Daryl
Klein’s book With the Chinks is an
example of why we should not censor or bowdlerise the past. Let it speak for
itself, and it may tell you more than it meant to
Towards
the end of 1917, a junior officer named Daryl Klein arrived in Qingdao in
China’s Shandong Province. He had come to take up a posting as a Second
Lieutenant in the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC), which between 1916 and 1918
recruited nearly 100,000 Chinese labourers to do war work, including the
digging of trenches on the Western Front. In so doing it freed up huge numbers
of Allied troops to take a more direct part in the fighting. The French also
recruited Chinese labour on a large scale. Not all returned to China safely.
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| Chinese New Year, Noyelles, 1918 (Imperial War Museum/2nd Lt David McLellan) |
I have known about this episode for a long
time; although little-known in Britain, the CLC’s story has not been a secret.
I first read of it back in the 1970s, when the Sunday Times Magazine ran a series called The Unofficial History of the 20th Century. It mentioned the CLC,
and referred in passing to a book by one of its officers, Daryl Klein, “with
the nonchalant title With the Chinks.”
The title stuck in my mind but it was only recently that I was able to confirm
that the book existed; it was rediscovered and republished by Naval &
Military Press in 2009 and is now available as a download as well as a paperback.
Klein’s
book is based on his diary from December 1917 to May 1918, and covers the
training of the labourers at their camp in Shantung (as it was then called),
their transport across the Pacific to British Columbia and their stay there,
and their onward passage towards France as far as New York. It ends there, and
does not cover the labourers’ service on the Western Front. Nonetheless it is
fascinating, the more so because it was published in 1919 and is thus a very
contemporary account. It is also shocking, confronting the reader with a stunning
level of casual prejudice.
II
The
CLC’s story has slowly been uncovered and there are now several books about it.
For the casual reader, it is set out in a short but very well-written and
well-researched book, Mark O’Neill’s The
Chinese Labour Corps (2014), one of a series called China Penguin Specials.
O’Neill has a family connection; his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in
China and accompanied the CLC to France.
O’Neill explains that the roots of the CLC lay in China’s weak
international position and its wish to use the war as a way to improve it. In
1914 China, although an independent state, was firmly under the thumb of the
Western colonial powers and Japan. It was saddled with a huge indemnity for its
supposed crimes during the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century, when
nationalist Chinese rose against the imperial powers and their “concessions” in
China. The latter were extraterritorial enclaves where the foreign powers had
special privileges; the most famous was Shanghai, but in 1914 there were
actually 27 concessions, according to O’Neill. (If you broaden the definition
to include all foreign enclaves, there were more.)
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| Tank maintenance, Teneur, 1918 (Imperial War Museum/2nd Lt David McLellan) |
In particular, the Chinese would have liked to regain
control of Shandong, where the German concessions had been seized by the Japanese
in November 1914. Japan was an ally of Britain and France, and China also hoped
that taking a pro-Allied line would earn it their help in dealing with its
neighbour. Thus in 1915 the Chinese offered to send a total of 300,000 workers
to Britain and France. In the event, Britain would recruit just over 94,000 and
the French a further 40,000; of this 135,000-odd men, about 10,000 would later
be “lent” to the US when it entered the war. About 80,000 of the CLC were from
Shandong, and were from a predominantly agricultural background; it was felt
they would deal better with the hard work, and the North European winters, than
the Cantonese from further south.
The CLC was not to bear arms or be exposed to combat. Inevitably,
however, some did come to harm; O’Neill says that about 3,000 died from bombing
and shelling, accidents while clearing munitions (which was clearly dangerous
work), and illnesses such as tuberculosis and ’flu (a number would perish in
the Spanish Influenza epidemic at the end of the war). Modern Chinese
researchers have claimed that the losses were higher. Moreover China would reap
few diplomatic rewards in return for their sacrifice.
III
To read O’Neill’s account in conjunction with Klein’s is to be
hit hard by the changes in the way we think about the world. For a start, one is taken aback by the title With the Chinks. In fact, “Chink” was then American slang, not
British. Klein barely uses it in the book. Instead he calls the men “coolies”,
a word that has mostly vanished now but was still used when I was a child 50
years ago for a Chinese or Indian worker. But it would now be mostly regarded
as offensive, and “chink” would now be taken as a racial slur. These are not words
I would use out of context today.
