The World's War

by David Olusoga

  One facet long obscured by the victory of literature over history, and by the narrowness in terms of both class and race among the authors of that literature, is the global nature of the conflict. No great memoir or work of poetry emerged from the war in Africa, the war at sea, or the battles in Asia and the Pacific. In English, only T.E. Lawrence’s turgid and self-mythologizing Seven Pillars of Wisdom came out of the war in the Middle East. What has been lost sight of is not only the true geographic scope of the war but its fundamental demographics. More words have been written over the past century about the few dozen middle-class officers who wrote their war memoirs and penned their war poetry than about the 4 million non-white, non-European soldiers who fought for Britain, France and their allies, let alone the millions of civilians who laboured at war work or who suffered hardships and loss when the war swept through their communities.43 Any reconception of the First World War as the World’s War is, at one level, about recovering those stories and those perspectives, or – to put it another way – about restoring the names of Mike Mountain Horse, Mir Dast and Mir Mast to the collective memory alongside those of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen.

  *1 The Great War Deeds of Mike Mountain Horse was probably painted sometime in the 1930s.

  *2 A reference to Germany’s genocidal campaign against the Herero and Nama people of its South West Africa colony (modern Namibia), which was just concluding in 1908.

  *3 Geddes, who was then deputy to Lloyd George, was so shocked by this assessment that he asked Kitchener to sign a memorandum stating his views. Geddes then presented this to a suitably horrified Lloyd George, who almost ripped the document in two. As C.J Chivers notes in The Gun (2011), p.130, Lloyd George’s response was: ‘Take Kitchener’s maximum, square it, multiply that result by two; and when you are in sight of that, double it again for good luck.’

  *4 Although generally a more fluid and mobile war, the conflict on the Eastern Front did see the construction of hundreds of miles of trenches.

  *5 In the Second World War, the theme music to the BBC’s European Service, broadcast into occupied Europe, was the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – a phonic emblem of the ‘real Germany’ that had been temporarily overcome by the bacillus of Nazism. It was appropriate, for Beethoven himself had been a romantic champion of personal freedom and a critic of his former hero Napoleon, the last European tyrant against whom Britain had been forced to fight on the continent.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Across the Black Waters’

  India in Europe – the ‘martial races’

  MARSEILLES, THE MORNING OF 26 SEPTEMBER 1914. The Castilia and the Mongara, two ships of the British India Company, steam into the broad waters of Marseilles’ old port. On deck and below in the holds are the units of the Lahore Division of the British Indian Corps, with their horses and mules and as much of their equipment as they have been able to gather together and load. On this first transport from British India comes a battery of the Royal Horse Artillery, a signal company, a field ambulance and a section of the Mule Corps too. At 9 o’clock the next morning, two more ships dock at Marseilles, carrying between them the men and horses of the 15th Lancers. One by one, ship by ship, units are landed, the various composite pieces of an Indian army that was disassembled and chaotically loaded in Bombay and Karachi seven weeks earlier. Now, at Marseilles, the whole complex, international, multiracial jigsaw puzzle is to be reassembled and rapidly prepared for war. These first ‘bizarre and incongruous’ days at Marseilles are later described by Lieutenant Colonel J.W.B. Merewether of the Indian Corps:

  Working parties of the Indian troops in their sombre but business-like khaki were mixed with assistants in the shape of French seamen, French labourers, stevedores, and our own Army Service Corps men. Nobody understood anyone else’s language; parties of Indians could be seen gesticulating and illustrating their wants by vigorous pantomime to sympathetic but puzzled Frenchmen. However, all was good humour and an intense desire to help, so matters soon arranged themselves.1

  The Lahore Division are not only the first Indian soldiers to land in France this year; they are the first Indians ever to take part in a war in Europe. As each new regiment, or part of a regiment, lands, they march through the long boulevards that stretch up the gentle hills of Marseilles away from the waters of the old port. Crowds gather under the dappled shade of the early autumn trees to cheer them on: ‘Vive Angleterre!.’, ‘Vivent les Hindous!.’2

