No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  Lalu just moved his head and smiled weakly.

  The woman gabbled away in French.

  Lalu stood dumb with humility, and was going to salute, and go away for fear an officer might see him talking to a Mem Sahib, while the Jodhpur Lancer, equally at a loss, said: ‘I don’t know what the sisterin-law wants.’

  The French woman laughed at her own discomfiture, and then said in English ‘picture’, pointing at Lalu, and the Jodhpur Lancer, trying to explain with her head, her eyes, her nose, her fingers, what she wanted.

  But as if the very presence of a Mem Sahib, usually so remote and unapproachable in India, had paralysed them, they stood unresponsive.

  Lalu looked about furtively and scanned the cavalry horses on the right, the shouting cooks and water carriers on the left and the Baluchis and the Gurkhas who were sunning themselves ahead of him. Then he looked back towards the officers’ quarters, and pointed towards them, thinking that the best thing was to send her to the Subedar Major Sahib’s tent. But his gaze met Subah’s, who came running along abreast of a French officer on horseback.

  Lalu and the Jodhpur Lancer sprang to attention and saluted.

  The officer talked in his own tongue to the woman, and then, laughing, said to Subah in English:

  ‘The Miss wants to draw the pictures of these men.’

  ‘Draw my picture, Mem Sahib,’ Subah said coming forward.

  The French woman smiled at Subah, said something to the officer, and made a gesture to the Jodhpur Lancer, Lalu and Subah, to stand together.

  But Subah thrust himself forward and thumped his chest to indicate that he wanted a portrait of himself all alone.

  By this time, driven by curiosity, other sepoys were gathering round.

  Whereupon the French officer said in Hindustani: ‘Mem Sahib would like a group.’

  ‘Fall into the group and let all of them be in the picture,’ Lalu advised Subah.

  ‘Han, we also want to be in it,’ said the other sepoys crowding round the woman, several rows deep, at the first touch of the pencil.

  Then they all stood away, twisting their moustachios into shape and stiffening to attention as if they were going to be photographed.

  The officer and the woman laughed as they talked for a moment, then the officer edged aside and the woman began to draw the picture.

  ‘That was the interpreter sahib,’ Subah said with great importance.

  The French woman sketched the group. But there were any number of subjects before her now, for other sepoys from the nearby tents had gathered round. They would come and look at the woman as though she were a strange animal, because she was so homely, so informal and so unlike the white women who came to Hindustan and never condescended to greet a native. And they posed before her, proud to be sketched, their honest faces suffused with embarrassed laughter, even as they stood, stiff and motionless, their hands glued to their sides.

  The woman could draw the pictures of the sitting, standing, talking, moving sepoys with a few deft strokes even before they knew they had been sketched.

  And then there was much comedy, the sepoys laughing at the caricatures of each other and exclaiming wildly as they came to life on paper, happy as children to see the sketches, and insisting on signing their name in their own language on the portraits.

  When the woman had made various sketches Subah began to press for a portrait of himself. But he could not communicate his wish to her in the little French which he had learnt at school. As he came up to her with a daring familiarity, Jemadar Suchet Singh, a tall, imposing officer of No. 2 company of the 69th Rifles approached to see the confusion and said:

  ‘Get away, don’t crowd round the mem sahib! Get away!’

  ‘Come, leave the skirt, let us go,’ Subah said.

  ‘You are getting too bumptious,’ shouted Suchet Singh to Subah. ‘You try to be familiar with her again, and I shall have you courtmartialed. Never mind whose son you are!’

  After this warning the crowd of sepoys began to slink away.

  ‘Come on, my heart-squanderer, she is beyond your reach,’said Lalu, dragging Subah away. ‘And get ready to face your father because I am sure Suchet Singh will report you!…’

  ‘Look out, son, I am to become a Jemadar soon,’ Subah said to Lalu, as they hurried towards the main road. ‘The Subedar Sahib told me today, so you behave if you value your life.’

  ‘Ohe, ja, ja, don’t try to impress me!’ said Lalu.

  ‘Oh, come, raper of your sister, we shall celebrate,’ Subah said. ‘You will be my friend, even when I am an officer.’

  ‘Build the house before you make the door.’

