The World's War

by David Olusoga

  The truth was that the Indian army that had been dispatched from Bombay and Karachi in the frenetic chaos of August 1914 had, by the end of 1915, effectively ceased to exist. The loss of so many white multilingual officers had had deleterious consequences, as had the denuding of the corps’ Indian officers. The reserves sent to fill up the ranks of the sepoys had, in many cases, been men whose physical condition said much about the enduring poverty that blighted the regions from which the martial races were drawn. Even those who were fit and strong could no more be compared to the veterans who had landed in Marseilles in 1914 than Kitchener’s volunteers and Pals Battalions could be regarded as soldiers of the same calibre as the career professionals of the BEF, who had died in the fields and canal banks of Flanders alongside the Indians.

  The Indian Corps’ depletion over fourteen terrible months was not simply in the loss of any one class of officer or soldier; it was in the catastrophic disruption to a whole ecosystem of relationships, traditions, expectations, unspoken understandings and cultural awareness that had, somehow, enabled the whole bizarre structure to work, and work well enough for it to be transplanted to Europe and thrust into a war the nature of which no nation or military commentator had accurately predicted. It has been argued that the Indian Corps probably never really recovered from its losses at Neuve Chapelle. Yet what really undermined its capacity as a fighting unit was the sheer relentlessness of the men’s deployment. Just a month after losing the 4,047 casualties of Neuve Chapelle, they were again involved in action, at the Second Battle of Ypres. There they fought not in a long-planned and well-prepared British offensive, but as part of the desperately cobbled together defensive force rushed to the battlefield following the devastating German gas attack of 22 April. Two days later, the units of the Lahore Division were marched north to the Ypres Salient; they arrived on 25 April, and the next day were involved in a concerted counter-attack that was itself checked by more German gas. It was there that Jemadar Mir Dast won his Victoria Cross, and there that the Indian Corps suffered another 3,899 casualties – around 20 per cent of those who had taken part in the battle killed, wounded or missing. On 31 August 1915, with the war one year and one month old, the Indian Corps counted its losses. By that date, after having fought in the First and Second battles of Ypres, and at Neuve Chapelle and innumerable smaller operations and defensive actions, 3,970 men had been confirmed killed and 19,976 had been wounded. Another 4,360 were ‘missing’ and 586 listed as ‘other deaths’. The previous day, as these figures were tallied, orders had been issued for yet another attack in which the Indian Corps was to play a role.

  The mining town of Loos was renowned even before the war as a bleak and dismal place, and after a year of fighting it was pock-marked by artillery. The great slag heaps, the metal towers of the pit heads and the ruins of the town itself made it one of the worst places on the whole of the Western Front to launch an attack; yet it was here that the British and Indian forces were to assault the German lines while the French attacked to the north in Artois. The Germans had learnt the lessons of the first year of the war well, and they were already moving towards a system of ‘defence in depth’, which meant that attacking Allied troops who breached the front lines would be drawn into killing zones commanded by German artillery and machine guns, many of them concealed behind concrete emplacements. At Loos they had established observations posts on the great mounds of mining waste, from which they had commanding views of the battlefield. To increase their chances of success, the British decided they would retaliate in kind for the Second Battle of Ypres and use their own chlorine gas in the attack.

  The Battle of Loos would be the first major outing for units of Kitchener’s home-grown army of volunteers – fresh and enthusiastic, but untested. This time, having been involved in almost all of the most costly British engagements of the war so far, the Indian Corps was to have only a supporting role. The Indians were to take part in assaults of the first day, 25 September, as well as launching a series of feints intended to draw the German defenders away from the main areas of the line to be assaulted. That first day was as disastrous as those that followed. Once again, a lack of independence of action given to soldiers and officers on the ground undermined careful British preparations. The British gas was released at the allotted time of 05.50, but only because the Royal Engineers manning the cylinders were given no discretion on the matter – a critical flaw when dealing with a weapon carried by the changeable wind. Much of the gas blew back into the faces of the attackers. Ten minutes later, one British unit, fighting alongside the 2/3rd Gurkhas, attacked the German lines, but the wire had not been cut by the British artillery bombardment, and they found themselves funnelled towards the German machine guns, which fired blindly into the smoke and gas but with devastating results. The next day, men of the Garhwal Brigade made enormous progress, but, as was the case throughout the battle, the reserves were too far behind the lines to build on initial success. It was for this miscalculation that the British commander-in-chief, Sir John French, was to be removed from his post and replaced by General Haig.