  The arrival of Indian troops in France was an event. In the words of The Times (2 October 1914), ‘They had an enthusiastic welcome and were the centre of a triumphal procession. The physique of the Indian troops impressed the spectators.’3 Another article described ‘stirring scenes’, noting how:

  Women presented the troops with cigarettes and fruit and girls strewed flowers on the road and pinned them to tunics and turbans. The enthusiasm reached fever heat when the Ghurkhas struck up the ‘Marseillaise’ on their weird instruments. Many of the younger natives leapt three feet in the air waiving the Union Jack and Tricolour..4

  The Special Correspondent of The Times found himself in expansive, lyrical mood when contemplating the significance and spectacle of the Indian Corps:

  Today it has been my great good fortune to assist at the making of history. I have seen the troops of one of the world’s most ancient civilizations set foot for the first time on the shores of Europe. I have seen proud Princes of India ride at the head of thousands of soldiers… fired with the ardour of the East, determined to help win their Emperor’s battles or die… I have seen welded before my eyes, what may well prove to be the strongest link in that wonderful chain which we call the British Empire….5

  These were exotic sights, enthralling for the local French populace, who were, he continued, ‘bent on having a glimpse… so that every second-storey window and every roof within a like area was a coveted vantage seat’. There were not only Indians in this ‘remarkable medley of soldiers’, but also an influx of men from France’s empire in the shape of ‘picturesque Zouaves and Turcos from Algeria, white-turbaned swarthy Moors from Morocco, coal-black negroes from Senegal’. Merewether was likewise astonished by the pageant of peoples and races he encountered, as Marseilles was shaken from its peacetime slumber to become a great garrison city in which the tribes of empire were gathered for war, so different to the city’s pre-war image as the place of ‘acrobats or lace-sellers on the quays’ or ‘itinerant musicians with their eternal “Funiculi, Funicula”’. As he observed, now ‘everything was given over to war’.6

  One of the Indian regiments marched up from the port behind its own band. Even cosmopolitan Marseilles had never witnessed an army of turbaned Indians, wearing British uniforms marching behind a band of Indian musicians playing the Scottish bagpipes. A photograph of Sikh soldiers parading along one of Marseilles’s leafy boulevards was made into a postcard; its caption (in English and French) read ‘Gentlemen of India marching to chasten German Hooligans’. This ancient city and its port – where once the great battle fleet of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had ranged in the mid-16th century – was once again the temporary home of warriors from the East and from Africa, its parks and open spaces transformed into military encampments. The Indian troops of the Meerut Division were allotted a site at La Valentine, to the west of the city, while the Lahore Division did rather better, being billeted at the Marseilles racecourse and the adjoining Parc Borély, one of the city’s most elegant destinations. As they pitched their tents and stockpiled their equipment, The Times carried a message addressed to the Indian Corps from ‘King-Emperor’ George V:

  I know with what readiness my brave and loyal Indian soldiers are prepared to fulfil their sacred trust on the field of battle, shoulder to shoulder with comrades from all parts of my Empire. I bid you go forward and add fresh lustre to the glorious achievements, the noble traditions, the courage and chivalry of my Indian Army, whose honour and fame is in your hands.7

>   Most of the 24,000 soldiers of the Lahore and Meerut divisions were long-service veterans. A century later it is perhaps impossible to conceive how strange and disorientating they must have found their arrival in the south of France. These soldiers – most of them illiterate and from rural backgrounds, who had been born on the borders of poverty and were now summoned by their regiments within days of the outbreak of a war thousands of miles away – had crossed the ‘Black Waters’ of the deep oceans. These were men who had never left their homelands before and who, for the most part, knew very little about the outside world. Marseilles was to be their base port for the next fourteen months; it was to here that many of the wounded would return, and it was here where reinforcements would arrive.

