The army that sat preparing its weapons and unloading its stores in Marseilles in 1914 was a direct product of this complex history and system of classification. It was made up only of men from the martial races and dominated by soldiers from the clans and hill tribes of the Punjab – Sikhs and Muslims – and Gurkhas from semi-autonomous Nepal. There were also Pashtuns, warriors from the lawless and infamously ungovernable tribal regions that still span the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, whose fathers and grandfathers had once determinedly fought the British.
While the martial-races theory explains the ethnic composition of the Indian Corps, the culture that existed within the army was a product of other lessons learnt since 1857. Eventually the British did examine the Mutiny and its causes with a degree of self-criticism and self-awareness. Perhaps as powerful as the urge to disarm and marginalize the ‘disloyal’ ethnic groups within the Indian Army was a determination never to repeat the shoddy cultural insensitivity and bureaucratic carelessness that had underlain the Mutiny.
The Indian Expeditionary Force that came to France was thus to be a unique cultural institution. It was a force in which every British officer was a career soldier, who lived in India on a semi-permanent basis. Each British officer was expected to learn the languages of the men under his command and to do so to a high level. Respect for the religions of India was now central to innumerable aspects of the force, and the army accommodated prayers and holy festivals of men from all the major religious groups of India. Even amid the extreme conditions that prevailed on the Western Front, Willcocks ensured that his Muslim troops were able to observe Ramadan, while his Sikhs received 3,000 sets of bracelets and religious daggers, specially made for them in Sheffield.28 The sensitivities around diet were also meticulously adhered to. Horace Grant’s photographs of the Marseilles encampments show men newly arrived cooking chapatti bread on the racecourse, as well as sacks of flour and giant brass storage pots which held dhal (lentils) and ghee (butter). To provide the men with meat, British Army quartermasters set out to buy thousands of goats – an animal whose meat offended neither Hindu nor Muslim. When it was calculated that to feed the Indian Corps on goat meat for just a few months would require the slaughter of most of the goats of southern France, a British mission was dispatched to neutral Spain and to Corsica, to buy up thousands of goats. The French government agreed to waive import duties. A grateful soldier of the Indian Corps wrote that ‘animals intended for the food of Sikhs are slaughtered by a Sikh by a stroke of a sword on the back of the neck, and those intended for Muslims, by a Muslim in the lawful way, by cutting the throat. Our [employers have] made the most satisfactory arrangements.’29
Culturally, this was an army in which there was a degree of mutual respect and cooperation between the races, and between white officers, Indian officers and men. It had a powerful esprit de corps, and the British sense of nationalism and loyalty sat relatively comfortably along the Indian notion of Izzat – an Urdu word meaning honour and reputation, of both soldier and family. The status of families in their home villages and towns could be built on the service records of their sons. The martial-races theory had, to some extent, been internalized by the favoured tribes, who came to identify themselves as warrior peoples too, for whom military prowess and martial honour were essential expressions of their ethnic identity. Indian soldiers who served in the First World War expressed repeatedly in their letters the desire to prove their loyalty and demonstrate their military skill. Many (but not all) regarded courageous war service as their manifest duty. As men who had ‘tasted the king’s salt’ – enjoyed the wages and the comforts of military service – they were now expected to pay with their service and their blood. The army reforms after 1857 coupled the concept of Izzat with the idea of empire and the ‘king-emperor’. Indian soldiers in their letters repeatedly referred to ‘our government’ and the need to show loyalty to it. Others mentioned the awe and reverence they had felt in the physical presence of the king-emperor during his visit to their camps in December 1914. Recalling the effect of George V’s visit to India for the Grand (Delhi) Durbar of 1911 – the lavish ceremony to mark the king-emperor’s recent coronation and to witness confirmations of India’s loyalty – Willcocks felt that:
Men who had never dreamed of seeing their Emperor in person, saw him with their own eyes, knew him to be a living entity, and went away feeling themselves sharers in an unequalled Empire. It is not too much to say that the King’s visit did more to bind to the Throne in loyal bonds the Indian Army than any triumphs won by the greatest of India’s former Emperors. Only those who know India and its people, and know them well, can understand the magnitude of the event.30
Bound together by these shared memories, sentiments and traditions, the Indian Corps of 1914 was a well-ordered, cohesive and self-confident institution; what it was not, though, was an army materially prepared for industrial war.