  ‘All right, wisdom, come, and run lest we be seen.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Lalu asked. ‘We have to get permission if we are going out of bounds.’

  ‘You come with me,’ said Subah, ‘there is a stall at the end of that road. I saw it when we were marching down to camp; it seemed a wineshop, because there were people with glasses full of red, pale and green wine before them. Come, we will walk through the camp as though we are not really going out, and then try and evade the sentry at the end of the road, or I shall tell him that I am the son of the Subedar Major Arbel Singh. Come, we shall be happy… You can live without fear of Lok Nath now, because now that I have got promotion he will remain where he is, in the mire…’

  ‘It would be strange if the lion’s offspring hasn’t any claws,’ said Lalu. ‘It seems to me that all of us will be in the mire if you become a Jemadar, not only Lok Nath!’

  ‘You know that my father has been invited to the officers’ mess tonight where the French officers, English Sahibs, Rajahs, Maharajas and some chosen Indian officers have been invited,’ Subah informed him, puffed up with pride. ‘And, it is said, that Sir James Willcocks, the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Corps is to arrive here soon, accompanied by Risaldar Khwaja Muhammad Khan, who is aide-decamp to this general, and a friend of my father. He is a Pathan from the Yussuf Zai: he was aide-de-camp to Lord Kitchener at one time… I should like to become aide-de-camp one day…’

  ‘You wait, son, you will become that, and more,’ said Lalu with a faint mockery in his voice.

  ‘Really, do you think?’ Subah said unconscious of his friend’s irony. ‘Then I shall make you a Jemadar.’

  ‘The dog eats a bellyful of food if he can get it, otherwise he just licks the saucer,’ said Lalu to cut short his friend.

  ‘Oh come, why are you always stricken even when happy?’ said Subah. And, catching Lalu’s hand he began to caper like a horse.

  Some Sikh sepoys dressed in shorts were washing their clothes while a group of French children stood around them. One of the Sikhs brought out a flute, and began to play it to amuse them. At this some French soldiers gathered round, imagining that the flute player was going to bring out a cobra. The sepoy pretended there was a snake on the ground before him, and played around its imaginary head, deliberately swelling his cheeks with his breath till they were like two rounded balls. At this the children scattered out of fear, but came back reassured when the sepoy smiled.

  One of them offered the mimicking juggler a sweet which the sepoy gulped down, rolling his eyes, and twisting his face as if he were swallowing some poison. And then there was an attempt at an exchange in the language of gesture. And, what was strange, the mime worked. And soon there was complete understanding between East and West.

  Lalu, who had stood to watch this scene, responded to the hilarity by accepting a cigarette from a French soldier, which the Sikhs, whose religion taboos smoking, refused. He only wished his regiment had been transferred here as from one cantonment to another, for a sojourn during peace time. But in a war?… Now that he was in France, he felt a curious dread of the Unknown, of the things that happened in a war, even as he felt the thrill of being there.

  ‘I am the son of Subedar Major Arbel Singh, 69th Rifles, and he has sent me to buy some cigarettes from that stall,’ Subah announced to the sentry witho
ut a blush.

  The sentry, a tall Baluchi, with a long crested turban, looked at him hard. ‘Who is that man with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Sepoy Lai Singh, orderly to the Subedar Major Sahib Bahadur,’ lied Subah.

  ‘Go, but don’t be long,’ said the sentry.

  The two boys passed the barrier, and made straight for the stall which stood at the crossroads.

  A few French soldiers and some Tommies were standing around drinking beer. Lalu felt embarrassed, afraid, and inferior to be going to a stall where there were only white men. With the assurance cultivated through his three years at the Bishop Cotton School, Simla, Subah dragged him to the bar.

  The Frenchman who owned the stall turned to them, wiping his hands on the white skirt of his apron and said, Mussia!. Subah pointed to some bottles which stood on the trolley. The Tommies at first stared at the two sepoys as if surprised that the Indians should have developed a predilection for drink. Then, contrary to their customary reticence in India, one of them said: ‘Good eh, Blighty!’

  ‘What, Blighty?’ said Subah.

  ‘He means Vilayat,’ Lalu said laughing.