  It was at Loos that the full potential of the Maxim gun was unleashed. From a range of 1,500 yards, the German guns stopped the British attack in its tracks. The machine guns overheated from constant firing, and estimates vary, but they might have killed or wounded over 8,000 of the 15,000 attackers. German machine-gunners, appalled by the effectiveness of their work, were reported to have ceased firing when the British began their retreat, unwilling to add any more dead to the ‘corpse field of Loos’.87

  The Indian Corps alone suffered 3,973 casualties in a battle that achieved little. They were commended for their role by both Sir John French and General Haig, but it was clear that, in Howell’s terms, the ‘breaking point had been reached’. Conscious of the losses they had sustained, of the near breakdown of the corps’ regimental structure and the sheer exhaustion of the men, Howell remained ever watchful for the signs of collapsing morale or anti-British feeling in letters. Both the Lahore and Meerut divisions were by now nothing like the fighting force they had been a year earlier. When the 59th Rifles had landed in France in September 1914, their strength stood at 13 British officers, 18 Indian officers and 810 other ranks. By the start of November 1915, the regiment had no British officers at all, just 4 Indian officers and a mere 75 other ranks. The 47th Sikhs had suffered even greater losses: they had no officers at all, British or Indian, and only 28 men.88 Critically, the regimental structure of the Indian Corps had also come close to collapse. Men were serving in ersatz units made up of the shattered fragments of once cohesive regiments that had borne their own long traditions and collective memories.

  There was always a part of the British Army that distrusted the Indian Army and feared the consequences of their deployment in Europe. The longer men from India remained in France and Belgium and watched the mighty British unable to defeat Germany – a nation few Indians had heard of before 1914 – the greater the potential damage to British prestige. Likewise, the longer the Indians fought alongside white men, who were demonstrably as vulnerable, fragile, terrified and mortal as they, the greater the damage done to white racial prestige in India. Their potential contacts with white women – in Brighton, Marseilles and elsewhere – seemed to threaten another of the most powerful taboos of empire. And now units of Kitchener’s volunteers had been trained and were arriving in France and Belgium.

  The mass home-grown army that Britain had lacked in 1914, when the decision to send the Lahore and Meerut divisions had been made, had rapidly and efficiently been forged. The Indians had helped provide Britain with the time that Kitchener had asked for during the War Council meetings of August 1914. With the new armies surging into the front lines and re-invigorating the British war effort, priorities changed, and the Indians were no longer needed. Their deployment in Europe had been an emergency measure, and the emergency had – it seemed – passed. Willcocks proudly concluded that the Indian Corps had ‘done their full sh
are of the work they were sent to do’.89 In all 138,608 Indians had fought on the Western Front in the first 14 months of the war. Only the cavalry were to stay on until 1918, to fight mainly as mobile infantry.

  The last ship carrying the last of the Indian Corps infantry regiments left Marseilles on 26 December 1915, exactly fourteen months to the day since the Castilia and the Mongara had arrived. This final transport, however, did not carry the Indian veterans back to Bombay or Karachi, from where they had departed in August 1914; it was bound for Basra – the main British military base in what was then known as Mesopotamia and today as Iraq. The Indian Army’s war was to be as global as the British Empire itself.

  *1 The Indian Mutiny is referred to in modern India as the Indian Rebellion or the First War of Indian Independence.

  *2 The natural corollary of the British belief that some tribes or races were naturally noble, war-like and dependable was that others were considered to lack those qualities. There were those peoples who, while not simply being written off as potential recruits, represented such a confluence of negative qualities as defined by British ethnography that they needed to be specially categorized and closely monitored – and, if necessary, suppressed. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 stands alongside the martial-races theory in the history of applied ethnography. This Act built upon previous legislation to define a handful of India’s minorities as innately criminal. They were, in this conception, literally born criminals. Among the tribes targeted by this legislation were some of India’s nomadic, itinerant peoples, notably the Gypsies, whose lives of constant movement and palpable independence jarred with the ambitions of imperial order and control. They were not alone; British legislation also defined the Badhaks, Dakoo and Kuzzak peoples as criminal tribes.

  *3 The British were also able to call on three divisions of dismounted cavalry – horses were of little use in the muddy morass of Flanders.

  *4 While Captain Howell monitored the Indians’ letters and watched for signs of impending collapse, the British High Command set out to see what tactical lessons could be drawn from Neuve Chapelle. The costly, three-day offensive and the loss of momentum at the end of the first day should have been interpreted as a clear demonstration of how recent German military reorganizations had placed far greater agency in the hands of junior commanders on the ground, who were able to adapt to circumstances, withdraw, and call in reinforcements, while British forces wasted time awaiting orders from distant commanders who were all too often beyond the easy reach of communications. The British had misinterpreted those German reorganizations, which increased the firepower of each regiment while at the same tine lowering the head count, as evidence that Germany was running out of men. This was one of the greatest feats of wishful thinking in the whole history of the war.

  Chapter 3

  ‘No longer the agents of culture’

  Imperial dreams, African nightmares

  12 AUGUST 1914. In eastern Belgium, four regiments of mounted German Cuirassiers descend upon the town of Haelen, charging with lances and sabres. In this ‘Battle of the Silver Helmets’, as it becomes known, they are repulsed at terrible cost by the Belgian defenders’ rifle fire. No one in Europe can possibly know that this is the last mass cavalry charge that the German Army will ever launch. To the southwest, the first of the enormous 420mm shells fired from the Germans’ ‘Big Bertha’ howitzers crash down upon the supposedly impregnable forts that ring the Belgian city of Liège. When The Times later prints reports of Germany’s new super-weapons, they are dismissed as fanciful by British military experts, who disbelieve that such vast shells are technically possible.1

  French troops – unwisely still dressed in their conspicuous but traditional red trousers and blue greatcoats – continue to surge across the border with Germany, in what will prove for them the calamitous Battle of the Frontiers. Meanwhile, in London the British Empire finally declares war on Austria-Hungary, which is in the process of invading Serbia. The British Expeditionary Force, having begun landing in northern France on 7 August, is marching into Belgium – and, unbeknownst to them, headlong into a German army several times its size. Also on 12 August, Germany itself is under invasion, as General Paul von Rennenkampf, commanding the Russian First Army, crosses the border and captures a town five miles inside East Prussia. In Malmedy, Belgium, Obit Jahnow becomes the first German pilot to die in the conflict, after his plane crashes.