Although
coolie was sometimes used simply for Chinese manual workers, strictly speaking
it meant an indentured labourer – that is, one who works to pay off a debt, and
is effectively unfree. The history of empire includes the most awful abuses of
such men, mostly Chinese and Indian, who were transported across the world,
worked in many cases to death and, if they survived, left to rot rather than
brought home. The worst abuses had been brought to an end in the late 19th
century, but in 1918 they were well within living memory. One wonders to what
extent Klein knew of them.
The
CLC men were not indentured as such, but they were under contract and could not
leave. Early in the book, Klein states that they were free men and could do so,
were they able to produce a good enough reason. But the fact is that they were
effectively prisoners, and at several points Klein describes incidents in which
they “escaped” and were forcibly brought back. Klein expresses no great
surprise at this. Moreover his attitude to the men was completely
paternalistic. He describes the induction process at the camp as the “sausage
machine”, in which a man has his hair cut, is washed and is taught to drill:
...a process which turns an ordinary uninviting
workaday coolie into a clean, well-clothed and smartly active human being. An
astonishing process which is doing a great good for a corner of China. If the
whole nation, male and female, could pass through the Sausage Machine it would
make the people anew, as it is making them, two to three hundred a day, in this
camp.
When a man tries unsuccessfully to escape, Klein is
simply puzzled:
Questioned why, at a court of inquiry held this
morning, he was desirous of so impolitely leaving his comrades, a dry warm
wooden bed, no end of rice, and the interesting prospect of seeing France at
war, he said that he wanted to give up all for his wife and follow her.
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| St Omer, 1918 (Imperial War Museum/2nd Lt Thomas Keith Aitken) |
In
Klein's view the men are not much troubled about their destination provided
they are not going into combat. It does not occur to him that they should worry
about this point. He describes how a mutiny broke out at sea in one of the first
drafts because an “absurd rumour” had spread that they were going into a “death
trap”. But as stated above, some 3,000 men of the Chinese Labour Corps and its
French equivalent would indeed die in France. As Klein's book was published in
1919, he should by then have known that, and his insouciance seems inexcusable.
Moreover he makes light of the danger from the journey itself. Thus in January 1918 there is a mass
break-out from the camp: “A malicious report
has lately gained credence among them that the last two transports were either
torpedoed, or captured by the Germans; a story, needless to say, entirely
baseless.” But
it wasn’t. In February 1917 the French troopship Athos, carrying Chinese labourers to France, had been torpedoed in
the Mediterranean. “The incident resulted in the loss of
754 lives,” says Mark O’Neill, “including 543 Chinese men who were destined to
never set foot on European soil, and who would be the first Chinese casualties
of the Great War.” In the Atlantic, 1917 had been the worst year for submarine warfare, and later in his
own book Klein will describe disciplining labourers who light cigarettes on
deck, lest they attract submarines. Klein’s paternalism had blinded him to the
fact that these men were not imagining things; that their concerns were, in
fact, real.
And
yet Klein clearly liked “his” Chinese. The book is peppered with references to
their strength and to their solidity of character, and he was especially
impressed by their kindness to each other:
They showed the sort of spirit which makes one positively
love the Chinese—the Chinese of Shantung at any rate. They are wonderfully good
to one another in adversity. They have warm hearts and willing hands. There was
something so eternally and touchingly human about this business that whatever
vestige remained in me of the conventional conception of the coolie quite
disappeared.
IV
Klein's narrative takes us across the Pacific to British
Columbia, where the labourers were kept in camps until transport was available
to take them onwards. Although Klein does not say so, the camps were secret –
initially to protect Chinese neutrality (though by now China was in the war)
but also so as not to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment in Canada. The men were
then usually taken across the country in sealed trains and embarked for France
in, one assumes, Montreal or Halifax. Klein's draft, however, were unusual,
being taken instead on the Empress of Asia, through the Panama Canal and
on to France via New York. It is, Klein tells us, a constant battle to make the
men understand the danger from submarines. (Oddly, the ship would survive the
First World War but be sunk in the second.)