The immediate military effectiveness of the Indian Corps as it arrived in Marseilles was undermined by a scarcity of equipment, in part a consequence of the speed of its deployment. September and October 1914 were, thankfully, unusually warm, and the fact that the Indians were still wearing their thin tropical uniforms was not an immediate problem. Attempts to equip them with warmer winter kit at Marseilles were incomplete. The Gurkhas were issued with woollen vests, but other units left Marseilles with little in the way of new clothing. There were other, potentially more serious, problems with equipment, and here the Indian Corps was the victim of history. Ever since 1857 the British had ensured that the Indian Army was always one generation behind in weaponry. However, on arrival at Marseilles the Indian troops were ordered to hand in the older rifles with which they had fought the whole of their careers – the Mark II Lee-Enfield – and were re-equipped with the latest Mark III models, weapons of the same pattern as the rest of the British Army. The new rifles had a more sophisticated sighting system and were more powerful. These were small differences, which the highly skilled marksmen of the Indian Corps could master; but adjusting to them would require a little time and practice. The plan was to give the Indians several weeks to train with their new weapons, and Horace Grant’s panoramas show clusters of men undergoing rifle drill. His more intimate portraits show Sikh troops sitting on the grass, examining their new Lee-Enfields and surrounded by neat stacks of the rifles. However the growing emergency at the front meant that some units of the Indian Corps were to be thrown into battle with weapons of which they had almost no experience; some fired them for the first time at living German targets.
ORLÉANS STATION, OCTOBER 1914. The platforms of Orléans Station are crowded with tall stacks of ammunition cases, watched over by Sikh guards. Mules, horses and artillery pieces are unloaded from long trains, as Indian and British soldiers work together to transfer war materials from railway wagons to mule carts and army trucks. Until this month, only the inhabitants of Marseilles have witnessed the Indian Corps at first hand. But now the scale and complexity of their deployment can be witnessed by the engine drivers, conductors, and platform workers of the French national railways. By day and night, in tiny provincial stations, smoky marshalling yards, echoing platforms and goods depots, the railwaymen of France peer into steamy carriages, catching sight of exotic uniforms and unfamiliar faces. They catch snatches of foreign languages and the smells of unknown foods.31 Since the outbreak of war in August they have grown accustomed to the armies of their own empire – the men from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, Berbers and Tuaregs, in short red tunics and voluminous blue trousers, others wearing white headdresses. They have met the ‘Black Guard Dogs of Empire’, the French West African Tirailleurs Sénégalais, tall and thin men wearing red fezzes. But Les Hindous of the Lahore Division, wearing British uniforms and now heading north from Marseilles to Orléans in their thousands, are an even more exotic and unfamiliar sight. Between the railhead and their new, temporary, camps the Indians receive another rapturous welcome, as the people of Orléans line the main boulevards i
n crowds three- and four-deep.
Accompanying them until mid-October is photographer Horace Grant, who creates a photographic record of their march to war – photos that have an immediacy, informality and poignant detachment of a later era: an Indian officer, with an open face and a self-conscious smile, holds a bouquet of flowers given him by one of the townswomen; the same officer, bouquet still in hand, passes a group of schoolgirls who have been excused from their lessons, the little girls in white frilled dresses, the younger girls held aloft by the older ones, huddled together and waving energetically, their expressions a mixture of excitement and wide-eyed curiosity; women in long Edwardian dresses standing in doorways, wicker baskets on their arms, offer fruit to the passing Indians; a line of Indian troops march past a throng of French soldiers – older, portly men in uniform, most probably reservists – who eagerly shake the hands of the tall thin Sikhs, all smiling warmly and laughing at the strangeness of their sudden proximity. One of the last photographs shows two columns of Sikh troops marching away from camera, up a wide French country avenue.
