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It turned out that German officials in this part of Africa had a more developed sense of playing the game than the British, even when they discovered that their telegraph link across Nyasaland had been cut. Three days after the strike on the Wissmann, Webb’s counterpart on the German shoreline sent him a message by runner:

Thanks to your extreme kindness in preventing the forwarding of despatches into our Colony, I am not clear whether England is at war with Germany or not … If you therefore wish to attack our province, I must most courteously remark that we are prepared to greet you in a somewhat unfriendly fashion. The position decidedly needs clearing up and therefore I beg you most politely and urgently to let me have a clear answer.*

The war in Africa – such as it was – does not bulk large in the memory of the British, who, like most northern Europeans, see the First World War through a periscope poked over the trenches of Flanders, across a vast expanse of mud, barbed wire and mangled bodies. They see an armageddon in which industrialized killing destroyed tens of thousands in very small areas. But it was also an imperial war, triggered by an act of rebellion against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, envisaged by Germany as a way of destroying the British Empire, used by the French to augment their empire and delivering the last rites to the Ottoman Empire. ‘Take me back to dear old Blighty,’ sang the British soldiers wading through the mud, ‘put me on the train to London town.’ How many of them knew that ‘Blighty’ had come into the army from an Urdu word originally meaning ‘foreign’?* Great numbers of the empire soldiers who fought for the British had never set eyes on Blighty and never would. The British had been very quick at deploying them, though: within three months of the shot which killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and set off the war, Indian troops were being disembarked in Marseilles, to be transported north in support of the British Expeditionary Force. Of the 8.5 million troops who served in the British forces of the First World War, about a third were not British at all. Canada sent over 600,000 men. In Australia, the leader of the opposition Labor party invited a massive crowd in the town of Colac, Victoria, to think about what he called ‘the Mother Country’ and declared, ‘Australians will … help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.’ Over 400,000 of his countrymen joined the imperial forces. Calculated per head of population, however, the most remarkable contribution came from New Zealand – 129,000 men, representing over half of those eligible for service.

But the largest of all empire contributions came from India, whose total of 1.4 million was bigger than the sum of soldiers from Scotland, Wales and Ireland combined. British army movement orders listed the 51st Sikhs, the 28th Dogras or the 74th Punjabis alongside battalions made up of farm boys from Somerset or pals from industrial Manchester. Advertising posters at home drew the Indians in with promises – ‘Easy Life! Lots of Respect! Very Little Danger! Good Pay!’ – which inevitably turned out to fall very far short of reality. But Gandhi believed those who signed up had moral right on their side, too. ‘We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire,’ he said, ‘our duty is clear: to do our best to support the British, to fight with our life and property.’ Sixty-four thousand of the Indians died, a further 67,000 were wounded.

German empire-envy was well known. The Kaiser had dreamed of destroying British power by igniting a holy war, for example, which would spread to the empire’s huge numbers of Muslim subjects. ‘Our consuls in Turkey, in India,’ he scribbled in the margin of a diplomatic telegram, ‘must fire the whole Mohammedan world to fierce rebellion against this hated, lying, conscienceless nation of shopkeepers, for if we are to bleed to death, England shall at least lose India.’ This notion of a jihad which would expel the British from India had been a