  On the same day – 3,000 miles away and little noticed at the time – British and German units approach one another through the African bush, in the German colony of Togoland. A piece of history is made. Regimental Sergeant Major Alhaji Grunshi, of the British West African Frontier Force, fires the first British shot of the war on land, as he and his unit attack Lomé, Togoland’s capital, before they move on towards the village of Kamina. It is not until ten days later that Edward Thomas, of the 4th Irish Dragoon Guards, becomes the first white British soldier to fire a round, in Europe. Incredibly, and against all the odds, both Alhaji Grunshi and Edward Thomas survive the full four years of the war.

  For Britain and its empire, the land war has begun – not in Europe, but in Africa. For both the British and the Germans, it will end there too, at another half-forgotten clearing in the bush, surrounded by African fields and farms.

  Europe’s troubles ignited a conflict in Africa. Yet for much of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, European statesmen had worried – often with good reason – that some minor incident in Africa might become the spark for a European war. The most serious flashpoint came in 1898 with the ‘Fashoda Incident’, when a French expedition attempting to claim southern Sudan collided with British units from Egypt near the tiny, backwater village of Fashoda: for a few days, it became the focus of world attention and the obsession of two global empires. A tense standoff ensued. It was only luck, circumstance and the skills of a gifted generation of diplomats and statesmen, who were acutely awake to the potential dangers, that avoided events like these leading to war. The idea that France and Britain might have gone to war in 1898 seems all the more bizarre to us now when we remember that all the leading officers who confronted one another in the Sudanese desert – Jean-Baptiste Marchand and a young ambitious lieutenant, Charles Mangin, on the French side, and Sir Herbert Kitchener and Horace Smith-Dorrien on the British – were, just sixteen years later, leaders in their nations’ joint struggle against Germany on the Western Front.

  By 1914, the concern that a clash over some slice of colonial African real estate might spark a conflagration in Europe had largely receded. The thick black lines that now cut across the map of the African interior had begun to acquire an air of permanence. Although it was generally recognized that some of those borders might – at some future date – require adjustments and refinements, there was a sense that it was in the interests of the European powers to cooperate with one another in the development of Africa and in the suppression of its indigenous peoples. This did not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that the continent had been at peace. The list of wars, punitive raids and military expeditions unleashed against the peoples of Africa over this period by the colonizing powers is depressingly long. Outnumbered enormously by the black populations they ruled over, white settlers in Africa developed a strong sense of white comradeship across nationalities, which was paralleled – in a more cautious and qualified way – between governments in Europe. Britain in particular, which had the choicest slices of the African pie, was in a position to appear generous. Around a quarter of the land surface of the African continent was ruled by Queen-Empress Victoria, and the British ruling elites were able, in public at least, to sound magnanimous towards European nations who had more modest territorial claims. When those lesser colonial powers fought wars against their subject peoples, the British tended to see their actions as being in keeping with the advance of progress and the inevitable extension of white rule over black Africans – whom Rudyard Kipling described as Europe’s ‘new-caught sullen peoples’. Even
when those wars expanded in scale and escalated in barbarism – as in the case of the German genocide against the Nama and Herero peoples in South West Africa (Namibia) in 1904–08 – the British did not often feel inclined to condemn the actions of a nation that many had come to regard as Britain’s junior partner in the great mission to civilize. Indeed, German propaganda from 1919, after Germany had been stripped of its colonies by the Treaty of Versailles, went to great pains to collate and meticulously re-publish articles from the British press that had praised Germany’s roles in Africa as colonizer, civilizer, educator and pacifier.*1

  This sense of common venture and racial comradeship was always strongest, though, among the settlers and colonial administrators on the ground. In the southern and eastern portions of the continent, where the climate allowed for relatively comfortable white settlement and the development of European-style farming, settlers tended to see one another as outnumbered pioneers, isolated and scattered over great distances, so they had to rely on one another in moments of crisis. White racial unity was reinforced by the experiences of war and uprisings, in which all whites – soldiers, settlers and farmers – fought alongside one another. Often these white communities were multi-national –Boers (Afrikaners) in German East Africa and British East Africa, alongside Swedes and other Scandinavians, for example. When it came to defending white rule and drafting laws and establishing economies that operated in the best interests of European settlers, appeals to white racial unity tended to trump the divisions of European nationalism. (The Boers of South Africa, whose own sense of nationalism existed independently of European rivalries, were the exception to the rule.)