Lesson video

Hi and welcome to our final lesson about what do the stories of the often forgotten armies reveal about the Western Front? This is my last lesson with you.

As you should know by now, I'm Miss Cusworth and today we're kind of bringing everything that we've learnt about together, together and having a go at answering this question.

So we've learnt so much about, hopefully you've learnt so much about the First World War, about the stories of these different often forgotten armies and we've started to think about, as each lesson's progressed, what it reveals about the Western Front and like I said, today we're going to be trying to bring all of that together.

So we focused on four main forgotten armies: the Indian soldiers and Ganga Singh, we looked at the Algerian soldiers and their experience with gas at the First Battle of Ypres, we looked at Native Canadian soldiers and more specifically about the story of Mike Mountain Horse and then we looked at Chinese labourers and their experiences of the Western Front.

So by the time we've looked at those stories, we've got to really the end of the war, if not after the war ended, if you remember when we looked at the Chinese Labour Corps, that often they stayed after 1918, many 'til 1920.

And I think we did this in one of the previous lessons where you looked at the story of the Chinese Labour Corps and so you might have this somewhere in your book and if you do, if you did this as an extension activity, I think it was two lessons ago, then take it out, find it and we're going to go through the answers.

If you didn't do this as the extension activity, I want you to take a moment to try and fill in these gaps now.

Try your best, we're going to go through the answers in a moment anyway, so don't worry if you can't get them all and I'm going to give you a few moments to do that, so pause the video, copy and complete this and I'll see you in a moment for some answers.

Okay, so hopefully you've done that.

If not, pause the video, I'm about to reveal the answers.

So what does the story of the Chinese Labour Corps reveal about the Western Front? The story of, and then hopefully this one was obvious, the Chinese Labour Corps reveals several things about the Western Front.

That the British didn't accept them until after the Battle of the Somme suggests how significant that battle was for shaping military strategy.

It also gives us an insight into the racist attitudes of the time.

We also see this when the Chinese Labour Corps was kept separate or segregated, sorry, and experienced racial prejudice.

So this, we're going to come back to this later, but what you have essentially done is you've written a paragraph that could contribute to your end of inquiry essay, if that's the option that you choose, there's going to be two other options for you later as well as the essay.

So well done for getting that paragraph, effectively a paragraph, written.

So we're going to go through each of the armies in turn in a moment, once I've made my self the right size and we're just going to write down really quickly, take a few moments to write down as much as possible that you can remember about the different stories.

So with Ganga Singh, I'm going to give you a few to get you started.

Think about where he fought, so we know that he fought at the First Battle of Ypres, think about where he travelled from, he travelled from the Punjab in what was then called British India.

Think about what his experience was, maybe his experience of fighting, think about at that point in the war, were they in big trench warfare? Was there stalemate? So I would like you to take, I would say maybe just two minutes to write down as much as you can about Ganga Singh and then unpause the video and we'll go on to the next soldier.

Okay, welcome back.

So I gave you a couple of suggestions of things you might want to write down before, you've probably got loads of other ones, maybe about the fact that he, his bayonet snapped and he carried on fighting, that he received the Indian Order of Merit, that when he was fighting, Ypres, we could see from that photo we looked at, the town of Ypres hadn't been completely destroyed as it was later on.

You've probably got loads of other really great ideas written down too.

So let's think then about the Algerian soldiers.

They were fighting a little bit later but very, well in the same place as Ganga Singh in the Second Battle of Ypres.

Think about what they experienced that was the first time that that thing was used successfully on the Western Front and anything else you can remember about them or their experiences.

Pause the video, write it down and I would say again, take two minutes or as long as you need to get every, all of the ideas down into your head on to a piece of paper.

What can you remember about the Algerian soldiers? Okay, welcome back.

So maybe you had written down about the chlorine gas, about the fact that that had actually been banned before the war, so think about maybe what that reveals to us about the Western Front, that the two sides were so desperate to break the stalemate that they were willing to use banned chemical weapons like chlorine gas, you might have a different interpretation of that, that's fine too.

You might have thought about the fact that there was that French soldier, do you remember? Who wrote down about the Algerian soldiers, how he didn't necessarily understand what they were saying but that they seemed thoroughly scared of the gas, which was understandable because of how dangerous it was to the people who inhaled it, what it did to their lungs, how it temporarily blinded them.