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| Embarcation at Shandong, from With the Chinks; pic possibly by Klein himself |
The journey through the Canal and the Caribbean gives Klein
further occasion to shock the modern reader, with descriptions of n*****s and
c**ns. (“Coolie” and “chink” I can manage, but only given the context; and I
cannot bring myself to type those.) The narrative ends in New York, a fact that
disappointed the reviewer for Punch when it was published the following
year. The review also criticised the book for failing to show why the men had
joined up, but conceded that: “For the conscientious historian it will have a
certain unique value. And in fairness it must be added that in the latter half
there are touches of humour and humanity which make the reading easy and
pleasant.” This was not entirely wrong. Klein was clearly not a bad man and for
all his youthful paternalism, his regard for the Chinese was real. Yet there is
little evidence of him talking to, or trying to understand, them, or to see
them as individuals.
Or is there? Some way through the book Klein
introduces his friend Julius East, or Jule, who has, he says, given up a good
career in banking to join the CLC. On the three-week voyage across the Pacific
it occurs to East to find out more about his charges: “The second day out in the Pacific it
came to Jule that it would be interesting to know what was passing in the minds
of his coolies. So, picking out the most intelligent of the interpreters, he
descended to the 'tween decks and closeted himself with his two sergeants.” The
ensuing conversation is described in some detail. Jule appears to have learned
little of the two men’s thoughts and interrogates a third, a “six-foot-two,
magnificently built, open-mouthed hayseed, one Lun Zun Chong ...Jule asked many
straight questions, but never a satisfactory answer did he receive.” Klein concludes that “the moral to be drawn
from Jule's interview with three members of his company is that nothing passes
in the mind of a coolie ...Nothing, that is, of a philosophic nature.” Jule is
disappointed. “He expected whimsical points of view, quaint definitions,
intellectual oddities.” He still maintains that he can uncover them, but not
through an interpreter, and decides he will learn Chinese.
We don’t learn whether he does, but we
do encounter Jule again, and hear of his thoughts and actions in surprising
detail. Finally, in New York, he has dinner with his sister – who lives there –
and her friends. The coolies, he assures them, will not be allowed to fight in
France even if they want to (and as we have seen, they didn’t). But Jule makes
the following observation:
At
all events, if they don't get a Tommy's chance in this war, they will get it
sooner or later in their own country. It will be a war of their own—a civil war
...clean, clear open minds against the dirt and truck and turgidness of
centuries. When these men go back to China they won't be satisfied with the old
life, the constricted and congested village life; they will want an existence
more akin to our Western ideas and ideals of life; they will want more order,
more open spaces, more cleanliness ... In a word they will be progressive.
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| Sword display, Crecy Forest, 1918 (Imperial War Museum/2nd Lt David McLellan) |
Was that Jule’s opinion? Or was he an imaginary
cypher for Klein himself? I think the latter. A search
of the website of Britain’s National Archives turned up his full name, and his
middle names were Julius Ernest. Julius East? It may be that Klein wrote the
racist hogwash he thought was expected of him, but used the Jule device to
express his genuine interest in the Chinese themselves – an interest that might
then have been seen as a little odd and even unsettling in some circles,
including those in which Klein would return to work as a civilian. It may be
that the book does reflect Klein’s own attitudes. But it could also be that
this whole book is subversive.
Of the man himself, I can find out very little. He was a
British officer, but his name sounds more American – and as we have seen, if he
was Jule, his sister lived in New York. He could also have been Canadian
or Australian; many Empire subjects would have been thought of as British then.
The fact that the National Archives had his full name meant I could establish
from other sources that he served from 1914 to 1920, and was gazetted temporary
2nd Lieutenant with effect from December 31 1917. I also found reference to an
American with a Russian-born father and English-born mother who may have been
our Klein; if that is our man, he was probably born in 1895. The answers will
be buried in the War Office files, for those with the time and skills to find
them.
