Some 140,000 men were recruited from China during the Great War by the Allied Forces. Their mission was not to fight but to labour on the front lines. In exchange, they would (in theory) receive a salary and decent rations. The unsung heroes of the Chinese Labour Corps, whose contribution to the First World War has been mostly overlooked by historians, are given their due recognition in this touching third novel from bilingual writer, Fan Wu.
WW1
During the Great War, 140,000 Chinese laborers were recruited to work in England and France in order to free up men in those countries to fight. Janie Chang uses this corner of history as the backdrop of her new historical novel, The Porcelain Moon. While the two characters at the center of the story—a young Chinese woman named Pauline Deng and a French woman named Camille Roussel—are fictional, Chang indicates in her author’s note that many of the landmarks and other details of the Chinese labor camps she writes about are based on real places.
In 2012, Murali Ranganathan, a historian and translator of Gujarati and Marathi, came across the memoir of Nariman Karkaria, a Parsi from Gujarat, titled Rangbhoomi par Rakhad, published in 1922. The book recounts Karkaria’s travels throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and his experiences in the First World War. The memoir, Murali Ranganathan writes, “is the only Indian war memoir from the First World War to have been discovered thus far.” Though initially skeptical of Nariman Karkaria’s story, and unable to independently confirm the accounts of Karkaria’s war experiences, Ranganathan believes the accounts therein are genuine.
They say that armchair generals discuss tactics but real generals discuss logistics. So here’s something different. Dawn of Victory is an account of World War I focused entirely on logistics. Jim Maultsaid enlisted at the outbreak of the war in 1914 and was immediately sent to the front where he was badly wounded on the first day of the Somme offensive. He survived, but was permanently disabled. Rather than being demobilized, he was packed off to officer candidate school and then sent back to France as a Lieutenant in charge of one platoon of the 96,000 Chinese labourers recruited to help with the war effort. His were from Shandong. Dawn of Victory is the story of the platoon’s day-to-day struggle to keep the frontline troops supplied with food, ammunition and fuel.
“The Circassian: A Life of Eşref Bey, Late Ottoman Insurgent and Special Agent” by Benjamin C Fortna
The Circassian sounds like the name of a film; there’s more than enough material here for one. Eşref Bey, or Eşref Kuşçubaşı or any of the other names by which he went, played many roles in his life: brigand, family man, military leader, spy, rebel. He crossed paths if not quite swords with TE Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—with whom he is sometimes compared. But in spite of Eşref’s fame—or notoriety—information on him seems hard to come by in English; he does not even seem (at this writing) to have a Wikipedia page.
A century ago China was at the height of its warlord period. The nascent Republic of China had 26 prime ministers in 12 years as one warlord after another gained ascendency in their internecine struggles.
Little wonder, then, that China remained neutral as the First World War raged, signing up with the Allies only in the last year of the conflict. The Japanese too, though formally allied with the Entente powers, provided little practical assistance. Japan invaded Tsingtao and defeated the German garrison in one of the war’s first battles, but after that Japan declined to provide much support when importuned by its hard-pressed allies. Late in the war, once the defeat of the Central Powers seemed likely, Japan supplied some war materiel under the terms of secret treaties assuring British and French support for its colonial ambitions after the war. Its aim was to be anointed Germany’s successor in control of its Pacific colonies, including continued occupation of Tsingtao.
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