Maybe thinking about how that would have felt psychologically, the impact of that experience on the people who survived, as well as seeing their, their comrades, their kind of other men they'd served with, maybe their really good friends, dying of this gas attack.

These two experiences of Ganga Singh and Algerian soldiers, we looked, both of them, at language and maybe even that there were language barriers sometimes between troops that had been brought from the empire and the European leaders who were often in charge and commanding them.

So then we looked at the Chinese Labourers, maybe we'll go and we'll do this one first and we'll think about what their story reveals.

So you might think about how they were treated maybe a little bit differently or their experience of war and what they were doing was a little bit different to, for example, the Algerian soldiers or Ganga Singh and so as before, pause the video, write down on your piece of paper or in your exercise book anything that you can remember about the Chinese Labour Corps.

When you've got all the ideas out of your head, unpause the video.

Okay, welcome back.

So you might have written down about the tanks and how they became really skilled at tank maintenance and what that revealed about the Western Front becoming or increasingly reliant on technology.

You might have written about how they were segregated and how that was maybe revealing of attitudes towards different countries or different races of people.

You might have written that they actually stayed on the Western Front longer than some other troops, that when the war ended in 1918, they were asked to stay because obviously there would've been a huge amount of work to do clearing up and from such a large war that had gone on for a number of years, so maybe that reveals the kind of impact that the war had on the Western Front after 1918, after the war officially ended.

You might have had loads of really intelligent things written down and well done if you had something that I haven't mentioned.

Let's go back to Mike Mountain Horse.

So this is an image here of him in his Army uniform.

We also saw a really beautiful image of him wearing more, I suppose you'd call it traditional dress and he signed up, you'll remember, for a very particular reason and I want you to think about why he signed up, what can you remember about that? And then anything you can remember about his experiences, what battles he fought in, what he might have seen and what, who he was with and maybe what they did.

What did we read about who he was with? So as before, I'll ask you to pause the video and then when you're ready and you've written down everything that you can remember, we'll unpause and we can go through some suggestions.

Okay, welcome back.

So you might have talked about how Mike's brother, Albert, had signed up, how he was at the Second Battle of Ypres, how he was affected, Albert was affected by the poison gas, how he later died and Mike, in his sort of memoirs, said he'd signed up partly to kind of get revenge on the fact that his brother was killed really as a result of the war.

You might have talked about how he was with George Strangling Wolf and how he'd cut a piece of flesh and buried it in Northern France in an attempt to stay safe and to be protected and we talked about how that reveals that there were lots of different cultures that existed on the Western Front in really quite a small area, people of different races who spoke different languages, who had different cultures, different religions and sometimes that's, I think, maybe forgotten a bit about the Western Front, just how diverse a group of people were there.

We also talked about Mike Mountain Horse being at the Battle of Cambrai and the tanks and the fact that that was the first mass tank attack, so on the Western Front and that links him in to the story of the Chinese Labour Corps, to some extent.

So we've got our five questions to answer and these are all getting you ready then, to kind of bring all of your knowledge together.

You'll notice that these questions aren't necessarily about a specific army, they're often bringing in your knowledge of the four different groups or people that we have studied.

So the first one is when was the First World War, what were the dates? Name four places or the four places that our forgotten armies came from.

Think about whose story reveals the importance of technology on the Western Front and it might be more than one person or group.

Whose story reveals the psychological impact of war? Again, it might be more than one.

What do all of our forgotten armies reveal about the Western Front? So as usual, you want to pause the video here and then press play when you're ready to go through some suggested answers.

Okay, welcome back.

Hopefully you got this one, 1914 to 1918 or you might have put it in a full sentence and been a bit more specific.

Well done, give yourself a tick if you put that.

Four places: India, Algeria, Canada and China or perhaps you did a good job and you put it in a full sentence.

Now this one, I feel like you could've had several different answers.

I put Algerian soldiers and Chinese Labour Corps and I did that because it focused on the gas and you could also have then had in here Mike and Albert Mountain Horse.

Albert suffered from the gas at the Second Battle of Ypres and the story of Mike Mountain Horse, so Albert's brother, and then the Chinese Labour Corps, I felt like revealed the increasing use of tanks on the Western Front.

Any of those answers or any of those stories if you mentioned them, give yourself a tick.

