The World's War

by David Olusoga

  At the end of 1914, General Haig declared himself convinced that the Indian line on the Western Front was ‘now very strong’.37 Nevertheless, the Indian Corps, like the British Expeditionary Force beside which they had fought, was a shadow its former self. Around a quarter of the men who had landed at Marseilles in September and October had received wounds of some sort. Under the acute stress of combat, some had inflicted wounds on themselves in a desperate bid to find a way out of a hellish and seemingly hopeless situation – and a few of those found guilty of this breach of military law were executed. In all, 2,000 Indians had been killed.38

  The winter that set in following the crisis of autumn 1914 was one of the coldest ever recorded in northern France and Belgium. It was then that the Western Front truly became the troglodyte world of legend. Men stood for days in freezing mud, were driven to despair by lice and beset at night by rats that ate the flesh of the dead. It was the winter of 1914–15 that brought into common usage the terms ‘trench foot’, ‘trench coat’ and ‘shell shock’.39 In photographs of the Indian Corps from that time, men sit wrapped in blankets, huddled in trenches that are filled with mud and topped by snow. They appear more like vagrants or desperate refugees than soldiers. One wrote home that ‘The trench is 260 miles long, it rains without ceasing every day and many men have been killed by the cold.’40

  There is a palpable defensiveness in the memoirs of Willcocks, and to a lesser extent Merewether, about the performance of the Indians in the freezing temperatures they were forced to endure. In the months and years that followed their withdrawal from France and Belgium a mythology grew up that Indian troops were incapacitated by the cold conditions. One proponent of this idea was the author Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote in 1916 that the Indians had been ‘fighting at an enormous disadvantage’. In his view:

  There are inexorable axioms of Nature which no valour nor constancy can change. The bravest of the brave, our Indian troops were none the less the children of the sun, dependent on warmth for their vitality and numbed by the cold wet life of the trenches… To stand day after day up to his knees in ice-cold water is no light ordeal for a European, but it is difficult to imagine all that it must have been to a Southern Asiatic.41

  That men who had never set foot on the subcontinent should believe that the brown-skinned soldiers of India were incapable of tolerating a winter in northern Europe was understandable. Less comprehensible is that British officers, who knew India and had personal experience of its enormous range of temperatures and altitudes, could remain convinced that men from the snowy Kathmandu Valley or the hills of the Punjab would find the temperatures of a Flanders winter intolerable. The martial-races theory postulated that those same tribes had been toughened and hardened by their lives in the mountains, yet somewhere on the sea passage from Bombay and Karachi that element of the theory seems to have been thrown overboard. All soldiers, of all races, on all sides, suffered in the winter of 1914–15; none of the armies was properly equipped or effectively prepared to face the conditions of modern war combined with that harsh winter’s effects. If the men of the Indian Corps suffered more than most on the Western Front – and there is some reason to believe they did – it was because they were the most poorly outfitted for the conditions, still in their utterly unsuitable drill uniforms. Yet they were still infantilized as ‘children of the sun’.

  As well as being forced to endure the cold, every soldier on the Western Front in those first months of the war suffered from a profound sense of dislocation; but again perhaps none more so than the Indians. First, there was the matter of geography: many of the Indian soldiers, men from illiterate or semi-literate village societies, had little grasp of it. They understood that their deployment was beyond India, ‘across the Black Waters’, to what was dimly understood as vilayati – a Hindi word which in vague terms meant variously ‘abroad’, ‘Europe’ or ‘Britain’ (and from which the army slang ‘Blighty’ evolved, meaning Britain). The Indian troops were well aware of how long their journey to Marseilles had taken. They had passed through the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and had seen Egypt, before steaming across the Mediterranean, all the time their understanding of the world growing. Yet so much of this experience was novel that it was difficult for them (as it would be for any first-time international traveller of the period) to gather a proper understanding of the distances over which they had moved. Sir Walter Lawrence, a brilliant civil servant who became Kitchener’s eyes and ears on all matters relating to the Indian Corps in Europe, wrote to the War Secretary in December 1915 explaining that Indian troops on the front were prone to confuse Austria for Australia and mixed up Paris and Persia.42

  The factor that was most disorientating for the men of the Indian Corps was, though, neither the cold nor the confusions of geography; it was the nature of their deployment. In the chaos and crisis of October and November 1914 they had been thrust into battle according to the flow of the fighting. As units headed up from Marseilles and became available, they were used to patch holes in the line or block German advances. They were consequently not given the opportunity to fight as a cohesive unit. This went against the powerful sense of community – something akin to village or even family life – that underpinned the complex culture of the Indian Corps. It was diluted and undermined when they were thrown into combat in small groups, among other units of which they knew nothing. While it may have been an unavoidable necessity, the practice had an impact on the morale of the men. As Willcocks explained:

