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Today it's taken for granted that people of all ethnic groups should be treated equally in the armed forces and elsewhere. But as Leslie Gordon Goffe writes, during World War One black officers in the British armed forces faced a system with prejudice at its core.
When war was declared in 1914, a Jamaican, David Louis Clemetson, was among the first to volunteer.
A 20-year-old law student at Cambridge University when war broke out, Clemetson was eager to show that he and others from British colonies like Jamaica - where the conflict in Europe had been dismissed by some as a "white man's war" - were willing to fight and die for King and Country.
He did die. Just 52 days before the war ended, he was killed in action on the Western Front.
Clemetson's first taste of combat was in 1916 on the Macedonian Front, in Salonika.
"It is as much like hell as anything you can think of," wrote a soldier who served alongside the Jamaican.
On the frontline for eight months, under constant bombardment by big guns and badly traumatised by "shell-shock", or what's now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, Clemetson, a 2nd lieutenant, was evacuated to a military hospital in Malta.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31796542
When war was declared in 1914, a Jamaican, David Louis Clemetson, was among the first to volunteer.
A 20-year-old law student at Cambridge University when war broke out, Clemetson was eager to show that he and others from British colonies like Jamaica - where the conflict in Europe had been dismissed by some as a "white man's war" - were willing to fight and die for King and Country.
He did die. Just 52 days before the war ended, he was killed in action on the Western Front.
Clemetson's first taste of combat was in 1916 on the Macedonian Front, in Salonika.
"It is as much like hell as anything you can think of," wrote a soldier who served alongside the Jamaican.
On the frontline for eight months, under constant bombardment by big guns and badly traumatised by "shell-shock", or what's now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, Clemetson, a 2nd lieutenant, was evacuated to a military hospital in Malta.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31796542
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