Forgotten Hill Disillusion Full Game Free

[Jesper Sahu]

Mutiny was first broadcast as part of Channel 4's contribution to Black History Month in October 1999. The documentary was the first examination of the British West Indies Regiment (B.W.I.R.) since the pioneering studies by W. F. Elkins (1970) and C. L. Joseph (1971). The filmmakers sought to recover the forgotten contribution of the Anglophone Caribbean to the British imperial campaigns of the First World War (1914-1918) and in doing so undertook two important, interwoven tasks. Firstly, they continue the longstanding tradition of questioning accounts of the war presented by the higher echelons and official historians. In the closing minutes of the film, contributing military historian, Julian Putowski, makes this explicit and suggests this challenge to the dominant perspective had taken place in the previous twenty years. More precisely, it can be said to have started to take hold, albeit in a very conventional form, from the early 1960s when the First World War re-entered the popular imagination in Britain. This era saw the publication of Alan Clark's The Donkeys (1961), which challenged the competency of the army leadership, the stage and film versions of Oh, What a Lovely War (1963 and 1969 respectively), the pivotal documentary series The Great War (BBC 1964) and a revival of interest in the war poets (Hanna 2007). In the past decade, a counter-challenge has been mounted by historians who claim understanding of the war has been distorted by literary tradition, which caricatures the British soldier as hapless victim of military folly (see Bond 1997). Secondly, by deploying interview footage of three of the handful of West Indian First World War veterans still alive in the late 1990s, Mutiny attempts to reclaim this forgotten history through the voices of the servicemen themselves, a tradition pioneered by the producers of The Great War series.

But this early fervour was not met with equal enthusiasm by the British War Office. The raising of West Indian contingents was initially rejected on a number of spurious grounds, including the suggestion by Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, that black soldiers would be more visible on the battlefield. Clearly, of most concern was that the black man might outperform the white on the battlefield, thereby increasing the confidence of black subjects throughout the British Empire, which in turn might lead to greater demands for self-determination. As Clifford Powell remarked, "When black people have rifles in their hands, don't joke with them. They mean to fight." Imperial self-confidence had already been dampened during the Boer War (1899-1902), as Britain struggled to put physically fit recruits into the field. This anxiety still festered in the minds of the Imperial establishment, although Mutiny alludes only fleetingly to this. A parallel strand in Imperial ideology ridiculed the suggestion that black soldiers could possibly be of use to the war effort. This was despite the reliance on black and Indian soldiers in many Imperial campaigns, particularly from the nineteenth century. In racially stratified West Indian societies, any suggestion black men should serve alongside white was dismissed out of hand. Mutiny recalls how C.L.R James was ridiculed when he tried to enlist in the Trinidad Merchants' Contingent, formed to send middle-class Trinidadians directly to British regiments, rather than the B.W.I.R. As James would recount in Beyond a Boundary (1963:39-40), rejection on the grounds of his dark skin, despite a strong educational and sporting background, was a defining moment; one which explains the central place he attributed to the war in The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932).

The intervention of George V in April 1915 forced the recruitment of West Indians to be taken more seriously. The king and his advisors were keen to present the image of a united Empire, but also recognised the continued refusal of recruits might undermine British rule. By May, preparations were well under way to send representative contingents from the British West Indies, including the mainland territories of British Guiana (Guyana) and British Honduras (Belize). In October 1915, the formation of the British West Indies Regiment as an infantry unit [End Page 225] was formally announced and over 15,000 men were eventually recruited, all volunteers. While some black West Indians had been so enthusiastic to enlist they stowed away on ships bound for the metropole, others were motivated by a mixture of idealism and pragmatism. Some wished to broaden their horizons by leaving small island communities, others desired an alternative to poverty wages of "9 pence per day."

As the volunteers sang "we want to catch the Kaiser if we get a chance" the response to the war by those left behind was often less enthusiastic. Some were reluctant to fight a "white people's war" and regarded the volunteers as "German bait." The loyalty of even the most pro-British black recruit would soon be tested by the institutional racism of the British Army, as well as the harsh realities of war.

