How the Empire saved an outgunned, outmanned Britain in The Great War

YOU MAY not have heard of Lance Corporal Grunshi. He was the first soldier in British service to fi re a shot in the First World War.

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The lance corporal was a thoroughly excellent chap who went on to win a brace of medals for bravery but the remarkable thing about Alhaji Grunshi’s gunnery on August 12, 1914, is where it occurred. 

Belgium? France? No, Togoland. When Britain went to war in 1914, the Empire went too, all 12 million square miles of it. The greatest empire in history girdled the globe from Australia to Zanzibar; it was so vast that the sun never set on its reaches and within its borders lived a quarter of the world’s population. Neither was British power limited to the admittedly generous portions of the world map coloured imperial red; from dots of coaling stations and ports, such as Gibraltar and Singapore, Britain projected metaphysical might and dispatched very tangible naval power.

All other things being equal, wars are won by the side with the money. India alone donated £146million to the war effort.

The world belonged to us. 

It was the global nature of Pax Britannica that put the “world” into the First World War and why Lance Corporal Grunshi was in action; he was sent from the British Gold Coast in West Africa on a raid into German Togoland next door. Unsurprisingly, given the extent of the British Empire, few corners of the planet were left in peace between 1914 and 1918, though Fanning Island must take the prize for the unlikeliest setting for war. In September 1914 the German cruiser Nu?rnberg put ashore a crew on the paradisiacal, British-owned Pacific coral atoll and blew up the cable office. 

Empire did more than make the Great War go global however; Empire enabled Britain to win. As Lord Kitchener caustically remarked about August 4, 1914: “No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous. They have no army and they have declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world.” 

Typical governmental parsimony and the old British distrust of the military, dating back to Cromwell’s musket-toting dictatorship, meant that the British Army in 1914 was tiny, totaling 247,500 men. The German regular army was 800,000-strong. One obvious solution to undermanning was to call up volunteers from the Empire, as well as from Britain herself. 

With battle declared, London called to the faraway countries and their populations, whether on tea plantations in Ceylon or the backstreets of Vancouver, answered with a resounding “yes”. The volunteering and service by imperial subjects was a phenomenon; in total 2.5 million men and women from the Empire bore arms, bandages, or spades for Britain in the Great War. 

Australia, one of the four self-governing Dominions (along with Canada, New Zealand and South Africa) of the Empire sent 300,000 men to France, of whom 180,000 became casualties. A distinct number of the colonials were men from the Outback and the prairie, tough men used to rough ways. Ideal raw material, then, for being soldiers. 

Emphatically, though, the Great War was not “a white man’s war” as 1,300,000 men from India volunteered, 30,000 men from South Africa, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland formed the South African Native Labour Contingent. When Britain needed to patrol the inland waterways of Mesopotamia, 1,700 Mauritians formed a labour battalion to keep the boats going. 

The Indian Corps made up half the attacking force at bloody, barbed wire-strewn Neuve Chapelle in France. Lance Corporal Grunshi’s Gold Coast Regiment took Togoland and men from Singapore and Hong Kong were in “Bull” Allenby’s Imperial Camel Corps when he took Jerusalem.

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Death was colour blind. In East Africa, a theatre where black troops were particularly heavily committed, disease proved as unmerciful as shot and shell and 100,000 perished. 

This willingness of imperial subjects to fight and die for the Mother Country requires a bit of explaining. After all, are empires not inherently unpopular, if not downright evil? 

For some colonials war service was simply a question of returning home because they were Brits who had emigrated. Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, for example, was made up of expats. Children of expats learned patriotism on their parent’s knee and like their mummy and daddy were bound by ties of kinship to Blighty. 

Everyone in the Empire imbibed patriotism at school, in village assemblies and during missionary meetings. Well aware of the positively intoxicating effect of seeing the Union Jack run up a flagpole, Whitehall and lobby groups in London like Lord Meath’s Empire Movement actively cultivated a sense of imperial identity, the “brotherhood” of Empire. 

The cultivation of imperial solidarity was starkly seen on Empire Day, an annual event which took place on May 24 (Queen Victoria’s birthday), when school children the length and breadth of Empire would salute the flag, sing God Save The Queen and listen to ripping yarns about Great Britons, headed by Nelson, Clive of India and Gordon of Khartoum. The beneficence of Empire was subtly underlined by a half-day holiday for a tea party. 

One enthusiastic Indian declared to his fellow countrymen: “We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire... our duty is clear: To do our best to support the British, to fight with our life and property.” He was Mahatma Gandhi, rather better known in his later incarnation as the leader of the struggle against British control of India.

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Of course, there was more to colonial volunteering than kinship, a sense of brotherhood and patriotism. One advert for Indian volunteers announced: “Very Little Danger! Good Pay!” Only half of that, alas, proved to be true. 

Some Indians looked to war to bring honour to their clan. Indar Singh, fighting on the Somme, wrote home: “I shall die arms in hand, wearing the warrior’s clothes. This is the most happy death anyone can die.” Above all, colonials saw the First World War like the British on their rainy island saw it: The war was a just crusade against an oppressive Teutonic regime. In the words of Gandhi himself, the British were fighting “a righteous cause for the good and glory of human dignity and civilisation”. 

Oh the irony, the irony. Worried by the way the USA and Germany were pulling ahead in the industrial league table, some British bigwigs had been convinced that the nation was suffering from “overstretch” due to the diversions of Empire. Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary, lamented: “The weary Titan [Britain] staggers under the too vast orb of its fate.” There was serious talk in London before the war about the advantages of dumping Empire. 

Fair enough, Empire did make a hell of a big target for an enemy, as the Germans discovered to their glee in 1914. The surface raiders Nurnberg and Emden played merry havoc among the shipping lanes to and fro Empire until the Royal Navy got its act together. In the building of Empire the British had put more than a few noses out of joint; the novelist John Buchan conjured a plot in his wartime thriller Greenmantle whereby Germany stoked an Islamic jihad to overthrow India, the jewel in the British imperial crown. Truth being stranger than fiction, it was discovered after the First World War that the Kaiser had tried to do exactly that. 

Weighed on the scales of historical reckoning though, Empire was an asset. Aside from human material, the Empire provided raw materials, be it the Caribbean rum that enlivened trench life on the Western Front, or the Trinidadian oil that made the petrol that fuelled army lorries. 


Such are the oddities of history that in fighting for Empire the colonies gained a self-consciousness that actually led to the dismantling of Empire. National identity is frequently forged by the tragic-but-heroic loss of blood on foreign fields. The English became the English at Agincourt in 1415; the Australians became the Australians at Gallipoli in 1915; the New Zealanders ditto; the Canadians became the Canadians at Vimy Ridge in 1917. 

The soldier who fired the first British shot of the Great War, Alhaji Grunshi, ended the war with promotion to regimental sergeant-major and the ribbons for the Distinguished Conduct Medal and Military Medal on his chest. There were 2.5 million Grunshis, men and women from Empire who served beleaguered Britain. What chance did Germany have against such people who came in such numbers?