  They had been trained to the understanding that when they entered into the battle it would, at any rate at first, be alongside the British comrades with whom they had served in Brigades in India; these at least they knew and understood; and even if this could not be, they had every reason to believe they would at least fight as battalions under their own Commanding Officers; but here none of these things happened. They were split up in fragments, and that they stood the strain as well as they did is the best possible testimony to their discipline and efficiency. As an Indian officer said to me on the return of the two battalions to re-join their Headquarters, talking about the separation from their own Brigades, ‘Sahib, they do not understand anything about us’.43

  A related issue was the impact of losing a high proportion of the corps’ white officers. The once almost unquestioned view, pervasive at the time, was that Indian units became passive and directionless without a British voice to give orders. In February 1915 the Office of the Censor of Indian Mails referred to men ‘feeling their own helplessness without their British officers’.44 And Willcocks was adamant that ‘even the best Indian troops in European warfare need the leading of British officers’.45

  More recently, historians have overturned that view. There is much battlefield evidence and many contemporary accounts that contradict or refine that assessment. The loss of officers impacted on all armies. What can be said of the Indian Corps, given their environment of the Western Front, is that the loss of white officers dramatically increased a sense of isolation. The bonds between officers and men were unusually close within the Indian Army, and the loss of each white officer had the effect of reducing the number of men in the combat zone who spoke the languages of the sepoys and who were thus able to translate and explain to the men something of what was going on around them. Simple cultural questions as much as life-and-death matters on the battlefield could be answered and addressed only by these bilingual officers. To envisage oneself in the sensory chaos of the Western Front, amid the thunder of guns and the clatter of rifle fire, accompanied by the babble of incomprehensible European languages, with critical orders shouted in foreign tongues, is to understand a little of what the Indian Corps experienced, as the officers, among whom they had lived and fought for years, fell around them. Such officers were literally irreplaceable.

  As casualties mounted, the Indian Corps struggled to replace losses of all ranks, not just white or Indian officers. Through its supply lines, which stretched back to its base port of Marseilles
, the corps did have access to reinforcements sent from India. However, many of the fresh troops who arrived on the transports were men over the age of forty, who had not been dispatched in August 1914 as they were not deemed fit enough for active service. Some were even thought unfit for service in India itself. Willcocks, quoting a damning official report, was distinctly unimpressed:

  One lot of reservists was classed as ‘utterly valueless’. Of nineteen men of one regiment ‘three are fit for service’... Another small draft was classed together as ‘particularly poor’, of another out of thirty-five men sent ‘ten are plague convalescents who have not even yet recovered their full vigour’. One boy was referred to as fourteen years of age, and another as a ‘mere child’. Of a draft of sixty-seven reservists nine were of ‘indifferent physique’ and fifty-eight ‘unfit’. India appeared anxious to fill up sorely-needed shipping with trash of this sort.46

  This lack of adequate reserves was, ironically, in large part a consequence of the martial-races theory, which concentrated recruitment within a restricted pool of communities and ethnic groups. An Army Commission, headed by Marshal Lord Nicholson, had concluded before the war that the recruitment structure of the army was too restrictive to satisfy the demands of ‘serious war’. By 1915 the Commission had been proved correct.47 The result was that the sway of the martial-races theory partially gave way, as the British were forced to widen the pool of recruits.

  In one important respect, the men of the Indian Corps differed from other non-European imperial subjects who fought in the First World War. Most of the latter left little individual trace. Men recruited from pre-literate societies fought their wars in literary silence, leaving no written accounts for historians to weave into the broader history of the conflict; often the only voices to be preserved are those of their European commanders or the occasional journalist who took an interest in men from far-off nations. There are just a handful of full war memoirs written by colonial and non-European troops. The men of the Indian Corps are, though, the great exception. Thousands of their letters were intercepted, censored and analysed by a special army office, the Censor of Indian Mails, which was established in late September 1914 and headquartered soon afterwards in Boulogne. It was run by a British captain, E.B. Howell, formerly of the Political Department of the Indian Civil Service. While most of the original letters are lost, the transcriptions of the thousands that were typed up, translated into English, and subjected to the Censor’s comments did survive the war. They remain, carefully preserved, in a series of huge ledgers in the British Library.

  Although, as scholars like Santanu Das have pointed out, these intercepts should be read with care, and deciphered and understood within a wider cultural and military context, they offer a large window onto the inner lives and experiences of the Indians who fought for Britain. The letters are composed by men in the trenches, or in camps behind the lines, or men lying wounded in hospitals in France and Britain. Written to family and friends, they carry the men’s views of the war, their perception of the scale of the fighting, their cultural observations of the British and the French, their reactions to enemy propaganda and their often distorted understanding of the geopolitics behind the war. As many of the sepoys in the Indian Corps were not literate, they dictated the letters to literate comrades or army scribes, who at times added their own literary flourishes. Although there were attempts to keep the activities of the censors secret, the soldiers did understand that their letters were being read by higher authorities, and by men who were not their trusted officers. Initially the Office of the Censor of Indian Mails was created to monitor letters arriving from relatives in India; but quickly it began to intercept and censor outgoing mail, and by March 1915 was processing 20,000 outgoing letters each week. There were only four officers to do this work, and unsurprisingly they complained of sore eyes and lack of sleep; as Howell explained in one of his reports, ‘the mere deciphering of any one letter may be as much as two hours work’.