Some of the subsequent poor treatment meted out to the British West Indies Regiment may have been the result of incompetence rather than racism. This was clearly illustrated during the ill-fated voyage of the Verdala, which sailed from Jamaica with the Third Contingent in March 1916. The ship was diverted via Nova Scotia to avoid German submarines, but as they had not been supplied with winter uniforms and as the ship was not properly equipped to carry troops, over 100 men succumbed to frostbite, suffering amputated limbs as a result.

Other circumstances could not be so regarded and reflected a more deep-seated mendacity towards black imperial subjects, despite attempts to portray the war as a universal struggle against Germanic authoritarianism. Under military law black men, whether subjects of the Empire or not, were regarded as aliens and were not permitted to rise above non-commissioned rank. More significantly, with the exception of the three battalions (First, Second and Fifth), deployed during 1917 and 1918 against the Turks, the remaining nine battalions were not regarded as of sufficient front-line calibre and performed labouring duties, such as unloading supplies, road building and transporting ammunition. Despite the vital importance of such tasks, the West Indians regarded their status as deeply inferior, particularly as they were denied the opportunity to fire a shot in anger, although routinely serving within range of enemy shellfire. The recited lines of the "Black Soldier's Lament," written in the 1980s by Captain George Borden to reflect the experiences of the black Canadian construction battalions serving in the First World War, highlights this grievance:

Stripped to the waist and sweated chestMidday's reprieve much needed restWe dug and hauled and lifted highFrom trenches deep toward the skyNon-fighting troops and yet we die(Ruck 1986). [End Page 226]

A search of the West Indian newspapers, may have revealed a more specific, contemporary poetic plea,2 but in terms of other illustrative sources the filmmakers were faced with very concrete difficulties. The Film and Video Archive of the Imperial War Museum (I.W.M.), London, for example, holds four fleeting segments, two of which were until recently miscatalogued.3 To address this shortfall, footage of other black units has been used to effectively convey meaning, although not unproblematically. In one section, newsreel of black American soldiers training in trench warfare on the Western Front is intercut with frames of Ghurkha soldiers crouching in dugouts in the Middle East.4 Simultaneously, the narrative shifts from the B.W.I.R.'s service as labourer battalions in France and Italy to the offensive role of the B.W.I.R. in General Allenby's Jordan campaign.

Recounting his experiences in Jordan, Gershom Browne tells how a comrade died having "met with a shell." I tried without success to locate this man, named as "Eustace Phillips" (or "Philips"), in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database. This prompted me to reconsider the merits of redressing historical omission by privileging the memories of the dwindling band of centenarian veterans. The closing sequence of Mutiny underlines how this has become an imperative in much recent war documentary (Badsey 2002); the narrator insists that "to fill the gaps in the history books we have to rely on the fading memories of the veterans themselves." Writing in the late 1920s, Paolo Monelli, the Italian war veteran and journalist, underlined the pitfalls of wartime memoir:

The man who undertook today, in good faith, to narrate his memories as a fighting man would write a false book. Not by his own fault, but because of the qualities of human nature. The most faithful and humble memory distorts long-past events. The shells fall closer, the actions are enormously exaggerated, the periods of waiting lose their length, the intermediate moments disappear: the falsehoods and rhetoric of others act upon us (cited in Harvey 1998:133).

The official preference for deploy the B.W.I.R. as labour battalions, rather than front-line troops, and the rising tide of discriminatory treatment could characterise the history of the regiment, in the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Wood-Hill, as a "heartbreaking tale of humiliation and disillusion." One of the B.W.I.R.'s pivotal advocates, whose lobbying contributed to the eventual front-line deployment in Palestine and Jordan, Wood-Hill was a long-serving officer of the West India Regiment6 before the war. He was appointed commanding officer of the first battalion B.W.I.R. and documented the regiments tribulations in a brief sketch circulated to the War Office, Colonial Office and West India Committee. Mutiny does not address the more ambiguous, reactionary side of Wood-Hill's character which resulted in his striking the men under his command (Cipriani 1940). It was an obsession with military honour and discipline, less a desire to redress racial discrimination, which drove his championing of the B.W.I.R. As he made clear in a letter to the West India Committee after the war, Wood Hill firmly hoped military discipline had made Jamaicans immune to political radicalisation.7

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