Neck hairs tingle to attention as a quartet of buglers sounds the nightly Last Post at the imposing Menin Gate cenotaph, in Ypres, Belgium. As the haunting notes echo through the mausoleum - as they have done every night since the ceremony began in 1928 (with the exception of the second-world-war years) - the horror of what happened on the nearby Flanders Fields during the first world war crystallises in the imagination. Several of the 300 or so remembrance tourists present dab their eyes with tissues as they observe the ritual two minutes' silence.
Then, exiting, some stop to read again the names, ranks and regiments of the young men who paid the ultimate price but have no grave. The names of soldiers from Britain and her Commonwealth are listed on the white granite panels of the memorial; Indian names engraved on the southwest pillar, surnames from South Africa, the West Indies and other far- flung nations elsewhere.
Missing, though, are Chinese names.
It's a little-known fact that 140,000 Chinese served on the Western Front between 1917 and 1919, shoring up and digging trenches, burying the dead (Chinese labourers buried German flying ace the Red Baron), working in munitions factories and cleaning up the shells, grenades and bullets after the November 11, 1918 armistice - the day the guns fell silent. In one incident, 500 Chinese drowned on their way to the Western Front. The French ship transporting them was sunk by a German torpedo.
With the Allies facing a severe manpower shortage after three years of fighting, the French and British launched recruitment drives in their concession ports in China, most of which were in Shandong province. Many signed up in British-run Weihaiwai (Weihai), which was also known as Port Edward.
The French recruited 40,000 Chinese peasants and interpreters as a rag-tag legion of basic workers but the British formed the 100,000-strong Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) and ran it along military lines. With a promise of higher pay than their Shandong fields could ever yield - plus a guarantee they wouldn't work in danger zones - tens of thousands of Chinese peasants lined up to board crowded ships bound for Europe via the Pacific, North America (which was traversed by train) and the Atlantic.
'It was told tonight in the mess that the coolies do not know and do not question where they are going,' recorded Daryl Klein, a second lieutenant in the CLC in January 1918. 'Having been assured that they are not going into action on the Western Front, they set out lightheartedly, as men on some fine adventure, not caring about their destination so long as they are fed and clothed,' he wrote in his notes.
