Our Journal: First World War Studies

During World War I, around 80,000 Estonian soldiers were mobilized into the Russian Army. The warfare and the composition of the Russian Army presented the Estonians with plentiful opportunities to experience and encounter many others. By relying on Estonian soldiers’ letters, diaries, and memoirs, this article takes a look at how the experiences of imagining and encountering others – the enemies (mostly the Germans) and the Estonians’ fellow soldiers in the Russian Army (mainly the Russians) – evolved during the war and contributed to Estonians’ war experiences as well as to their rising national consciousness on the eve of the collapse of the Russian Empire and the emergence of the nation-states.

As this case study of Estonian soldiers shows, the images of others were dynamic and were affected by numerous factors, such as propaganda, patriotism (or lack thereof), and direct encounters. The minorities of the Russian Army who often struggled with making sense of the war and with experiencing camaraderie in the multi-ethnic army, could at times perceive enemy others more positively than they perceived their fellow soldiers. While the Estonians mainly pictured the Germans as the enemy, they could also imagine German soldiers as fellow sufferers, or the German Army as a liberator who would free the Estonians from the Bolshevik regime in 1918. Encountering fellow soldiers – mainly the Russians – did rarely generate camaraderie and feelings of shared identity but rather revealed differences between the Estonians and other soldiers, and ultimately resulted in growing separatist and nationalistic fervour among the Estonians.

Key Words: The image of the enemy, patriotism, multi-ethnic armies, national movements, war experience, Estonian soldiers, egodocuments

Between 1914 and 1918, the German army occupied Belgium and large parts of France. One important feature of the occupation was the gender imbalance and, as such, these French and Belgian territories were often the theatre of encounters between the occupation soldiers and local women. Intimate relationships among them were not uncommon: one can find comments about them in two thirds of the diaries kept by people living under the German occupation. This article is based on the analysis of a corpus of 110 such diaries, revealing the way people perceived and judged these relations, but also the variations in this perception, geographical, chronological, social or gendered. Some of these diaries – especially when written by young women – also provide clues about different aspects (like harassment or occupation languor) of the ‘psychological soil’ in which these relations could emerge. In occupied France and Belgium most people considered these relationships to be appalling from a patriotic and moral point of view, and their sheer number was viewed as a concern, but some diarists tried to understand the origins of the phenomenon. The different interpretations suggested explanations such as gender, class, age, education, the length of the conflict or misery, but rarely demonstrated empathy for those who were called ‘femmes à Boches’ (‘women for the Huns’). Prostitution flourished from the start of the occupation and was completely at odds with the standards emanating from the “occupied war culture”. This rise provoked an outcry and disgust among the population: its expansion and its association with the occupier inflamed its visibility in public space, making it partly inhospitable to the occupied people. Weddings, in contrast, were extremely rare, and only reported in a few diaries. This quasi absence of formalized relations did not prevent the birth of numerous children born to a French or Belgian woman and a German soldier. These babies were generally officially recorded as having an ‘unknown father’ and were not welcome in the community, despite the anxieties generated by a drop in the birth rate during the occupation period. With the rise in sexual encounters between occupation soldiers and local women, venereal diseases became a common concern to both the occupiers and those occupied. During the first winter of the occupation, measures were taken by the German and local authorities to try to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Centers specialized in the (forced) treatment of women infected by venereal disease were created by the occupying authorities. These centers were sometimes nicknamed ‘parc à poules’ (‘chicken parks’) by the occupied population, ashamed of their very existence, but eager to see the ‘purification’ of the public space through the arrest of prostitutes and infected women. All in all, the various forms of intimate relationships were more often reported in the Operations- und Etappengebiet, close to the front, than on the territory of the general-government, where the density of the German presence was lower. But everywhere, these relationships – generally regarded as venal sexuality – aroused animosity and led to these women being ostracised.

