched in the States, and in the south, black people lived under a set of racial laws that were really not that dissimilar from the laws of apartheid-ywa South Africa.
50:01What astonished the black troops when they got here were the simple things, that they could go out to the cafes, that they could travel in the same railway carriages as whites, that they could talk to white women on the street.
50:12And that's something that could get you killed in the American South.
50:16One soldier wrote home to his mother, saying the only time he was ever reminded in France that he was black, was when he looked at his own face in the mirror.
50:27Something of a love affair developed between France and black America.
50:31Unlike France's own black troops, recruited from West Africa and regarded by many French civilians as uncultured and primitive,
50:38America's black troops were seen as sophisticated, urbane and as irresistible as their new style of music.
50:45Behind the lines parties would sow the seeds for the post-war passion for the jazz.
50:52But the American military viewed this love affair with mounting horror.
51:00French acceptance of black Americans as equals threatened to undermine the foundations of segregated America.
51:10The music had to stop.
51:12This is a copy of The Crisis, which was the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the NAACP, which is an American civil rights movement that still exists today.
51:27And this edition from May 1919 is a celebration of what it calls the American Negroes' record in the Great World War, a record of loyalty, valour and achievement.
51:39But on page 16, there's a section called documents of the war.
51:45And the most important document is this one, secret information concerning black American troops.
51:52This was written by the French military mission on the orders of the Americans.
51:57And what this is, is a list of instructions and demands placed on the French by the Americans on how they were expected to treat black American soldiers.
52:06It begins, although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by white Americans as an inferior being, with whom relations of business or service only are possible.
52:20The black is constantly being censored for his want of intelligence and discretion, for his lack of civic and professional conscience, and for his tendency towards undue familiarity.
52:31We must prevent, it says, the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black officers.
52:44We must not eat with them, must not shake hands, or seek to meet or talk with them outside of the requirements of military service.
52:51We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of white Americans.
53:01We must make the point of keeping the native population, they mean the white French population, from spoiling the Negroes.
53:09White Americans become greatly incensed by any expression of intimacy between white women and black men.
53:16But French officers had more pressing concerns than shoring up America's race barrier, and the so-called French directive was suppressed.
53:30By September 1918, they and their black American troops were involved in what became known as the 100 Days Offensive, the final bloody push to drive the Germans back to the Rhine.
53:44Early on the morning of the 26th of September, Freddy Stowers and his company received orders to take a heavily defended hill infested with German machine gun nests.
53:58When the German troops appeared to surrender, Stowers led his men forward.
54:03But it was a trap. The machine guns opened up, and he was hit twice.
54:07But somehow, he managed to lead his men and take the German positions.
54:10He died on the battlefield, an American soldier in a French helmet.
54:17Stowers was recommended for the highest US military accolade, the Medal of Honor.
54:24But it would be more than 70 years before the recommendation was processed.
54:28His sisters finally received the medal on his behalf in 1991.
54:43The 100 Days Offensive ended with a crippled Germany signing an armistice on the 11th of November.
54:49With the fighting over, the black regiments returned to the United States, many with French medals pinned to their chests.
55:03Some marched down New York's Fifth Avenue as proud heroes.
55:09But the American South marked their homecoming in other ways.
55:16Within a year, eight black veterans who had survived the horrors of the Western Front were hanged by white lynch mobs.
55:25Two others were burnt alive.
55:27In one case, the victim's only offense was to refuse to take off his army uniform.
55:37During four years of fighting, Europe's imperial powers had broken all the rules of the game of empire.
55:44They'd armed their colonial subjects, brought them to the heart of Europe, and ordered them to kill whites.
55:51The carefully constructed myth of white superiority had been dismembered in the carnage of the fighting.
56:02But the war didn't lead to the disintegration of empire.
56:07In the years after 1918, the genies were put back in their bottles.
56:14The victorious empires of Europe continued to grow.
56:24Colonial soldiers were told,
56:26Thanks very much. Now back to your villages.
56:29Back to inequality.
56:31Back to how things were.
56:33Let's forget it ever happened.
56:37A history was constructed which quietly eclipsed their contributions
56:41and left a collective memory of an almost exclusively white conflict.
56:52If you want to see a fitting memorial to the world's war,
56:56you have to travel to present day Zambia.
56:59Deep in the bush, near the Chambizi River.
57:01It was here that General Paul von Letov-Waubeck and the ragged remnants of his Ascari army were persuaded to lay down their arms by a British bureaucrat.
57:16He told them that the guns of the Western Front had finally fallen silent.
57:22Three days earlier.
57:24The world's war was fought by African Ascari's, the men who took part in the very last engagements of the conflict in these fields.
57:34It was fought by the Indians, who'd held back the German advance of 1914.
57:39By French tirailleurs who took part in the recapture of Fort Duomont of Verdun.
57:43By the Chinese labourers who dug the trenches and repaired the tanks.
57:49And by the men of the Crescent camp, who found themselves recruited into the Kaiser's strange jihad.
57:54And now, a century later, we are just beginning, perhaps, to write them back into the history of the First World War.
58:03The war was fought by the British.
58:10The man named Peter Lagarde.
58:20The man named Peter Lagarde.
58:25The man named Peter Lagarde.
58:27The man named Peter Lagarde.
58:31You