During the course of the First World War, the Gurkha soldiers saw action in various fronts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A war time censor’s office was located at Boulogne, France to keep track of mail to and from troops from the Subcontinent in France and England. It was the responsibility of this office to seize letters containing ‘sensitive’ information about the war fronts and conditions back at home. The censor officers prepared frequent reports which sometimes included lengthy extracts from letters they read.
Letters written by Gurkha soldiers during World War I provide the most direct written evidence found thus far for an examination of the psychology, if you will, of Nepal’s soldiers on the battlefield. The letters which are excerpted below are from the stacks at the India Office Collection of the British Library in London. In the more than 20 volumes of censors’ reports, each consisting of more than 200 folios, one can find only about 50 letters from Gurkha soldiers.
More often than not, the exact names of the sender and receiver were deleted from these reports, and the identification went something like “from a Gurkha wounded in France to his friend in India”. The language in which the letters were written is identified as “Gurkhali” or Hindi and the extracts given are in English translation.
It is obvious that in a war participated in by thousands of Gurkha soldiers, these letters come from but a very small percentage of them. Those who could write, like the writers of these letters, must have learnt to do so in the army. It also seems reasonable to assume that most of the soldiers did not know how to read and write and their experiences are lost forever.
No other written evidence originating from the common Gurkha soldiers from World War I have been found, although it is likely that letters and diaries do exist, undiscovered in archives or attics. Even though these are translated and extracted versions of the original letters they remain useful in weaving the dukha theme into the Gurkha history of the First World War. It is sobering to note that these letters, and their messages of dukha never got through to their addressees and have only now been discovered for historical analysis.
These censored letters give us some preliminary insights into the consciousness of the Gurkha warriors, as they tried to make sense of the unbelievable horrors experienced on the front. They also provide a glimpse of the disastrous early phase of the World War from the point of view of the Gurkha soldiers. We hear about the deaths of friends and fellow fighters, of amputations, personal regrets, and the terror of earthshaking explosions. We learn that the hospitals in England are full of the wounded. We read about prisoners of war begging for a few rupees’ worth of supplies.
THE CENSOR’S TROVE
After the British Expeditionary Force sustained severe losses (in the magnitude of 15,000 men in five days) in the early phases of the war in France, a decision to reinforce it with Indian Army troops was made in August 1914. Corps of the Indian Army, with Gurkhas as part, had reached France by early October and seen action by the end of the month.
All accounts suggest that the Indian Army soldiers were poorly equipped and ill-prepared for the war in Europe. By early November, the Indian battalions had seen heavy fighting and sustained severe losses, resulting in the serious reduction of average battalion troop strengths. As has been reported by the military historian Jeffrey Greenhut, on 30 October alone the 2nd Battalion of the 8th Gurkhas lost more than 600 men in an assault by the Germans. Those who survived “straggled to the rear in confusion.”
The morale plummeted in these battalions which bore the first shocks and, as Greenhut has reported, many men seemed to be “shooting themselves in order to be taken out of the line” – there was an unusually high incidence of wounds in the left hand. There were court-martials to improve troop discipline, and a much needed rest was given to the soldiers of the Indian Corps in early January, which seems to have boosted morale a bit. Yet in February, E. M. Howell, a mail censor officer, reported that “a breaking strain was near.”
A letter written in January 1915 by a wounded Gurkha in England to his friend in a regiment serving in India: “Be anxious for me. For the war is like a huge mutiny. The Indian troops have suffered terrible losses. In my double company, the 4th, five men have been killed; and in the 2nd, one-third of the total have been killed... Our Gurkha regiments have suffered great losses... for the remainder to survive is difficult.” A letter written in March 1915: “And the firing of bullets goes on, and sister, I would like to see it. Several hundreds of thousand of men have been killed and there is no hope of survival. The water (in the trenches) is up to the knees. Ishwar (God) is ruler. What can one do? Do not worry about me.” Another letter written during the same month from a hospital: “It is not a war but the divine wrath of God (Parmeshwar). In a few days hundreds of men have been destroyed. The shells of the cannon have been flying about like rain in the rainy season.... The men who survive and go back to India should consider it as a new life. The whole world is being destroyed.”
“Perhaps the Germans will be beaten. They attacked in three lines. Two lines were blown away... When the Brigade attacks, the Gurkhas and Sikhs go first and the white troops are put in the second line. No one asks about the dead,” wrote one soldier. A Gurkha convalescing in England to another Gurkha also in England: “At first the fire of the cannon was just like an earthquake... The piles of the killed on both sides were like heaps of slaughtered goats. I am sorry that my company lost so much.” In other letters we come across lines like “it is said that all (regiments) are being finished. Here wounded men come sometimes 200, sometimes 300, and all the hospitals in England are full.” A man being treated in a hospital in Brighton wrote in May 1915: “I am wounded. What can I do. Just as on parade we used to practice the position for musketry firing, so in the war we lie down. O God, O God, when can I see my elder brother?” Another letter from hospital: “I am in the Milford Depot and am now ready for the firing line. The people who are returned to India are those whose heads, eyes, feet or hands have been rendered useless.”