Key Words: Military occupation, Belgium, France, sexuality, children born of war

This article examines geographical field research in Albania and Montenegro under Austro-Hungarian occupation, which lasted from 1916 to 1918. It focusses on one of the most important German-speaking geographers of the early 20th century, Eugen Oberhummer (1859–1944), a pupil of Friedrich Ratzel, the founder of German geopolitics. In 1917 and 1918, Oberhummer went on two expeditions to Montenegro and Albania during the First World War. He already had travelled in four continents and vaguely knew the Western Balkans from an expedition in 1907. It will be argued that the actual situation in Albania and Montenegro did not alter, but did rather reinforce Oberhummer’s attitudes and opinions on the ‘other’ he encountered. Thus, the two war expeditions – Oberhummer primarily met high-ranking Austro-Hungarian officials and only few locals – confirmed his expectations basing on his ‘Ratzelian’ theoretical conceptions. It will further be argued that – in contrast to the much younger and less experienced ‘scholars-at-arms’ of the expedition of 1916 – war and violence were of secondary relevance for the well-travelled and renowned professor of geography in his late 50s. Neither in Oberhummer’s articles nor in his diaries the war and the occupation of Albania and Montenegro made up an important part. In Oberhummer’s ‘Ratzelian’ view, humans could not change or overcome the basic features of geography, as humans were clearly subordinated to the elemental forces of geography. People, over generations, adapted to geography, not the other way round. The on-going First World War was an opportunity for Oberhummer to travel to Albania and Montenegro, but the guerrilla warfare in large parts of Montenegro, the violence against the civilian population, and the fighting at the Albanian front were of secondary relevance and interest for him. Nevertheless, what Oberhummer observed offers great insights into the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Montenegro and Albania from the perspective of a renowned and – given the general circumstances – pleasantly relaxed Ratzelian geographer at the height of his academic career.

Key Words: Albania, Montenegro, Austro-Hungarian occupation 1916–1918, geographical field research, Eugen Oberhummer, Friedrich Ratzel

World War One brought large numbers of people of color into contact in the relatively short period of four years. During this time communities of colonial subjects and of African Americans were drawn into the war. They actively observed the war, its impact on their own communities, and its impact on other people of color. Throughout the world the war intensified the growing scrutiny of racial oppression in the nascent anti-colonial and pan-African movement. Confronted with a global war, leaders of the African American community, along with leaders of various colonial peoples, persuaded men and women in their communities to support the Allied war effort. They encountered opposition in doing so but also support. And they encountered each other’s struggles. In each of their own national contexts they employed a rhetoric of citizenship for service. Exploring their rhetoric illustrates the global and entangled nature of the histories of people of color during the war. It shows how the war forged new connections between them and laid the foundations for the vibrant pan-African and anti-colonial movements after the war. The following article traces the speech and writing of leaders and of the pro-war press from India, New Zealand, America and French West Africa. During the war colonized and racially oppressed people around the globe acted upon the reasoned and reasonable hope that their contributions to the war effort in the war would win them political rights. Each group was engaged in a war against racial oppression alongside their battles in global World War One fronts. Their struggles were entangled but not one and the same. That had been true before the war but the experience of recruitment and the deferred promises of citizenship for service intensified both the forces of solidarity and of local struggle and identification. That tension was to continue long after the war.

Key Words: World War One, black American soldiers, W. E. B. Du Bois, Blaise Diagne, Maori in World War One, citizenship, military service

Though the Great War is imagined and discussed as a European conflagration, an epic showdown between white Europeans, the simple fact remains that from the first, European battlefields mirrored the multiracial makeup of the empires doing battle. The Allies depended most heavily on their black soldiers, both as combatants and as labourers, even if it meant pressing these recruits into service at the end of a gun. And when the United States finally joined the war in 1917, it too leaned extensively on African Americans, this despite resistance from many white Southerners. An added consequence of the use of black soldiers in Europe – nearly one million of them from Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and the United States – were reinvigorated campaigns for more meaningful citizenship rights for blacks on the homefront, including calls for decolonization and an end to segregation. This paper examines how Allied nations enlisted and deployed black soldiers in Europe. With so many black men from so many different places in Great Britain, Belgium and France for the first time, the Black Atlantic world converged in Europe during its greatest crisis in civilisation. Drawn into the conflict by a desperate plea to save democracy, black soldiers ended the war determined to make real democracy for themselves.

Key Words: Colonial soldiers, force noire, Canada, African Americans, African soldiers, Race and War