Heterosexuality In The Western Front

Although brothel visits usually involved encounters between a man and a woman, they often divide themselves by whose perspective they focus on. The final category analyzes little of the prostitutes own thoughts or emotions during these liaisons, but rather the men. Many members of the BEF kept their own personal journals in which they recorded their experiences along and behind the Western Front in France. Despite extramarital sex being a hushed topic, some soldiers still felt comfortable enough to write about the brothels they observed or visited, these sources are the main focus of historians who study the male heterosexuality of the BEF. As the WWI broke out, it became abundantly clear that the war would not be won without the aid from the British and French colonies. Begrudgingly the British Army accepted the aid from their supposedly inferior brethren. The first Indian troops were sent to France in 1914 at Marseille. The soldiers sent from India were the only non-white colonial forces which served as combatants along the Western Front, rather than in labor battalions. The racial tension between British and Indian combatants was palpable, and British Command was wary
about allowing Indian soldiers to intermingle with European women. Jeffrey Greenhut is keen to point out this strenuous relationship in his writing, claiming that;
The British attitude toward the relationship between white women and Indian men was expressed as a concern with this same British prestige. Cognizant that their rule in India rested upon that delicate reality, the governing classes, both civilian and military, believed that an integral part of that prestige was the high status they wanted Indians to accord to white women.

Maintaining an image of prestige to the Indian colonists was of the utmost importance to the British Empire, and France’s masions tolérées created an obstacle for them. Greenhut points out that while the British were busy attempting to prevent any sort of intermingling between white women and Indian troops, the French openly allowed their Africans troops the same privileges as their own combatants. The identity crisis occurring among the BEF was originating from the arrival of dominion combatants, who were now for the first time being exposed to poor white Europeans. The British Army became overprotective and possibly even insecure of their own identity, going out of their way to try and prevent the Indian Corps from conversing or having sexual liaisons with the local women in France. They instituted curfews, and harsh, albeit infrequent punishments on those who did not return to their barracks on time. The presence of the Indian Corps posed a direct threat to the image of the Britain, it was of vital importance to maintaining of the British Empire as a whole to project an image of honor, and glory to these troops, while hiding the blemishes of their society. Philippa Levine also falls under the category of historians who stress the importance of cross-racial encounters among the BEF and Dominion troops.
Levine holds similar beliefs to Greenhut in that the presence of the Indian Corps posed a threat to the image of the British Empire, but extends her argument beyond solely the Indian Expeditionary Force. Levine defines identity as:
The linking of race and gender (too often dubbed as “social” categories) to imperialism - generally regarded as a “political” category - demands attention to the specifics of the historical time frame … The widespread fears around the hopes of controlling sexually transmissible diseases made prostitution a laboratory for medical surveillance; gender and class made the prostitute a vulnerable if not always obedient
subject.

To Levine, race and gender are not social categories, but rather constructs which are directly related and interpreted by imperialism. The injection of colonial troops into France directly altered the sex trade in the country, and the BEF’s machismo over their once believed inferior subjects. While the BEF struggled to survive off their meager earnings, their colonial counterparts who received a larger paycheck had the luxury of frequenting maisons tolérées. This disrupted the delicate balance of social hierarchy and masculinity of the British Empire as discussed above with Greenhut’s argument.