Death seemed impossible to escape, hence there is repeated reference to those who have returned to India as lucky ones who have been given a new life. A soldier at the front wrote to his brother in Dehra Dun, “About the state of affairs here I tell you that both sides are using machine guns and cannon. Rifles are not much used. Consider yourself very lucky that you have returned to India.”
Some of the correspondents were dearly aware that the letters were checked, and there is often guarded reference to “I will tell you later”. Wrote one Gurkha: “You asked me about the state of affairs here. It is like being between the devil and deep sea. When I come back to India then I will sit beside you and tell you everything, but I do not know when that will be.” Another wrote: “I would write fully about the affairs here but I am sorry that the order is not to do so. Several of our letters are opened in the Post, and if anything is found written contrary to what is ordered the writer is punished. Brother, without doubt you also have a lot of hardships and work to do. But we also have more. Brother, here rain falls a lot, and it is very cold and there is lots of mud.”
THE WESTERN FRONT
The reference to rain, water and mud in the trenches draws attention to the kind of warfare that these Gurkhas were engaged in, a mentally and physically excruciating variety of fighting known as trench warfare that was new even to the soldiers of Europe. Many western historians have long argued that trench warfare determined not only the perception of the First World War of the soldiers who participated in it, but also how it was remembered and understood by future generations. That certainly could be said to apply to the Gurkhas as well.
By early 1915, a system of multiple trenches – roughly 475 miles long – that stretched from the North Sea through Belgium, Flanders, France to Switzerland had already been dug. In this so-called Western Front, the armies were in a stalemate, and movement was measured in yards, not miles. The trench criss-crossed landscape, in the words of historian George L. Mosse, “was mo
re suggestive of the moon than the earth, as heavy shelling destroyed not only men but nature, a devastation that would haunt the imagination of those forced to live in the trenches.”
In the trenches and hospital beds, the soldiers’ mind travelled homewards. One Gurkha wrote; “Subedar Bahadurji... do not let my wife have any difficulty about living.” A letter from a Brighton hospital bed dated 23 October 1915: “My mother used to tell me that if I did not give up my job and come and earn my living at home I should be sorry for it I laughed at this and now I am repenting at my leisure. When I think of my mother I say to myself ‘What can I do?’ What was fated to happen has come to pass. We have been caught just as fish are caught in a net... My wound is paining me a good deal just now, but I hope that in a few days, it will be much better.”
Some desperately hope for a return to the village: “If there is any arrangement for making peace do... find out the true news and let me know.” Another one put it in the following manner: “Up to date there (has) not been the slightest indication of the end of the war... The spring is now on and the buds appearing but we think of our own hot country.” Another letter “Since we are attached to our country when will that day appear when we will see our native land?”
There is also thanksgiving: “Now in my regiment all the sepoys are finished and I am left alive with a little to eat and drink, but Panneshwar showed me great favour, on the day on which I was wounded my fellow bandsman was killed.”
Naturally, the Gurkhas thought a lot about the enemy. One put it this way, “On 9th day of May 1915 our Division was ordered to take German trenches at 5 a.m. Enemy trenches were 400 yards off from us. This trenches is near new Chaple (sic) we went with fix swords and khukries in mouths, this was the famous charge I have been through. We lost many men but we captured the enemies line, I could not follow my company owing to sharpnel bits struck on my right forearm but it missed the bone, by mercy of Almighty God. Now I am in England and getting much better and shortly I will be back to France again and kill some more bastered (bastard) German because they are not men because they use poisness (sic) gas.”
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FOKKERS AND ZEPPELINS
The major participation of the Indian Army Corps in the Western Front was limited to the first year of the war, after which they were transferred to more fighting in the Middle East.
Among those who were left in Europe was one soldier with keen eye and lucid pen. In May 1916, he wrote: “There is no official news about peace, but how long can the enemy continue such violence? The enemy are shut in all four sides, and nothing from outside can reach them. From this it appears likely that the war will end this year, but whatever seems best to God will happen. I have petitioned to be sent back to India, and I hope for favourable reply... This war is very terrible. There is no safety for a man on the earth, or under the earth, in the air, or on the sea. Strong fortresses are overturned like dust, what chance then has anything else? When the artillery fires continuously, hills are converted into dust heaps, and the same thing happens to ships on the sea. Under the sea, submarines go and fight.
On land poisonous gases and liquid fire are used. Under the earth, mines are dug and exploded 200 or 300 yards away. In the air ‘Aeroplane,’ ‘Zeppelin’ ‘Fokker,’ ‘Aircraft,’ etc make war amongst themselves. All these things are employed for the destruction of men. Is this true warfare? All these means are not employed on one side only. No, no, the other side is equally pugnacious. The fighting is not confined to one locality. It is spread all over the world... From all this it would seem that God is displeased with the peoples of the world.”
A soldier in an English hospital who had a limb amputated writes in February 1916 to a friend in Egypt with a matter-of-fact directness: “On the 25th of Asoj [mid-October] I was in the attack against the German trenches. I was wounded and left in the trench. I was taken prisoner into Germany and there they cut my foot off. I was two months in hospital there and was then sent to England, and I am now under orders to be sent back to India.” And a request from a prisoner-of-war adds an entirely different perspective: “Your brother Bahadur Pun sends his blessing. If you have three or four rupees about you please send them, also things to eat and drink, and clothes should be put up in a parcel and sent. Dhani Ram Pun and I are prisoners of war in Germany.”
