This is me dressed up as Pudsey The Bear at The NTDF AGM Annual General Meeting in September 2017 seven years ago when I was thirty one when I was younger. This photo was took in Susan Proctor’s room and Liz Turnbull took the photo at the time.

America sent almost 400,0000 black soldiers to Europe. In 1914 the barriers to black advancement were scarcely less formidable than they had been just after the abolition of slavery. They were hemmed in by complex legislation confirming their status as ‘ separate but equal’. In fact these laws based voting rights on property and education condemning the blacks to permanent inequality.

When war broke out black leaders hoped that service would dissolve prejudice and segregation. Far from it. In places such as Spartanburg, South Carolina there were riots at the presence of Black Yankees in training. The men and their black officers were allocated to labour battalions and given menials chores. There were no black artillary officers and no black pilots. On arrival in France segregation was imposed no black was allowed to speak to a French woman and French officers were told not to meet blacks ‘ outside the requirements of military service’

Yet the black soldiers fought as bravely as whites. Several hundred received the French Croix de Guerre but none received the Medal of Honour from their own country. At home their contribution to the war effort vanished utterly beneath renewed waves of oppression. Wilson had won the support of those few blacks with political influence in 1912, saying that he wished to see ‘Justice done to coloured people’. And in this Fourteen Points he asserted a right to self determination. It was one of the ironies of history that 10 per cent of his own population had to wait another 40 years before they had any hope of benefiting from those ideals.

Until 1917 America remained neutral, but many of her citizens did not. Over 100 of them joined the 10000 strong French Foreign Legion in 1914 some of the 32000 foreign volunteers who joined the French and British including 1000 Germans opposed to their own countrys aims.

In the ranks of the Legionnaires Fighting with the British on the Somme was the Havard graduate and poet Alan Seegar who wrote one of the best known poems.

I have a rendezvous with Death on some scarred slope or battered hill, when spring comes round again this year and the first meadow flowers appear.

Death kept that rendezvous. Seegar dies in a shell hole on the Somme on July 4th 1916.

Hundreds of American volunteers found a role whenever they could. Dillwyn Parish Starr from Philadelphia served as an ambulance driver with the French before transferring to armoured cars at Gallipoli. At 32 as a lieutenant in the British Guards regiment he was killed on the Western Front in September 1916. On November 23rd 1917 a plane was shot down over Bourlon Wood during the battle of Cambrai. The pilot was an American Lieutenant A. Griggs serving with an Australian Squadron that formed part of the Britains Royal Flying Corps. When Winston Churchill on a visit to the Ypres salient in 1918 came across Henry Butters from San Francisco who was a second Lieutenant with the royal artillary he asked him how he had managed to be enlisted. Buttere replied candidly ” I just lied to them and said I was British born”