The psychological impact of war, maybe you've just put Mike Mountain Horse.

We talked about his experience of losing his brother, Albert, and his sort of feelings of maybe grief and he's talked about revenge, getting revenge but I feel like maybe we saw the psychological impact in all of the stories.

With Mike we saw it with the death of his brother, Ganga Singh and Algerian soldiers, we could maybe imagine the traumatic exp, the trauma that was, they had from their experiences.

Perhaps we don't have something written from them and so we're sort of inferring, inferring from their experiences, particularly from the gas attack but also Ganga Singh and maybe not having officers nearby who he could understand or could understand him.

Finally we saw the graves of the Chinese labourers who were killed in barroom fights and those deaths that were partly caused by shell-shock, so again, thinking about the sort of psychological impact of war, we see it in the Chinese labourers' story.

And then it was trying to bring together maybe one thing that all of the stories had in common and so an acceptable answer is that like, different people fought and what I mean by that is people from different backgrounds or different places all fought on the Western Front.

Being a bit more detailed, you might have written something like, what all of our forgotten armies stories reveal about the Western Front is that it was a much more multicultural place than often imagined.

Through their stories, we also get an insight into the impact of empire on who fought on the Western Front, of changing technology, war's psychological impact and military strategy.

So bringing in those themes, do you remember in those tables that we've done together? Bringing in those themes to your answer.

Now the kind of main purpose of this lesson is to try and answer that question, what do the stories of the often forgotten armies reveal about the Western Front? And here I'm going to give you three options.

So I'm going to give you the option of a worksheet, the option of a timeline and the option of an essay.

Now the worksheet one, lots of you will maybe be doing this at home and won't have a printer, in which case, don't stress about the worksheet.

I know lots of people don't have printers at home, so don't stress about the worksheet, that's just an option maybe if you're doing this in school or if you're doing it at home and you do have a printer.

The timeline you don't need a printer for, anyone can do.

Same with the essay.

So with the worksheet, you can access it on the website and it's using the map that we've looked at lots of times and where the different groups served to just write down as much detail as possible around them, thinking and focusing on what their stories reveal, what their stories show us.

Another option is a timeline and I just did this with two different coloured pens and I drew out a timeline of the war and you can go back and you can use the timeline that I've shown you a couple of times at the beginning of the lesson.

I put down some, a kind of piece of information and then I thought about what it revealed.

So I did this one for you and I said Chinese Labour Corps finally leave Western Front, reveals although war ended in 1918, it affected the area or people for some time afterwards and you might want to then copy out this one, the one that I've kind of made for you and then fill it all in and you might want to think about Ganga Singh and he fought in the First Battle of Ypres and what that revealed.

Final option is an essay and you might want to write an introduction, it's optional but an introduction to explain why we are studying the often forgotten armies and then you could do maybe like three paragraphs.

Two different ways of structuring those paragraphs or what you include in them, one way is one paragraph per army, so you might want to do four paragraphs, one paragraph per army or you might want to do three, focus on the three that you feel like you know the most about and talk about the army and what their story reveals or you could do a paragraph per theme, so you might want to have one paragraph on the psychological impact of war and then bring in any story that's appropriate as evidence.

You can choose whichever you think works best for you, whether it's the worksheet, the timeline, the essay.

I would really like you to have a go at bringing everything together and answering this question.

And maybe you can think about using the example paragraph that we kind of did together at the beginning of the lesson because this is what I mean when I'm talking about a paragraph, this is a paragraph about the Chinese Labour Corps, you could then do one about Ganga Singh or one about Mike Mountain Horse and those would be the three paragraphs, if you were to write the essay.

So I'm really confident that you'll be able to have a go at this.

Give it a go, if it doesn't work out, no worries.

So whether you have a go at the essay or maybe the worksheet or the timeline, if you would like to, I would love it if you would share some of your work with Oak National.

So if you would like to, please ask your parent or carer or whoever you, an adult that you live at home with, to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and then make sure you tag Oak National, so we can see it and the hashtag #LearnWithOak.

So this is the end of the lesson.

Make sure whatever of those three options that you take, that you complete the end of lesson quiz to check your understanding.

It's been a real pleasure to have these lessons with you, to share the stories of these often forgotten armies, to think about their experiences of the Western Front and maybe about what their stories reveal to us.

All right, see you soon, bye.