On 18 October, the Lahore Division will board trains from Orléans to be rushed north to their assembly points at Arques and Blendecques, in Nord Pas-de-Calais.
On 19 October 1914, as the Indian Corps were moving north, the fighting that was to coalesce into the First Battle of Ypres had already begun. British forces, badly depleted and having suffered heavy casualties, were outnumbered by the Germans two-to-one: fourteen German divisions to seven British.*3 The British sector consisted of a series of trenches, outposts and ad hoc defensive positions in a bulge around the Belgian town, which was just a few miles behind the fluid front line. To the north were the desperate remnants of the Belgian Army, about 60,000 men. To the south were the French.
On 22 October, four days shy of a month since the Castilia and the Mongara had docked at Marseilles, the first Indian units arrived at the front, driven there by a fleet of red London buses, still emblazoned with advertisements for ‘Buchanans Black and White Whisky’ and ‘Carters’ Liver Pills’. Later that day, they entered the line between the villages of Messines and Wijtschate (Wytschaete), to the south of Ypres.32 ‘Asia had dropped into Europe,’ wrote General Willcocks later, adding:
…the descendants of Timour, of Guru Govind, of the ancient Hindus, had come to fight the Huns on the historic plains of Flanders. Seventy miles in a direct line from us lay the immortal field of Waterloo; seventy-five miles away were the cliffs of Dover. The man must have been carved out of wood who would not have rejoiced at his good fortune; the heart atrophied that did not beat the faster at the thought that he was given a chance, however humble, of taking his share in the greatest conflict of all times.
To the frustration of Willcocks, the Indian soldiers were not deployed as a unified force to defend a sector of their own, but rather thrown into battle piecemeal wherever they were needed. The first to see action were the 57th Wilde’s Rifles, who were sent to hold the lines developing around Wijtschate, on one of the low ridges to the east of Ypres upon which the defence of the whole sector rested. Although only about 150 feet above sea level at their highest, these innocuous features in an otherwise drab and monotonous landscape were critical to British hopes of halting the German advance. If the ridges were captured, then Ypres itself could not be effectively defended, and if Ypres were to fall the Channel ports were at risk – a prospect that would spell disaster.
The fighting around Ypres in October and November 1914 was, however, not yet trench warfare. The lines consisted of isolated strongpoints, machine-gun emplacements and improvised slit trenches, hastily scratched into the wet Flanders mud. There were dangerous gaps between the strongpoints or beyond the sweep of the defending machine guns. The potential for the enemy to outflank or slip between positions was ever present. At times, German attacks came across whole sectors of the front and threatened to simply overwhelm the defenders; at others, the Germans launched targeted offensives aimed at specific objectives, on a narrow front. The whole area was within the range of the German guns, and hour by hour the ancient town of Ypres, with its Cloth Hall and ramparts, was being pounded into rubble.
A platoon of the 57th Wilde’s Rifles was photographed on the edge of Wijtschate on 22 October – dug in, along an avenue still lined with undamaged trees, the buildings behind intact with even their windows unbroken. Civilians can be seen loitering outside the ‘Nieuw Staenyzer’ Inn, a landmark that still ‘exists’ today; like the rest of the village the present version is a simulacrum of the original, for Wijtschate was obliterated by the war. Captured and recaptured, it was shelled to dust and mud over the course of four years. The men of the 57th Rifles were among the last troops to see Wijtschate as an intact and pristine settlement. By the standards of later defences, their improvised position hardly qualified as a trench; they were lined up in what is little more than a narrow ditch, the earth from their meagre excavations piled up to form a forward parapet, on which they rested their rifles. The photographs show smiling faces and clean uniforms. A British officer wears a turban held on his head by a non-regulation chin-strap: while the white officers were expected to learn native languages and immerse themselves in the cultures of their men, clearly they were not required to master the near-miraculous art of wrapping a turban. With trees still in leaf, the Indians’ thin khaki drill uniforms do not yet seem out of place, despite the coming winter.