  Although in theory a sealed military area, the Indian encampment at the racecourse and Parc Borély became an unofficial tourist attraction. In the last days of September, Massia Bibikoff, a young Russian amateur artist in Marseilles, was given permission to enter Parc Borély in order to make a series of sketches.8 She felt:

  …as if I had been transported by a wave of a magician’s wand into a world utterly detached from the present. Good Heavens, what variety everywhere and in everything! I arrived in the midst of the turmoil of pitching camp. All over the great race-course there was nothing but soldiers, carts, empty wagons, a few tents already pitched; and all this chaos with an accompaniment of shouts and orders and braying mules made up a scene so unexpected, so out of the common in our days, that for a moment I stopped involuntarily in breathless astonishment, feasting my eyes on the truly incomparable vista.

  There was something of a mutual fascination between her and the Sikh soldiers she observed:

  Seldom, save for the Cossacks, have I seen such fine men. There was not one less than some five feet eleven in height, slender, beautifully proportioned, while many are of real beauty. Their expression is gentle and remarkably sympathetic, especially when, as so often happens, a kindly smile lights up their bronze faces. But what can it be round their chins? I look closer and see their beards carefully twisted up and held in place by a thin string of black silk which they fasten behind their ears… I asked a French interpreter about this, and he told me that no Sikh has the right to cut off a single one of his hairs from the day he is born. ‘You will also notice, Mademoiselle, the iron ring which they have on their turban. It is the distinctive mark of their caste, which is forged from a dreadful weapon of old times, and is given them by the Guru or High Priest… This is the special warrior caste… If I looked at them with natural curiosity they repaid me in kind. From the moment of my appearance in their camp a great many of them stopped their work and crowded round.

  Bibikoff’s war diary is so strikingly honest and open that it is difficult to believe it was ever intended for publication. In it, she admits with girlish candour: ‘The fact is I have lost my heart to these proud and gallant bronze-skinned soldiers.’ She seems to have been completely carried along by the great outburst of excitement, nationalism, romanticism and orientalism that consumed Marseilles in the autumn of 1914; yet her diary is completely lacking in racial judgement; rather, there is a heartfelt fascination with, and sympathy for, the Indian soldiers.

  Another visitor of note to the camp was Horace Grant, one of the famous Grant Brothers who became star staff photographers for the Daily Mirror. From the dates of his photographs, Grant seems to have arrived at the Marseilles racecourse on 30 September 1914. He took a whole collection of photographs that show the Lahore Division preparing itself for war. Using an old-fashioned panoramic camera, probably sited on the high vantage point of the nearby Château Borély, Grant produced a stunning overview of the scene that solidifies everything Bibikoff described and sketched. The panorama shows the racecourse as a sea of canvas, with long terraces of tents arranged like a series of New York city blocks. Overhead hangs a hazy layer of smoke from cooking fires. The racetrack itself has been transformed into an oval parade ground, around which the men of the Indian Corps can be seen training and marching. By the white rails of the track have been stacked rows of huge, tapped barrels that contain drinking water, and neatly arranged not far from them are the mountain-guns of the artillery batteries. On the fringes of the panorama are the mules shipped across the world to haul those guns into battle. Here and there are clusters of men engaged in rifle drill, while others sit on the grass, cross-legged, fitting cartridges to the canvas belts of the machine guns. With the skyline of Marseilles beyond the edge frame, and only the mountains and the waters of the Mediterranean as a distant backdrop, it is a scene that could as easily be in Bombay or Calcutta.

  Grant’s panorama is also a picture of an army that is essentially Victorian, in both equipment and organization. Although the men of the Indian Corps were seasoned veterans, unlike most of the continental conscripts already at the front, there is still something innocent about the scenes – the little clusters of figures, the dated artillery pieces, the mules and marching drills. The same innocence is palpable in images taken just weeks earlier of the Kaiser’s army, marching off to an industrial war wearing their leather Pickelhaube helmets, and the legions of France in their blue tunics and red trousers. The Indian Corps had perhaps more excuse than most to be under-prepared, being an army created for frontier wars against rebellious tribes and now suddenly hurried across oceans.