  The French Sahib struck the knuckles of his finger against a bottle of white wine, and gesticulated. But before Subah could say anything, an English Sergeant-Major stalked up to the stall and snapped at the Tommies as well as the sepoys:

  ‘Where the bloody hell do you reckon you are? Is this a cantonment or a bloody war?’

  The soldiers stood with their heads hanging down.

  ‘This is out of bounds,’ the Sergeant Major rapped. And he leaned over to the Tommies and hissed at them angrily, snarling at the sepoys the while.

  During the next few days the Indian corps began to be moved to Orleans, where, it was said, they were to be properly equipped with new machine guns, howitzers, mechanical transport, medical equipment and all the necessities that an army, trained to fight on the frontier and for policing the outposts of the Empire overseas, needed in operations in the West. They had handed over the rifles and ammunition which they had brought from India at Marseilles and fresh arms were issued to them. The sepoys adapted themselves to the new rifles, but they hoped that they would not be forced to have new machine guns, as that would entail more strenuous practice, when they were kept busy enough with packing and unpacking, and clothes drill, and they had also been given new warm clothes. It was said that this war to which they were going was unlike any other, fought with things called ‘grenads’ and ‘mortas’, and a rumour ran that the Germans had invented a gun which could shoot at range of seventy miles. But why hadn’t the Sahibs thought of all these things in India? Of course, they had had to leave the cantonments in a hurry, and the Army Headquarters at Simla hadn’t had enough time. But the arrangements were being pushed too fast. The officers were kind, however, patting the Gurkhas on their backs and asking them to sharpen their kukhries, telling the horsemen to value their steeds more than their lives, and encouraging the others to keep fit by wrestling exercises, as they would have to face up to the ‘Huns’, who were ‘twice as big as the Indians in size.’… And the sepoys felt that now that they were here, they were here, and it didn’t matter if they had big guns or small guns or whether they lay on mats like the beggars or slept in feather beds like the princes. Travel was good for the heart, since, contrary to the prognostications and evil forebodings of the priests, they hadn’t died in crossing the black waters.

  The 69th was one of the first regiments to be dispatched to Orleans.

  Born in 1905, Mulk Raj Anand was a radical Indian writer whose work reveals a great empathy with the poor and oppressed. One part of a trilogy, Across the Black Waters, first published in 1939, describes the experiences of Lalu, a peasant whose family is evicted from their land and who becomes a sepoy fighting in the Indian Army in the hope that his war effort will win back lost family land. The book powerfully describes the sense of alienation felt by the Indian soldiers as they get closer to the front. In battle, they are put in the most dangerous positions on the front lines and their regiments suffer very high rates of casualty. Although they want to put on ‘a good show’, the soldiers in Across the Black Waters are also puzzled about what exactly they are doing in France and why the war is a concern of theirs. Eight hundred thousand Indian troops fought in all the theatres of war with almost 50,000 killed or missing and another 65,000 wounded. For its contribution to the war effort, India expected to be rewarded with moves towards independence. When it became obvious that this was not going to happen, support for Gandhi soared.

  A life-long communist, Anand volunteered in the 1930s to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After spending the Second World War in London working for the BBC, he returned to India in 1946. Anand died in Pune in 2004.

  ERNST JÜNGER

  RAJPUTS

  from Kriegstagebuch 1914–1918

  (War Diary 1914–1918)

  translated by Martin Chalmers

  13. VI.17

  This morning I had probably the most interesting war experience that I’ve had so far.

  Last night our company came forward from the Siegfried-Position. My platoon was assigned to Outpost 3, I had to go with them. In the forefield I came upon Sergeant Hackmann with some men who wanted to carry out a patrol. I tagged along as a battlefield hanger-on. We crossed two wire entanglements and got through between the English posts. To the left of us there were English digging trenches, to the right of us was an occupied piece of trench, from which came the sound of voices. We wanted to take some prisoners, but we didn’t manage it.