Without doubt, some of the fighting men thought of the World War I fronts as occasions to “prove the Gurkha name” – there is some evidence of this in a handful of the letters at the British Library. However, the more thoughtful among the letters indicate more of an effort by these men of Nepal to understand the scale of destruction around them. While some describe the war’s great losses in a seemingly matter-of-fact way (“The land was so full of the slain that it was difficult to set foot on the ground...”), others resorted to metaphors to convey what seemed beyond description. Thus, the reference to divine wrath and the destruction of the whole world.
What these letters offer is an image of the Gurkha soldier entirely different from the standard battlefield image which pervades the public consciousness in the world and in Nepal, of the Gurkha, khukuri raised, charging the enemy with the battle cry, “Ayo Gorkhali!” This congealed image of the battle-hungry Gurkha – true to his salt, loyal to his commanding officer, (mfadaar to his country – is the product of the sahib’s imagination, later identified by sycophantic Nepali intellectuals as the embodiment of the most special quality – bravery – of all Nepalis.
The soldier from the hills of Nepal as he comes across in these letters is a different kind of Gurkha. He is a hero, but because he is sensitive, intelligent and human. He feels pain and does mourn the loss of a friend in the battlefield. He is afraid of death and is thankful when it spares him.
Dukha has been central to the lives of Gurkha soldiers throughout their history. It is time, many decades late, that we begin to listen to the soldier’s cry from the battlefield.
SO CLOSE TO HEAVEN
Barbara Crossette
Barbara Crossette is an American journalist and author. She served as editor and chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia for The New York Times, and was their United Nations bureau chief from 1994 to 2001. She has been awarded the 1992 George Polk award, a 2008 Fulbright prize, and the 2010 Shorenstein prize for her writings on and coverage of Asia. She is currently United Nations correspondent for The Nation.
BUDDHIST NEPAL
Lakpa Nuru Sherpa was happy to be back in his two-room house in Chaurikarka, a hamlet deep in a sheltered valley a couple of thousand feet below the village of Lukla, a starting point for treks into the Mount Everest region of Nepal. The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, nearly the size of Florida, must support a population of almost twenty million people scattered over difficult topography; life is hard for most. Lakpa Nuru, a mountain guide like many of his fellow Sherpas, was lucky. Fit and healthy in middle age, when many other Nepali men are dead or spent beyond their years, he was able to retire from the trail and come home to tend a small plot of land. He sent his children to school. And then, with what money was left from his years of trekking and climbing, he went off to India, several hundred miles away, to buy books.
The Sherpas are Buddhists, descendants of migrants from eastern Tibet who settled centuries ago in the Solu-Khumbu region of northeastern Nepal, the region best known to foreign trekkers. Before he died, Lakpa Nuru said, he wanted to own the most precious thing he could think of: a set of Lord Buddha’s teachings, produced in all their authenticity by Tibetan monks in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamsala, the headquarters of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile. Like all traditional Tibetan Buddhist books, these volumes are assemblages of narrow loose-leaf pages inserted between boards, wrapped in colorful cloth and secured by a bright ribbon. The script, read horizontally, is in a classical Tibetan language unknown to Lakpa Nuru. He spent his life savings knowingly on a set of books he will never read. That didn’t matter. “Maybe my children and grandchildren will read them one day, beca
use they are more educated,” he said, as he asked to be photographed with his treasured library. When I told the story later to His Holiness Ngawang Tenzing Zangbo, abbot of Tengboche monastery, in the shadow of Mount Everest, he was not surprised. “Every Sherpa home is a cultural center,” he said. “How much so depends on each family’s means.”
“The government may call us a Hindu kingdom and His Majesty may be an avatar of Vishnu,” a businessman once told me in Kathmandu, “but if you scratch the surface of Nepal almost anywhere, you’ll see how Buddhist we really are.” Buddhism came to Nepal early, as might be expected, given the religion’s origins in nearby northern India, and was soon adopted by the people called Newars, who are as close to an indigenous population in the Kathmandu Valley as anyone will probably ever find in the darkness of barely explored Nepali history and legend. The Newars were not alone in their faith. All over Nepal there were other Buddhist minorities, particularly along the Tibetan border. All or most of Nepal apparently fell under Tibetan dominance in the seventh and eighth centuries, but with or without conquest, Tibetans and Newaris cross-fertilized each other’s highly developed Buddhist cultures for hundreds of years.
Much of this history can be politically inconvenient not only in Nepal, where most of the kings and all the hereditary Rana prime ministers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Hindus, but also in India, where upper-caste Hindus have dominated politics since independence and Buddhism is more coopted as part of history than honored as a living religion. Not a few Indians argue that Buddhism is no more than an offshoot of Hinduism; Hindu priests have control over some of Buddhism’s holiest places, including the temple at Bodhgaya, where Buddha reached enlightenment.
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