That the Indian Corps was ultimately deployed in Europe, rather than sent to garrison the Middle East or the Mediterranean, was decided by the flow of events during their transit. The war in the West rapidly descended into a series of almost daily crises and reversals for the French, British and Belgians. The German war plan – the famous Schlieffen Plan – appeared to be unstoppable and the Kaiser’s army nearly invincible. Fortresses designed to halt armies – some of them recently re-designed, re-armed and reinforced – were either bypassed or crushed (in some cases literally) by guns of unheard-of calibre and destructive power. What mattered now were not fortifications but men and their rapid deployment. At the Battle of Mons, on 23 August, the BEF had crashed headlong into a German force that was overwhelmingly superior in size and firepower. Despite the legendary marksmanship of the British troops, they were forced back into a desperate retreat. What Britain needed from its Indian Army in 1914 were simply men – to hold lines, plug gaps and halt German assaults with rifle fire and bayonets.
Germany had been far better prepared for war than any of its enemies; however, that preparedness relied on a short war in the West. Germany’s chief enemy appeared to be time: the more of it that elapsed, the more Britain and France would have the opportunity to draw men and materials from their empires, and the more prospect there was that Russia would be able to fully mobilize its vast army and place its semi-feudal economy on something approaching a war footing. The long continental war that Kitchener and Haig had prophesied was exactly the war that Germany desperately sought to avoid, for in such a conflict Britain would adapt its industries to war production, strangle German trade and imports with the iron tentacles of the Royal Navy, and recruit an army large enough to play a full role alongside France and in concert with Russia (in the east).
By mid-September, the French counter-thrust on the Marne ended any hopes of success for the Schlieffen plan. Germany’s generals and armies responded by adapting and improvising with a series of frantic assaults, beginning a pattern of failed outflanking movements followed by desperate entrenchments to secure ground taken. Mile by mile during this ‘race to the sea’, the trenches of the Western Front were born. But while there was still hope of outflanking the British and French, the Germans kept attacking. It was into the eye of this tempest that Britain flung its Indian troops. By the time they reached the Suez Canal, all talk of their spending the war standing guard over that waterway, or garrisoning islands in the Mediterranean, had evaporated, as the British Army confronted arguably the most desperate situation in its history – just over the Channel.
As the flotilla of ships carried the Indian divisions to France, the decision to deploy the Indians was transformed – organically, as well as by propaganda officers – into a dramatic demonstration of all that was right and moral about the British Empire. A degree of war euphoria, imagining the future heroic service of the Indian troops, took hold in both India and Britain. The dispatch of the Indians was taken by journalists and politicians in both London and Delhi as proof that the ties that bound the British Empire were stronger than ever, and were set to be further strengthened by the shared experience of the war. It was believed that this great imperial adventure, in which Indians and Britons would fight side-by-side, presumably in equality, would usher in a new age of cooperation and mutual respect. On 31 August 1914 The Times painted a vivid picture of India’s ‘Eagerness to Serve in Europe’:
India has thrown herself energetically into preparation for war, and a wave of ardent loyalty is sweeping over the country. The presence of British Indian troops in the fighting line, accompanied by their own Princes was the one thing necessary to seal India’s passionate devotion to the empire in the noble and heroic struggle now going on.12
A similarly effusive editorial by the Calcutta Bengali read:
We desire to say that behind the ranks of one of the finest armies in the world there are the multitudinous people of India, ready to co-operate with the Government in the defence of the Empire which, for them means, in its ultimate evolution, the complete recognition of their rights as Citizens of the finest State in the world… in the presence of a common enemy, be it German or any other power, we sink our difference, we forget our little quarrels and close our ranks and offer all that we possess in defence of the great Empire to which we are all so proud to belong, and with which the future prosperity and advancement of our people are bound up. India has always been loyal in the hour of danger.13