  I returned to my outpost in a bad mood, settled down on my coat on the steep slope and dozed. Suddenly there was rustling in the bushes of the little wood, sentries ran away, the sound of muted whispering could be heard. At the same time a man ran up to me: ‘Lieutenant, 70 English are supposed to have appeared at the edge of the wood.’ I had four men immediately to hand, whom I positioned on the slope. Immediately after that a group of men ran across the meadow. ‘Halt, who goes there?’ It was Sergeant Teilengertes trying to collect his men. I quickly gathered everyone together, drew them up in a firing line and crossed the meadow between slope and wood with the men. At the corner of the wood I ordered the line to wheel right. Meanwhile furious shell and machine gun fire had begun from the English side. We ran at a march pace as far as the hill where the English trenches were, in order to gain the dead angle. Then figures appeared on the right wing. I pulled the cord on a hand grenade and threw it at the head of one of them. Unfortunately it was Sergeant Teilengertes who saved himself, thank God, by a hasty sideways leap. At the same time English hand grenades were thrown from above, while the shrapnel fire became unpleasantly intense. The men scattered and disappeared towards the slope under heavy fire, while I maintained my position with three faithful followers. Suddenly one of them nudged me: ‘Lieutenant, the English!’And truly to the right a line of figures was kneeling shoulder to shoulder in two sections. As they rose, we ran away. I ran up against barbed wire treacherously stretched through the tall grass, went head over heels three times and tore my good trousers to shreds. During these events there was a tremendous noise in the wood, the rustling steps and the voices of at least 60 men were audible.

  So I ran away, fell over the wire, reached the slope and I managed to collect my men and to form a line into order. However, I really had to yell at the men, I grabbed some, threw them onto their place and ordered them to remain lying where they were. The commotion in the wood grew ever louder. I roared over to the wood for what must have been five minutes, and got only strange shouts in reply. Finally I took the responsibility and ordered fire to be opened, even though my men maintained they heard German accents. The shouting in the wood increased, as my 20 rifles rattled into it. There, too, there were yellow flashes from time to time. One man was shot in the shoulder and was bound where he was. I ordered cease fire. Everyone stopped shooting and I shouted once again ‘Password!’ and then: ‘come here, you are prisoners, hands up!’
At that a great deal of shouting over there, my men maintained it sounded like Rache! Rache! [i.e. revenge]. Suddenly a figure detached itself from the edge of the wood and came towards us. Unfortunately I shouted at him, the fellow turned round and went back. ‘Shoot him down!’ A salvo followed. The fellow seemed dealt with. Some time passed, then the jabbering over there rose again. ‘Just let them approach!’ Cries came from the edge of the wood, which sounded as if good comrades were encouraging each other to go forward together. Then a line of grey shadows appeared, advancing towards us. ‘Steady fire!’The rifles banged beside me and above me, making my eardrums ring. In the middle of the field a small yellow flame still lit up from time to time, but was soon extinguished. Finally their whole left section advanced. I had one group wheel to the right and also sent these people my best wishes. Now it seemed to me that the moment for their withdrawal had come. I ordered: ‘On your feet, up, march, march!’We ran towards the edge of the wood, I with some good lads far ahead of the others, and broke into the wood with a loud hurrah. Unfortunately the other fellows had not held their ground but had run away. Consequently I moved to the right along the edge of the wood into the cornfield. There I sent all of the men except 8 back to company.

  While we were still standing in the cornfield we heard the English at the edge of the wood again, loud cries as well, as if the wounded were being picked up. We went round the wood and once again advanced along the break through the trees. The English had disappeared. From the meadow, where we had shot down the advancing line, we heard unfamiliar cries and moaning. We went over and saw several dead and wounded lying in the grass, who begged us for mercy. We took three of the figures hidden in the grass and dragged them with us. Now we also had living witnesses to our almost two-hour skirmish, one, however, died immediately, a bullet fired at close range had torn his skull apart. To my question: ‘Quelle nation?’ (They spoke French) one answered ‘Rajput.’ Aha so Indians! Something very special. None had been hit less than twice. One quickly shouted ‘Anglais pas bon.’ I quickly gave myself an English carbine with bayonet and then we made our way with the screaming prisoners to our trench, which we reached as dawn broke, welcomed by those who had remained behind, who stared in astonishment at our men. I right away drank a coffee with Kius and ate scrambled eggs, then I slept until 2 o’clock. So with 20 men we successfully fought over a hundred men, although we had orders to withdraw if approached by superior force. I must say, without wishing to praise myself, that I only achieved it through mastery of the situation, iron command of the men and through advancing with a charge against the enemy.