V
Whatever Klein really thought, I found parts
of his book hard to read, and if I were Chinese I would have been climbing the
walls somewhere around page three or four. Behind the paternalism was the
historical suffering of indentured labourers alluded to earlier, and while the
CLC men did not suffer as badly as that, their conditions in France were hard. Neither was this the case only for those
employed by the British. Mark O’Neill states that those employed by the French
fared better, but his own account does not always seem to bear this out:
Several Chinese
workers died in the French factories, due to accidents, disputes and illnesses
that were not properly treated. Between 1916 and 1918, the men were involved in
twenty-five strikes or violent demonstrations. There were arguments among
themselves, usually related to gambling, and clashes with other foreign
workers. In January 1917, in a gunpowder factory in Bassens, a brawl with Arab
workers left two Chinese dead. A few days later, at a gunpowder factory in
Bergerac, 500 Chinese attacked 250 Algerians; one Chinese was killed and sixty
people were injured.
Meanwhile the British organize a well-equipped hospital in
the base area that has 1,500 beds and Chinese-speaking doctors and dressers,
and the workers receive the same care and attention as the British soldiers. “To
give a flavour of home, each ward had a canary and a model pagoda several
metres high stood near the main entrance, with a gong that struck the hours of
the day.”
On the other hand, O’Neill also reports that the British-built
hospital had “a large compound for the treatment of those who had lost their
mind under the stress of war.” He also records that quite a number of workers
died in bombing raids on their camps and elsewhere. Moreover O’Neill does recount incidents in
which British officers mistreated Chinese workers, saying that when workers presented
a complaint and their officer could not understand them, it was not unknown for
them to simply open fire: “A lieutenant in charge of 1,000 men was reported as
hitting the workers on the face, kicking them and calling them names," he
writes. “In turn, they cursed him and finally a strike occurred. The guards
opened fire and four workers were killed.” Neither was this the worst incident;
in October 1917, five men were killed and 14 wounded after a dispute over
discipline, while two months later there was a mutiny because of bullying by
British NCOs. This resulted in the deaths of four Chinese workers and a
Canadian soldier.
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| Gravestone, Noyelles, 1919 (Imperial War Museum/Ivan L. Bawtree) |
Reading With the Chinks,
it is not hard to see how this happened. Klein, though of his time, was clearly
decent enough but his fellow-officers seem to have been a rum lot. One, for
example, is a Russian officer in a crack cavalry regiment (or so Klein assures
us) who has been stranded by the Revolution and has left all his baggage “in
the Carpathians”. He misses the sophisticated company he had when he served in
the London and Washington embassies before the war, and finds his
brother-officers a poor substitute. The other officers seem to have been a
mixed bag of missionaries and other China hands. One advocates converting all
the labourers to his muscular brand of Christianity. This idea is wisely
quashed by the others, but most are not above a little casual violence: “There
is rivalry among the officers in regard to the number of canes broken on the
backs, legs and shins, not to speak of the heads of defaulters,” reports Klein.
“The supply of canes ran short in Tsingtau some time ago.” He quotes a
brother-officer as saying that “nothing... knocks anything into a coolie so well as a nose-bleed.” The
officer concerned is, says Klein, “well practised at drawing a coolie's blood
at first slap,” and assures everyone that "they
soon get over it and bear you no malice, either.”
Klein recalls an officer called Harris, “who has an
excellent digestion and the temperament of a lamb,” admitting that he was
“growing astonishingly callous in his treatment of the coolies.” He tells Klein and the others that “’the
smallest breach of discipline drives me into a fury ... I don't know what has
come over me. Time was ...I could initiate a coolie into the knowledge of left
and right without loss of temper. To-day I cane him into this knowledge ...’ In
Harris' heart is a great fear of becoming like a Prussian officer. ‘What if I should become like that which we
are seeking to destroy?’”
Herein lies what for me is the key message, albeit unintentional, of With the Chinks: that the power of one
group over another is as bad for the first as it is for the second. As the distinguished playwright and MP Benn Levy said in a
1946 Commons debate on the occupation of Germany (which was not going well):
“It is not good for a nation to be conquered. But it is also not good for
people to be conquerors.” I may remember Daryl Klein the next time I hear someone
praising the achievements of colonialism.
For further reading on the Chinese Labour Corps, Mark O’Neill
quotes Brian Fawcett’s Chinese Labour Corps in France 1917–1921 and Xu Guoqi’s Strangers on the Western Front. The
Imperial War Museum’s excellent collection of photographs of the CLC can be
found here.
Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies
was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops
(ISBN 978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)