In his short but perfectly timed tract India and the War, Sir Ernest Trevelyan, a Calcutta high-court judge, claimed that in the India of 1914 all ‘Distinctions of race and creed have disappeared at the first suggestion of danger to the empire. Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees and Buddhists are all uniting.’14 And the Viceroy of India informed the Secretary of State for India on 8 September 1914 that ‘There is a wave of loyalty, instinctive and emotional loyalty, which has swept over the people of India.’ He added that even among ‘the Indian educated classes’ there was ‘a loyalty based on reason and the recognition of facts… It is sensible of the undeniable benefits conferred by British rule.’15
The British press was fascinated, too, by the fact that the fighting men of India had marched to war with the blessings and the financial assistance of the so-called ‘Native Princes’, through whom one-third of India was indirectly ruled via a patchwork of treaties and agreements. In August 1914, George V sent a message to the ‘Princes and People of My Indian Empire’ appealing to both for assistance and loyalty. The response was immediate and unequivocal.16 The princes fell firmly behind the war effort, and they raised vast amounts of money to equip and supply the Indian Corps. Some princes personally volunteered for service. The viceroy happily informed London that:
The Rulers of the Native States in India, who number nearly seven hundred in all, have with one accord rallied to the defense of the Empire and offered their personal services and the resources of their States for the War. From among the many Princes and Nobles who have volunteered for active service, the Viceroy has selected the Chiefs of Jodhpur, Bikaner, Kishangarh, Rutlam, Sachin, Patiala, Sir Pertab Singh, Regent of Jodhpur, the Heir Apparent of Bhopal and a brother of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, together with other cadets of noble families. The veteran Sir Pertab would not be denied his right to serve the King-Emperor in spite of his seventy years, and his nephew, the Maharaja, who is but sixteen years old, goes with him.
When the viceroy’s telegram was read in the House of Commons the following day, Andrew Bonar Law, Conservative Party leader,17 asked if the government was ‘taking every possible step to have the message circulated throughout the whole Empire?’ The backbench MP William Thorne even called for a copy of the telegram to be sent immediately to the Kaiser.18
As war euphoria took a firm hold in both Delhi and London, the rallying cries of the newspapers and the politicians were reinforced by a chorus of voices emanating from penny pamphlets that were rushed into print. The Christian philosopher Edwyn Bevan, perhaps the most eloquent of the pamphleteers of 1914, published his impassioned tract Brothers All: The War and the Race Question, arguing that the deployment of Indian troops to Europe represented not simply the rejection of an outdated racial taboo but was also the mutual will of the peoples of both Britain and India. Railing against the attempts of German propagandists to portray it otherwise, he wrote:
To our enemies the disregard of the ‘colour bar’ in the combination against them is a matter for reproach. We know already that they charge us with disloyalty to the cause of European culture, and we must be prepared to hear the charge flung against us with still greater passion when the war is over, and echoed in German books for generations to come… As a matter of fact, there is nothing very new or strange in the employment by a civilized Power of alien troops, as a weapon… If we were merely using Indian troops in the same way, without any will of their own, there would be nothing so very remarkable in it… What gives the moment its significance is that the presence of th
ese Indian troops does not represent solely the purpose of England. It represents in some degree the will of India. However the complex of feelings which we describe as ‘loyalty’ in India is to be analysed… behind the Indian troops there is the general voluntary adherence of the leading classes in India, the fighting chiefs and the educated community, to the cause for which England stands.19
India’s ‘leading classes’, its growing professional and political elites, hoped the war would lead to change of some sort. M.K. Gandhi, at that time in London, was among the many who believed that Indian participation in the war would be rewarded with some form of self-government, and he and others threw their efforts behind the troops. The moderate Indian National Congress was fully supportive of the imperial war effort and deployment of Indian soldiers to the Western Front, and the viceroy’s telegram of September 1914 duly expressed British thanks for the loyalty and assistance of a long list of Indian political, religious and civic organizations.
The Indian Army that was encamped at Marseilles in autumn 1914 had been designed, carefully and over time, to fight and win small colonial wars in India, or in other flashpoints of empire. From the 1860s onwards, it had acted as the ‘fire brigade’ of the British Empire, dampening down revolt and discord wherever needed.20 It was not equipped – as General Haig knew all too well – for a war in Europe, despite the strong pre-war urging of more far-sighted generals cognizant of the danger posed by Germany.
It was also a hybrid, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-racial, multi-faceted entity, the product of several cultures. The Raj (or Crown Colony of India, sometimes called the Empire of India) encompassed modern Burma, Pakistan and Bangladesh too, while the kingdoms of Bhutan and Nepal, home to the Gurkhas, were also under Raj domination. A large proportion of the Indian soldiers who landed in Marseilles in 1914 were therefore from villages and cities that are today no longer in India itself. But this is not to say that it was a cross-section of the Raj’s 300 million people. To understand its make-up in 1914, it is necessary to understand the impact of events almost sixty years before.
The Indian Army was a force shaped, above all, by the history of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, a crisis that grew into a war of independence against British rule in India, which in those pre-Raj days was still in the hands of the East India Company.*1 It was led by regiments of the Bengal Army of Northern India, and was sparked by an array of relatively minor grievances, some of them long-standing, many of them caused or exacerbated by a sloppy lack of concern for the religious sensitivities of both Hindu and Muslim soldiers; but it spread and mutated, becoming a civil and military uprising, and it came close to breaking Britain’s hold on the subcontinent before it was suppressed in 1858. Much of the army remained loyal to the British, and both Muslim and Hindu regiments fought alongside British forces against the rebels.
The consequences of the rebellion – other than the brutal suppression and punishment of the defeated and captured rebels – were not only the end of East India Company rule and the creation of the Raj in its place, but far-reaching army reforms. A Royal Commission, led by the Secretary of State for War, recommended the disbandment of the regiments that had mutinied, a reduction in the size of the Indian Army overall and a full reorganization of recruitment policy. The British came out of the Mutiny with a changed mindset, one that came to see the ethnic and religious diversity of India as the key to imperial security. Race and ethnicity, whether real or confected, were to become regarded as the guarantee of military loyalty. As the mutinous regiments were disbanded, often leaving the loyal soldiers literally weeping, recruitment was expanded among those peoples who had remained loyal, most notably the hill tribes of the Punjab.
These policies were reinforced in the later decades of the nineteenth century by the emergence of ethnography as an accepted science. Building on accepted ‘scientific’ assumptions and India’s existing ethnic and caste differences, ethnographers (most of them amateurs) concluded that only some of the peoples of India were ‘martial races’ – and here they used words like ‘race’, ‘clan’, ‘tribe’, ‘people’ and ‘class’ almost interchangeably. Whole swathes of the Indian population, they concluded, should be rejected for military service not just because they were deemed untrustworthy, but also because they were innately ‘passive’ or effeminate. Ethnography reinforced empirical theories emerging from 1857, and so groups like the Punjabis – both Muslims and Sikhs – that had proved their worth by remaining largely loyal in the Mutiny were now awarded the stamp of approval as ‘martial races’.
Ethnography in India was underwritten by what is today called ‘geographic determinism’, the belief that the climate and topography of a region shape and meld the characters and cultures of its peoples. In this view, the millions of Indians from the broad, warm plains of southern India as well as those from Bengal and the Deccan Plateau had, over generations, been rendered passive and effeminate by their soporific climate.*2 (Indeed, in 1881, Lord Roberts, one of the early architects of the recruitment of ‘martial races’ and commander-in-chief of the Madras Army, concluded that in courage and physique ‘the sepoys of lower India are wanting. No amount of instruction will make up for these shortcomings.’21) Conversely, the men of the hills of the north, where the winters were cold and the land only marginally productive, were regarded as being toughened by their environment and rendered war-like by geography, isolation and competition for scarce land and resources.22 The Gurkhas of mountainous Nepal were cited as the perfect example of a warrior race, a people who had been tempered by the harshness of their environment. Yet, to enable these distinctions to work, facts on the ground that appeared to contradict the theory were expunged. Ethnic groups that had little in common were amalgamated into larger, simpler categories, and some groups were even invented to help the theory along. The Gurkhas were never one people but rather a group of Nepalese clans; the reasons why some other Nepalese clans were not considered martial was not always clear or rational – especially when inter-marriage and migration blurred the boundaries. Likewise, the term ‘Dogras’, used by the British right up to the First World War to describe men from hill tribes in eastern Punjab, was a British invention.23
The application of simple categories from the martial-races theory provided a means for young British officers, arriving in India for the first time, to make sense of the complex mass of peoples, faiths, cultures and languages of the subcontinent; indeed, it had already been conveniently codified in a series of recruiting handbooks written by officers. Among the first was Eden Vansittart’s 1890 Notes on Goorkhas, which was designed to assist recruiting officers in distinguishing genuine Gurkhas from the (presumed to be) lesser tribes of the Nepalese hills. Nine years later came P.D. Bonarjee’s Handbook of the Fighting Races of India, which was followed in 1911 by the classic work on the subject, Major George MacMunn’s The Armies of India. MacMunn, whose work was still in print in the 1930s, was not a man to mince his words. ‘It is one of the essential differences between the East and the West,’ he pronounced,’ that in the East, with certain exceptions, only certain clans and classes can bear arms; the others have not the physical courage necessary for the warrior.’ 24 He explained that:
…to understand what is meant by the martial races of India is to understand from the inside the real story of India. We do not speak of the martial races of Britain as distinct from the non-martial, nor of Germany, nor of France. But in India we speak of the martial races as a thing apart and because the mass of the people have neither martial aptitude nor physical courage… the courage that we should talk of colloquially as ‘guts’.25
In MacMunn’s analysis, it was not a matter of class and status; rather, India’s history as well as its climate and topography had made some races martial and others effeminate. India’s ruling peoples he tended to discard as the ‘effeminate intelligentsia’. ‘.It is extraordinary,’ he lamented:
…that the well-born race of the upper classes in Bengal should be hopeless poltroons, while it
is absurd that the great, merry, powerful Kashmiri should have not an ounce of physical courage in his constitution, but it is so. Nor are appearances of any use as a criterion. Some of the most manly-looking people in India are in this respect the most despicable.26
‘The existence of this condition,’ he complained, ‘much complicates the whole question of enlistment in India.’
By 1914, the army’s faith in the idea of the martial races had, if anything, become even more deeply ingrained. The commander of the Indian Corps, Lieutenant General Sir James Willcocks, and J.W.B. Merewether, whose account of their time in France and Belgium was the most comprehensive, were adherents. Willcocks was an extremely senior soldier, experienced in Britain’s colonial campaigns; he was well respected and highly motivated. He was also a great believer in his Indian troops. Merewether was likewise a champion of the Indian soldier. In an appendix to his 1918 The Indian Corps in France he offered his readers a glossary of each of the martial races, beginning with an explanation that the great bulk of India’s people were ‘without physical courage and unfit for any military service’. He went on to sketch out the various ‘types’ within the Indian Corps of 1914, being particularly impressed with the Sikh from the Punjab: ‘generally a fine tall man of strong physique and stately bearing, with the manly virtues inculcated by his religion strongly developed… The chief traits of the Sikhs are a love of military adventure and a desire to make money.’ The Jats – a Hindu people – he described as ‘tall, large-limbed, and handsome, and remarkable for their toughness and capacity for enduring the greatest fatigue and privation’, in addition to which during the Indian Mutiny ‘they distinguished themselves greatly against the rebels’. The Pathans – from what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan – were ‘tall handsome men’, identifiable by an ‘easy but swaggering gait – that speaks of an active life among the mountains’. However, while the individual Pathan was ‘an ideal raider or skirmisher, full of dash’, Pathan units in the army were ‘often wanting in cohesion and power of steady resistance, unless led by British officers’. Afridi soldiers (also from the modern Afghan–Pakistan border area) Merewether believed were ‘ruthless, treacherous and avaricious’. But, he reassured his readers, ‘If you can overcome this mistrust, and be kind in words to him, he will repay you by great devotion, and he will put up with any punishment you like to give him – except abuse.’ For Merewether, it was the Gurkhas who represented the highest perfection of the martial races of India. While he complained that they all looked the same, he was adamant that there was ‘much about the Ghurkha which especially appeals to the British soldier; his friendliness, cheeriness, and adaptability make him easier to get on with than other classes’. Finally there were the Muslim soldiers from the Punjab, whom Merewether saw as ‘all-round soldiers with an attachment to their officers which is proverbial. They may, on the whole, be said to be steady and reliable – rather than brilliant in any particular respect.’27
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