  The most powerful of the letters tend to be those that attempt to convey the shock of modern warfare. In January 1915 one soldier wrote: ‘It is very hard to endure the bombs, father. The bullets and the cannon balls come down like snow. The mud is up to a man’s middle. The distance between us and the enemy is 50 paces.’48 The same month a sepoy serving at the front described the ferocity of industrial firepower in terms that his family in rural India would understand: ‘The enemy’s guns roasted our regiments even as the grain is parched. Corpses lay on every side and the blood ran in little rivers.’ A letter rejected by the Censor for its honesty as much as its tone of desperation read:

  In this sinful country it rains very much and also snows and many men have been frostbitten. Some of their hands and feet cannot be stretched out and those who stand cannot sit down again. Some have died like this and some have been killed by bullets. In a few days you will hear that in our country only women will be left. All the men will be finished here. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of soldiers have been killed. If you go onto the battlefield you will see corpses piled upon corpses so that there is no place to put hand or foot. Men have died from the stench. No-one has any hope of survival. The whole world is being brought to destruction. I cannot describe the war because 30,000 men have been destroyed and 20,000 more will be destroyed.49

  Again and again, Indian soldiers attempting to describe the scale of the slaughter fell back on metaphors and similes taken from the rural life they knew – grain being tossed on to the fire, or walnuts falling from trees. One described the dead as being the ‘chaff upon the threshing floor’; a Muslim sepoy felt he and his comrades were ‘like goats tied to the butcher’s stake. We have no idea when he will come, and there is no one who will release us. We have given up all hope of life.’50 More graphically still, one letter reads: ‘Men are dying like Maggots. No one can count them, not in thousands but in hundreds of thousands.’51 The more religiously focused of the men compared the battles in France and Belgium to the legends of their faiths or the gargantuan struggles of the Hindu epics – ‘the name of Germany is breathed throughout the world like the name of Harankash’ (a devil), or in the description of German aircraft as being ‘like the great bird of Vishnu’.52 ‘Having seen this war, all that has been written in Mahabharat and in the Ramayan is altogether true,’ reported one sepoy to his family.53

  The intercepted letters of the Indian Corps became what Howell called a ‘trench telescope’, a mechanism by which the army authorities were to spy on the Indian troops, understand their concerns, seek out signs of disloyalty or sedition, and watch for any falls in morale. Critically, the army aimed to determine how far the Indian Corps could be pushed before the men gave up hope and morale collapsed. Howell was always looking for signs that some critical breaking-point was being approached. At the start of January 1915 he began to note that while many soldiers were still determined to remain dutiful to ‘our government’, they also showed ‘a tendency to break into poetry which I am inclined to regard as a rather ominous sign of mental disquietude. The number of letters written by men who have obviously given way to despair has also increased both absolutely and relatively.’54 An Indian civil servant of some standing and a man proud of his linguistic abilities, Howell went to pains to translate the Urdu poetry – perhaps as an intellectual exercise as much as in the hope that it contained anything of real intelligence value. In the same report Howell noted that:

  A number of letters from men with their units at the front have been examined. They betray undeniable evidence of depression… The tendency during the month has been for these letters to increase in numbers and in length. At the same time there has been a marked change in tone. Grumbling is still almost entirely absent and there is never a hint of resentment or anti-British feeling… but adverse signs are growing more conspicuous… What is more significant still is the proportion of letters which, though they show no sign of giving way to despair or of any faltering in devotion to duty, yet give a melancholy impression o
f fatalistic resignation to a fate that is regarded as speedy and inevitable. This feeling too appears to be spreading.55

  In the minds of Howell and the army authorities, the information gleaned from the Indian letters also allowed them to use the Western Front as a grim testing ground for the martial-races theory. Howell commented on how each of the various ‘races’ were behaving under the appalling pressure of combat, and whether they were coping in accordance with the general theory. In one report, of the weekend of 27 March 1915, he noted:

  It is instructive to note the different behaviour of men of different races under the pressure of despair. The Sikh either grows sulky or tries to malinger. Vide extract No. 55 of the last collection. The Muhammadan of the Punjab wails and prays. The Pathan also believes in the efficacy of prayer, but being a man of quicker wit than either of the others in some cases seems definitely to have taken means to help himself.56