  Seven weeks earlier, a meeting of the War Council was held at 10 Downing Street. In attendance alongside the Cabinet were General Douglas Haig, then commander of I Corps of the British Expeditionary Force, and Lord Kitchener as the newly appointed Secretary of State for War. Both men had long predicted that Britain would, in the end, be forced to fight a war against Germany. Both had prophesied that when that war came, it would be long and protracted; in 1909 Kitchener had estimated that any war with Germany would last at least three years.9 At Downing Street on 6 August, as plans for the deployment of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) took shape, Kitchener called for the mobilization of the Indian Army. Orders were to be issued for the call up of the 3rd Indian Division (renamed the Lahore Division) and the 7th Division (which became the Meerut Division). The minutes taken confirm that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith believed his ‘cabinet were averse to sending native troops too far West, and he felt very strongly that it was undesirable’.10 However, the situation in France was so grave and the warnings of a long war had such an impact that the plan agreed was for the two Indian divisions to be dispatched, in the first instance to Egypt, and there readied for potential use in France. The next day King George V issued a formal pardon to all men of the Indian Army currently absent without leave or in a state of desertion, giving them until October to hand themselves in. It was on 8 August that the newly named Indian divisions received orders for mobilization and the chaotic scramble to assemble men, arms and equipment began.

  The scenes in the two ports of embarkation, Bombay and Karachi, were as frenetic as those at the various regimental headquarters, military cantonments and railway stations. Units were forced to depart only partially formed, others could not get all their officers to the ports of embarkation before their transports had to depart, and some British officers were on leave in Britain or in transit when the call came. Likewise, Indian officers and men who were on leave in their remote home villages could not easily be contacted. Despite the best work of the army and the Indian railways, many regiments left only partially equipped, in the hope that the mess could be sorted out at their destination – and where that would be was still uncertain too. As the transports were loaded in Bombay, the enterprising management of the Taj Mahal Hotel offered white officers a preferential rate to bring in custom.11 Sepoys – the ordinary Indian privates – and Indian officers were not similarly welcomed; they stayed in camps or in the warehouses by the docks. On 24 August the first ships of the Lahore Division sailed from Karachi. As the troops had not been informed where they were heading, there were constant rumours: that they were being sent to Egypt to guard the Suez Canal, then that they
were to be stationed in Malta to free up white British soldiers for deployment in Europe. There was also a pervasive fear within the army, and among India’s ruling elite, that if the Indians were intended to fight in Europe the war might be over before they could make their presence felt on the battlefield.

  The departure of this great armada of transport ships and escorts represented a profound break with British imperial tradition. The Indian Army had fought beyond the borders of the Raj before, but never in Europe. Its soldiers had recently, and controversially, been denied the opportunity to prove their valour during the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). But now, within two days of Britain’s declaration of war, the decision had been made to prepare them for a role on the European continent, in a conflict in which Britain itself was imperilled and in which they would face a white enemy. While the architects of the modern Indian Army had never had any difficulty envisaging Indian troops doing battle with Russian soldiers in the valleys of Afghanistan, they had rarely imagined them at war in the heart of Europe against a Western European foe.

  The decision was down to simple arithmetic. In total numbers of fighting men, the Triple Entente powers – Britain, France, and Russia – had the advantage over Germany and Austria-Hungary; but the British Expeditionary Force dispatched to Rouen and Boulogne on 12 August was, by the standards of the great conscript armies of the continental powers, minuscule. Whereas the German Army was 1.9 million strong and the forces of Austria-Hungary 450,000, the British Expeditionary Force fielded just 70,000 men, albeit superbly trained and experienced ones. The British Indian Army, though, was the largest volunteer army in the world, with 150,000 of its 240,000 men ready for immediate service.