Colonial Experiences and the First World War

In her wonderful debut monograph, Contact Zones of the First World War: Cultural Encounters across the British Empire, Anna Maguire relays an encounter between British Empire soldiers and a nurse in a hospital in Malta. It is the height of the First World War. Men and women from across Britain’s global empire rallied to the colors and were deployed to battlefields ranging across three continents. In the wake of the Allies’ failed 1915 Gallipoli campaign, New Zealander Tom Lane befriends an English corporal during their time together in a hospital ward. Grateful no doubt to have survived the ordeal intact, the duo is aghast at discovering the condition of one of their fellow hospital mates, a Black Jamaican whose wounds have gone untreated for days. “You never saw such a mess in all your life,” Lane recalls. An Ottoman shell has taken a lump out of the man’s thigh. As the wound festers, untended by the hospital’s staff, the man writhes and moans in agony. “But he’s a human being!” Lane protests when a Canadian nurse comes along. She stops, looks at the New Zealander, the Englishman, and at last the Jamaican. She replies, “Might be to you, but not to me. We only treat whites. We don’t bother about [n------]” (159).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · British Empire · Colonialism · Empire · First world war · Political science · Trial by ordeal · White (mutation) · World War II · African history and culture studies · History · Law · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact