The World's War

by David Olusoga

  The spread of negative stories from the front, through soldiers’ letters, into the high-recruitment areas of the subcontinent such as the Punjab and the Kathmandu Valley was a cause of concern. Many men were from military families, and some attempted to warn their brothers not to join up, or if they were already in the army to do all in their power to be avoid being sent to France. An Afridi wrote to his brother, who was attached to another regiment: ‘If we can find a way, I will save myself… If you can, do not remain fit for duty Become “sick” & do not go to the battle again.’ Other messages attempted to convey the same meaning while avoiding the attention of the Censor. Howell was at times apparently impressed when such warnings were hidden or coded behind metaphor. In his report of 13 February 1915 he wrote:

  Orientals excel in the art of conveying information without saying anything definite. When they have a meaning to convey in this way, they are apt to use the phrase ‘Think this over till you understand it’, or some equivalent, as an indication that they are doing so to the reader. This phrase is becoming increasingly common in letters from all sources.

  A powerful and recurring theme in the censored letters is a deep sense of grievance against one particular British policy, which exposed a cultural gulf between the British and Indian soldiers. By the traditions absorbed in the Indian Army, when a man had fought bravely and been wounded in battle he had fulfilled his obligations as a warrior: it was inconceivable that a man who had suffered wounds and acquired Izzat should be nursed back to health only to be sent, once again, to face mortal danger. To the British, however, convalescence and recovery of a soldier naturally led to his return to active duty. The British Army seems to have struggled to fully grasp the extent to which Indian soldiers felt differently about this. As early as December 1914 Howell was warning his superiors how deeply this grievance was felt. One Garhwali soldier, recovering from his wounds, had asked: ‘How can a man be saved? There is no chance of it. Even he who has been wounded and recovers has to go again and fight?’57 A week earlier, a Sikh soldier had written to his brother, telling him: ‘Since the 10th February I have returned to the trenches. For the wounded who recover to some extent are sent back there. My heart is very sorrowful.’58 This point of deep cultural difference was one that the post-1857 Indian Army had never been able to smooth over, and it was thrown into stark relief by the devastating casualty rates experienced on the Western Front.

  By the spring of 1915 British and Indian forces had managed to hold the line and helped halt all German attacks on the Ypres sector. They had, however, never been on the offensive, other than small-scale, localized counter-attacks. In December 1914, Russian attacks on the Eastern Front had drawn German troops away from France, thereby increasing the potential impact of any Allied attacks in the West. Determined to show that the British Army was a full partner, and unwilling to wait for the arrival of Kitchener’s volunteer armies then in training, the commander of the BEF, Sir John French, began preparations for the first British offensive. It was to be launched against Neuve Chapelle, a small and insignificant village about twenty miles from the town of Ypres, which had found itself sandwiched between the two sides in the autumn of 1914.

  Today, Neuve Chapelle, with its terraces of small houses and simple brick church, has been rebuilt. The fields in which so many men fought and died are once again used to grow cabbages. Other than the war memorial in front of the church and the brass cartridge cases brought to the surface each year by the plough, there is little to indicate that a battle was ever fought here. Yet even before the offensive of 1915, blood had already seeped into the soil around Neuve Chapelle. The Indian Corps themselves had taken the village in October 1914, in the period when possession of it passed back and forth between opposing armies. In spring 1915, though, Neuve Chapelle was firmly in German hands, at the centre of a salient – a protrusion of the German lines into British-held territory, a great looping bulge on the map that almost invited attack. Even more enticingly, beyond Neuve Chapelle was the valuable high ground of Aubers Ridge, and beyond that the strategic town of Lille, a major German transport hub. Neuve Chapelle stood opposite the heart of the sector of the British line that was defended by Indians, who would inevitably become part of the offensive. When the attack did come, almost half of the attacking troops would be Indians.

  The Battle of Neuve Chapelle is what passed for a success on the Western Front of 1915 – a success with a cost. The plan was for the 7th and 8th British divisions and the Indian Corps to take the village and then push on into the open country and, if possible, seize Aubers Ridge. Preparations were extensive and professionally handled, with many of the lessons learnt in the eight months of war effectively applied. There was a great concentration of firepower and stockpiling of shells. The Royal Flying Corps won, and then maintained air supremacy, and used that advantage to take good aerial photographs of the enemy positions, which, along with the clear and plentiful maps that were made available to the attackers, helped the British to plan and execute the assault. Yet, despite all the careful preparation, the battle itself followed the same basic plot as almost every battle fought in France and Belgium until 1918, with short-term success being squandered, allowing the enemy to regroup and prevent a ‘breakthrough’.

  Following a bombardment by 500 guns of various calibre – the biggest British operation of the war to date – the assaulting forces, both British and Indian, attacked together at 8:05 on the morning of 10 March. The artillery had done its job, the enemy barbed-wire entanglements were mainly broken, and some of the front-line trenches had been pulverized. The Germans were outnumbered by about seven to one, by an attacking force that was 60,000 strong. German troops who had endured the worst of the bombardment were in a state of shock, dazed by the unexpected onslaught, and the British and Indians took their trenches within the first hour of fighting. After a scheduled pause to allow for a second artillery bombardment, the British troops, along with men from both the Lahore and Meerut divisions, attacked the village itself. Fighting house-to-house, they forced out the Germans, who retreated to rear positions. In a story that was soon being told and retold in the British newspapers and illustrated magazines, Rifleman Gane Gurung of the 2nd Gurkhas launched a one-man assault on one house from which German troops had been firing. Moments after bursting through the front door, Gane, all five feet and two inches of him, was seen marching out of the house with his rifle trained on eight German soldiers whom he had taken prisoner, each of them far larger than himself. Gane was later awarded the Order of Merit for his actions.

  After the Germans had been driven from the village, they were pushed into a nearby wood, the Bois de Biez. When the British and Indian forces reached the wood it was dusk, and although the area appeared to be empty, suggesting the German forces had fallen back, the situation was highly dangerous and uncertain. The flank was exposed, and with no confirmation that the Germans had fled it was decided not to enter into the woods but rather to hold positions along the Layes Brook, a ditch that offered the only cover in the cabbage fields between the village and the Bois de Biez. There, they dug in for the night. Under the cover of darkness, however, the Germans brought up significant reinforcements and constructed their own new line of defences both in the woods and in front of them. At dawn, the men of the Garhwal Brigade saw the newly excavated German trenches, complete with barbed wire and machine guns. The assaults that followed against the improvised German defences resulted in heavy Indian losses. A German counter-attack on the third day was similarly calamitous, resulting in considerable losses among the Germans.

  The day after the battle, a Sikh officer of the 47th Sikhs, a regiment of the Lahore Division, wrote to his father in the Punjab describing his experience:

  …since the 10th we have been engaged in a great battle. At first the enemy were in some places two hundred yards from us, in others three hundred, & in others one hundred yards & over against them were we. We killed them & they killed us. Now we have begun to advance & have beat
en the enemy well back. In these last two days our people have driven the enemy far back and have taken about 3000 prisoners. Of course we lost heavily, but we also inflicted heavy loss on the enemy & we are in possession of three covering trenches. The enemy are now very frightened. When our men without a thought for their own dear lives & loyalty to our dear Government reach the enemy’s trenches, the Germans in fear throw down their rifles & come running towards us with their hands up. Now we hope that victory is very near. I expect you will see your son very soon… Our losses have been great, but we died doing a good work. On the 11th & 12th our losses alone were a captain killed, six British officers wounded, three Indian officers killed & six wounded, & many men were killed.59

  A day later, Sepoy Bigya Singh, a Garhwali, wrote to his family boasting that ‘our regiment has exhibited great bravery. The fame of Garhwals is now higher than the skies. One of the Garhwals, a Havaldar [Sergeant], has won the honour of the Victoria Cross’.60 On 14 March, the day after the battle had ended, Sir John French felt able to cable the Viceroy of India that ‘the Indian troops under Sir James Willcocks fought with great gallantry and marked success in the capture of Neuve Chapelle’, although he also had to acknowledge that ‘the fighting was very severe and the losses heavy’.61 Over the course of three days’ fighting the Meerut Division suffered 2,353 casualties and the Lahore Division 1,694. Total British casualties numbered 11,652.62 While some of the attacking Indian troops were exhilarated by the battle, others were becoming convinced that they had no chance of surviving the war.*4 One Sikh soldier concluded to his father that ‘There is no hope that I shall see you again for we are as grain that is flung a second time into the oven, and life does not come from it.’63 Another soldier, a Rajput, warned his family: ‘Do not think that this is war. This is not war, it is the ending of the world.’64

  Six thousand miles away in India, the recipients of the letters were drawing their own conclusions. Among the so-called martial races, rates of recruitment dropped dramatically, just as quotas were hugely increased. As each affected community learnt of the scale of the suffering that its sons and brothers were being exposed to – at the First Battle of Ypres during the winter and now at Neuve Chapelle – the flow of young men willing to join up dwindled. This was another factor that led the British to recruit from peoples they had not traditionally considered to be martial races.

  As for the depopulated village of Neuve Chapelle itself, it remained under British control until 1918, when it was once more lost to the Germans – this time by its Portuguese defenders. Their austere war cemetery – yet another enclosed square of granite headstones and tended lawns – stands amid the drab cabbage fields on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle, within view of the memorial to the missing of the Indian Corps.

  THE ROYAL PAVILION HOSPITAL, BRIGHTON, 1915. In Britain’s best-known building in the ‘oriental’ style, convalescing Indian soldiers sit in bath chairs on the lawns. The wards – laid out in the former galleries of the Royal Pavilion – are filled with rows of neat, iron-framed beds with white, starched linen. The beds are interspersed with elegant pot plants, and plentiful light streams in through tall windows. In each bed sits an Indian soldier in a white turban. Nurses and doctors flit between them, tending to the most needy. To assist in their recuperation, the patients are given access to the grounds, and twice a week they are graced by recitals played on the grand pipe organ built into the southern side of the Pavilion’s great dome. There are also electric lantern exhibitions and endless visits from well-wishers. For those patients who are mobile, there is outside seating. For Indian NCOs there is a separate recreational suite of rooms; on the wall of one of these hangs a signed photograph of King George V.65

  Since December 1914, those convalescing soldiers fit enough have been permitted to go on sightseeing tours beyond Brighton. There are visits to the Tower of London, London Zoo and the Natural History Museum, and trips to view Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and more sites besides. Some Indian soldiers ride the London Underground or visit Selfridges for an hour’s shopping.66 It is sometimes hard for them to take it all in. One soldier writes home: ‘Today I saw a museum in which all the living fish of the world were kept in boxes of water, and a magnificent palace which cost millions of pounds.’67

  Once discharged from their treatment, the soldiers are presented with a Short History of the Royal Pavilion, which, among other things, records the royal visit to the hospital on 25 August 1915, when:

  …the King and Queen by their gracious sympathy gave many wounded soldiers a proud and happy memory that will be handed down to generations. In many an Indian village in the years to come these soldiers, their fighting days long over, will talk to their children’s children of the Great War. Their faces will then glow with pride as they tell of that day when they were lying wounded in a Royal Palace and the King and Queen came to their bedsides and spoke to them words of tender sympathy and cheer.

  Among the Indian casualties at Neuve Chapelle were 1,495 wounded sepoys and 36 wounded Indian officers. The most seriously injured of these men were evacuated to six military hospitals that had been established in southern England, at Milford-on-Sea, New Milton, Brockenhurst, Bournemouth and Brighton, where two hospitals were set up very near one another. These facilities were in addition to the field hospitals behind the lines, which received men straight from the battlefield, and the clearing hospitals in France.