It was on 22 October, too, that the first Indian soldier to fall in the First War World was killed, in the Ypres sector. The name of Naik Laturia from the Punjab is one of the 54,896 etched on the walls of the Menin Gate in Ypres, the memorial for those whom, as the dedication reads, ‘the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death’.33 Eight days later, the 57th Rifles with the 129th Baluchis (who had entered the line on 23 October) were subject to an intense German bombardment, followed by a determined assault on their positions. One company of the Rifles was decimated by German machine guns; in another company there was only one survivor, Jemadar Ram Singh, who was badly wounded. The 129th Baluchis suffered comparable losses. The ground into which they dug their positions was so heavily waterlogged that their fox-holes filled up with water. Only by adding parapets were they able to find anything approaching proper protection from enemy fire; but there was, as yet, no barbed wire to prevent the positions being rushed by determined attackers.
The German forces confronting the Indian Corps had both artillery support and hand-grenades; the Baluchis had little of the former and none of the latter. The Indian Corps learned how to resort to improvised grenades made out of jam tins filled with dynamite. General Willcocks was well aware of the disadvantages under which his troops were fighting:
…our men had to face mortars, hand-grenades, high explosive shell, and a hundred other engines or contrivances of war, with which they themselves were not provided. Here were these gallant fellows just arrived and exposed to every form of terror, and they could reply only with their valour and the rifles and two machine-guns per battalion with which they were armed, and yet they did it.34
The list of medals and commendations presented to the Indian Corps by the end of 1914, alongside the equally long list of casualties, speaks of the intensity of the fighting. Outnumbered at every turn, they desperately held onto their allocated positions. In one engagement, Havildar (Sergeant) Ganga Singh of the 57th Rifles killed five German soldiers (some accounts say six) with his bayonet, until it finally broke in two; he then fought on with a sword until he collapsed, wounded. Incredibly, he was later found alive when the trenches he had so ferociously defended were re-taken by the 5th Dragoon Guards. On 31 October the 129th Baluchis were in the line near the village of Hollebeke, another of the tiny settlements that blocked the road to Ypres. Two isolated Indian machine-gun crews faced down a German attack. After one gun was put out of action by artillery fire and the crew killed, Sepoy Khudadad Khan kept the last gun firing, until his position was overrun and all his c
omrades killed. Khan was severely wounded and only survived by hiding under a pile of bodies and crawling back to his regiment after nightfall. He was evacuated to England for treatment and awarded the Victoria Cross, the first Indian soldier to receive the highest military honour. It is today on display in Khan’s home village, Dab (Chakwal), in Pakistan.
Towards the end of November, the rumble of artillery bombardment faded and the sounds that echoed across the flooded fields of Flanders were those of digging and hammering as hundreds of thousands of men shored up, extended, deepened and reinforced trenches. The end of the First Battle of Ypres was bought about by the onset of winter as well as by the physical and material exhaustion of the armies. The British lines had held, and German efforts to break through had been thwarted – but at a terrible cost. The Indian Corps were now holding ten miles of the twenty-five-mile British sector. With no flank left to turn there was – literally – no room for manoeuvre. Willcocks concluded that the Indians had suffered a ‘toll as heavy as the British units had to pay, and yet comparatively it was heavier, because it was taken from men who had had no opportunity of realising what it was all about’.35 In Parliament, the Under Secretary of State for India, Charles Roberts, acknowledged the Indian contribution to both the stabilization of the front in Europe and the war elsewhere, telling the House: ‘we have warmly to recognise the substantial help which is being afforded to the Empire by the appearance of Indian troops at a great number of points in a battle line which extends from Tsingtau [sic] to La Bassée across the breadth of three Continents.’36
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