History'It doesn't mean I'm not sick of this damn war," says the flying-ace, Lord Flashheart, in Blackadder Goes Forth: "The blood, the noise, the endless poetry." The first World War, perhaps more so than any other modern conflict, is unusual in being understood primarily through the art it has inspired.
However far historiography of the conflict has moved on, often defending strategy and commanders who had previously been vilified, we simply cannot get past Wilfred Owen's image of the "passing-bells for these who die as cattle". From the soldier-poet Owen's stanzas written in the trenches to Erich Maria Remarque's inter-war All Quiet on the Western Front, to Oh! What a Lovely War in the 1960s and on to the contemporary Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks, and Blackadder itself, it has been art that has shaped the thinking of successive generations on the futility of the "war to end all wars".
So it can surely be no fluke that something comparable has happened even to the "forgotten" campaign of that conflict. For many the war in sub-Saharan Africa - primarily east Africa - means Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn aboard the African Queen. More recently, it was the setting for William Boyd's tragicomic novel, An Ice Cream War, which (without spoiling the plot) reaches its farcical conclusion as the British and German forces continue fighting each other for weeks after the armistice has been declared on November 11th, 1918. Nobody bothered to tell them the conflict was over. Even for the top brass in Europe, this was the war that time forgot.
Now the bloody campaign in Africa has the history and the historian it deserves. Edward Paice has written a superb account that is as moving as it is incisive. His achievement is to take this "forgotten" campaign and make it seem central not just to the first World War, but to the tragedy that would enfold sub-Saharan Africa throughout the rest of the century. Tip & Run is a magnificent achievement that provides a compelling non-fiction partner for William Boyd's novel.
THE GENERATION OF politicians and military commanders immediately preceding that of 1914 would have found it extraordinary that Africa could have been a sideshow in any great power conflict. "Africa mattered to the European powers at the beginning of the twentieth century," writes Paice. In the 1890s Bismarck had warned that Africa would cause "manifold, untold conflicts". The British imperialist Joseph Chamberlain predicted hostilities between the European rivals in Africa would lead to "a long war, a bitter war and a costly war". The fighting between Britain and South Africa that followed shortly after - costing about £12 billion (€18 billion) in today's money and a loss of life that exceeded Crimean war fatalities - seemed but a chilling warning of a far worse conflict to come.
The truisms that have been accepted about poor British generalship on the Western Front - largely now disputed by historians of the war - in fact apply more readily to the conflict in Africa between 1914 and 1918.
The campaign was characterised by bad luck and downright incompetence. London expected "bow-and-arrow fighting" and a "game of tip and run". Instead, says Paice, "Britain, India, South Africa, Belgium, Portugal and Germany were sucked into a maelstrom that radically altered the lives of millions of Africans and would result in a compete redrawing of the map of colonial Africa".
Among the startling aspects of Tip & Run is the complete lack of feeling for African warfare demonstrated by the British commanders in deploying their superior forces. After all, the country's leading military figures - Kitchener, Haig, French, Roberts, Hamilton, Allenby and Smith-Dorrien - and a raft of junior officers had cut their teeth fighting African campaigns. The Boer War gave them immediate experience on which to draw. Yet they fought like neophytes. Even the South African Gen Jan Smutts, who took command early in 1916, struggled to make an impact. When he set sail to attend an Imperial Conference in London a year later, the quality of his leadership was already being brought into question.
ONLY THE GERMAN military commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, emerged from the conflict with his reputation enhanced. With a force roughly a 10th in size of that of the British, he ran his adversaries ragged. Contemporaries on all sides and scholars alike have judged him "one of the greatest guerrilla leaders in history". The fact that he fought honourably - he "played the game" said one London journal after the war - only enhanced his standing.
This single example of great generalship, however, cannot hide the "butcher's bill" of the conflict. If the war in Africa was a sideshow, it was an expensive one. The official death toll on the British side alone, including soldiers and African military carriers, exceeded 100,000, and in reality, suggests Paice, it was probably double that figure. Even the official figure equated to the number of British soldiers killed on the Somme in 1916, or to the US's total dead in the Great War. For many of those who died, particularly the African carriers, it was not bullets but the conditions that did for them. Searing heat, pouring rain, minimal rations, rudimentary medical supplies, and disease all combined to take their toll.
No doubt most combatants would have sympathised with the views of one young British officer. In 1914 Lieut Lewis had witnessed the death of every single member of his half-battalion on the Western Front. Sixteen months later he wrote disconsolately to his mother from the front in East Africa that "I would rather be in France than here". If only he had been a poet.
Richard Aldous is head of history and archives at UCD. He is the author of The Lion and The Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli (Hutchinson, 2006)
Tip & Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa By Edward Paice Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 488pp. £25 Finally, the first World War in Africa gets the historian it deserves