  The Indian military hospitals in England were to treat almost 15,000 wounded Indians. The biggest was the complex of commandeered buildings in Brighton, including an old workhouse, which came to be known as the Kitchener Hospital. At its height this was the largest of all the military hospitals in Britain, with 1,736 beds and, as The Times put it rather indelicately, ‘an asylum for 20 insane’.68 Not as large, but more significant in terms of its propaganda role, was the Royal Pavilion Hospital, established within the faux-oriental seaside retreat built in the 18th century for King George IV. With only 724 beds it was far smaller than the neighbouring facility, but its setting, under mock Islamic domes and minarets, seemed the ideal location not only to treat the Indian soldiers but to demonstrate to the wider world the high level of medical and pastoral care they were receiving in British hospitals. These men of India were, after all, being treated in a ‘Royal Palace’, or so the propaganda claimed.

  In 1915 the Brighton Corporation produced a widely distributed pamphlet – A Short History in English, Gurmukhi & Urdu of the Royal Pavilion Brighton and a Description of It as a Hospital for Indian Soldiers. This expensively produced booklet detailed the many wondrous medical facilities and architectural delights of the Pavilion Hospital. The dome, beneath which a great circular ward for the Indian troops had been established, was described as ‘a lofty, spacious building of beautiful proportions’ and ‘with its fine proportions and rich colouring now mellowed with age would form at all times a good subject for a painter’s brush, and a specially striking one now when filled with wounded Indians’. The whole palace, as the Short History explained, had been designed by a ‘distinguished architect [who] had studied in India and had studied Eastern Architecture’, so that ‘with its domes and minarets and Pavilion [it] might have been designed as an Indian palace’. Fashionable Brighton had been chosen by George IV as the site for his oriental folly in part because the king had been influenced by the contemporary belief in the regenerative properties of sea waters and sea air. Similar considerations had influenced the military authorities in 1914. Again, the prevailing belief that Indians struggled in the cold suggested that they should be accommodated only in the warmer parts of southern England. The Short History promised that ‘Everything has been done to make the wounded Indians as comfortable and happy as possible. Not only do they live in a Royal Palace, but the splendid grounds which surround it have been reserved for them, which goes far to promote their quick return to health and strength.’69

  ‘Naturally,’ explained a reporter from The Times who toured the Pavilion Ho
spital in May 1915, ‘the conduct of a hospital for Indian wounded is a much more complicated business than the conduct of a hospital for Europeans.’ There was some truth in that observation. As in the Indian Corps itself, the hospital was organized along lines of religion and caste. A Sikh temple was improvised in a marquee erected in the grounds, while a makeshift mosque was built on the lawns in front of the dome, enabling Muslim patients to face east during their prayers under the shadow of an Islamic-style structure. Enormous energies went into preparing appropriate food for men of the various faiths, and the hospital had nine strictly separate kitchens. To supply them, and the kitchens of the other Indian hospitals, the India Office sourced and imported huge quantities of Indian foods – flour, dhal and ghee as well as various spices. The Short History boasted:

  There are proper caste cooks, with a head cook in charge of each kitchen… Orders that none but these cooks are allowed in the kitchens are posted on the doors in Urdu, Gurmukhi, and Hindi. The food of the Hindus is handed out from the store to the different head cooks by a high caste Brahmin. He, of course has nothing to do with the meat store as he cannot touch dead flesh… In every ward there are two water taps used only for drinking water, one for the Hindus another for the Mohammedans.70

  The segregation of amenities extended to the provision of water taps and the slaughter of animals. No beef was permitted within the hospital, lest it offend the Hindus, and pork was likewise banned out of respect to the Muslims. The Indian wounded were also shielded from the proselytizing of Christian groups. When a supply of envelopes arrived from the YMCA bearing the initials of that organization, the Censor’s office decided that the four offending initials should be removed from each envelope. Similarly, when Christian-themed books were found to have been distributed by presumably well-meaning visitors, this breach in protocol was looked upon dimly by the hospital authorities, who were desperate to avoid any suggestion that the patients were the subject of any unwanted missionary work.