While Delhi’s political officers were intriguing with malcontent sheiks in an Arabian version of the Great Game, German diplomats were coaxing Turkey’s rulers into a partnership. For some years the German Foreign Ministry had recognised the potential of a jihad for making mischief among Muslims in the Russian Caucasus, Egypt and India. In the event of war, Muslim uprisings in their respective empires would compel Britain and Russia to withdraw troops from the European fronts. During August and September 1914 German diplomats intensified their efforts, warning the Sultan’s ministers that Turkey’s survival depended upon Germany. They were backed by Enver Pasha, the Minister for War, who pinned his hopes on a quick German victory as Turkey’s only hope of survival. And rightly so, for France and Russia were keen to acquire Ottoman provinces and, if they won, were certain to embark on a partition of the empire. France in particular was deeply interested in acquiring the oil reserves around Mosul in northern Mesopotamia. Britain could not afford to upset its allies by supporting Turkey and so, reluctantly, had to stand by and watch it slip into the German camp. By early September it was clear which way the Turks would jump, but not when.
The likelihood of war with Turkey caused despondency in Delhi. A large proportion of Indian soldiers were Muslims and were bound to be exposed to seditious, Pan-Islamic propaganda, calling on them to abandon the King Emperor and fight for their faith. Furthermore, the call for the holy war would revive unrest in Afghanistan and on the North-West Frontier.
The solution lay, as it always did when such difficulties surfaced, in a massive affirmation of British power, designed to impress and coerce. The old doctrine of the pre-emptive, aggressive masterstroke was resuscitated by General Sir Edmund Barrow, the military secretary at the India Office. On 26 September he proposed a coup de main against the vulnerable Abadan oil fields and the possible seizure of Basra. A veteran of the second Afghan war and sundry North-West Frontier campaigns, Barrow was convinced that shaking the mailed fist would have the right effect. ‘So startling and unexpected a sign of our power to strike’ would instantly convert all the discontented local rulers to Britain’s cause and considerably hamper a jihad.10 This audacious plan was quickly endorsed by the Secretary of State, Lord Crewe, and Kitchener, the Minister for War. Orders were wired to India where, on the 29th, the Sixth Division, then earmarked for France, was placed in readiness for embarkation for the Persian Gulf.
A campaign marked by awesome muddle and mishaps began as it continued, with hitches in procuring shipping. There was confusion too as to the expedition’s purpose. Its commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Walter Delamain, was instructed to land at Abadan in the knowledge that political officers had forewarned the local Arabs. Yet he was to do nothing which might offend either Turkish or Arab opinion and avoid any preemptive action that could upset what the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, called the ‘Muhammedan masses’ in India and Afghanistan.11 On the 26th the invasion force anchored off Bahrain, and after three days aboard the stifling transports the troops had to be put ashore for sake of their health, preceded by a declaration that Britain had no aggressive intentions in the area. Nonetheless, Delamain had been told to treat Bahrain as a de facto British protectorate. The following day the former German battlecruiser Goeben, now flying the Ottoman flag, shelled Odessa. In November, Delamain was ordered to attack Al-Faw at the southern tip of the Shatt al-Arab, land and advance on Basra.12 So began a campaign which, when it ended almost exactly four years later, represented India’s major war effort.
Basra fell on 23 November, justifying earlier predictions that Turkish resistance would prove feeble. From then on, the war gained an impetus of its own with an advance northwards along the Tigris through Al-Qurnah to Amarah, which was taken in June 1915. What had begun as a minor campaign was transformed into a full-scale conquest of Mesopotamia, with the great Islamic city of Baghdad acting as a magnet. Over-optimistic generals dictated strategy, convincing waverers in London and Delhi that the contest would be a walkover and that once Baghdad was captured British prestige would soar in every bazaar from Beirut to Bangalore. As the front crept forward, local commanders presented their political masters with a well-worn formula. Hardinge was informed during his tour of the front in February 1915 that Basra would only be safe when Nasiriyah and Amarah had been captured. Sir Percy Cox, the senior political officer, agreed. Like all his breed, he imagined that he could penetrate the innermost recesses of the native mind. It worshipped success, and so a few victories would bring the neighbouring Arab tribes into the British camp.13
So far, Arab support had been disappointing. Just before the outbreak of war, Abdal Azi Ibn Saud (the future founder of the Saudi royal dynasty) had hedged his bets by a reaffirmation of loyalty to the Sultan after a period of flirting with Britain. Once hostilities were under way, Arab participation fell far short of what Cox had airily predicted. What he lacked the imagination to understand was that, while Arab sheiks were glad to be rid of their Turkish masters, this did not predispose them to welcome British ones. As it was, a substantial body of Arabs stayed loyal to the Sultan and even more were malevolently neutral, plundering the supply lines of both armies indiscriminately.
Hardinge was seduced by the patter of the generals and his political advisers. His confidence helped persuade the Cabinet to sanction fresh offensives and new objectives. In July the ministers agreed an advance to Kut-al-Amarah (Al-Kut) and in September approved an offensive against Baghdad itself. Not everyone was content; Kitchener, Curzon and Sir Austen Chamberlain, the Secretary of State, expressed misgivings, but these were dispelled by the local commander, General Sir John Nixon. As cocksure as he was incompetent, Nixon was mesmerised by prestige and repeatedly lied to his superiors about the state of his forces, which were deteriorating rapidly.
The Mesopotamian bubble burst on 22 November, when Major-General Charles Townshend’s outnumbered Sixth Division was trounced at Ctesiphon and driven back down river to Kut-al-Amarah, where it was encircled. After the battle, it was discovered that Nixon’s intelligence staff had under-estimated the size of the Turkish forces engaged by 6,000.14 Further, equally disturbing revelations of slovenly staff work and mismanagement came to light during the next six months as the tide of the war turned against the Anglo-Indian army. The scandals of what was now called the ‘Mess pot’ campaign proved that the Indian army lacked the capacity to fight a modern war; the strain was too much and systems which might just have worked during a frontier campaign buckled and fell apart.
Disintegration started at the top. In abler, more versatile hands the army might have fared better, but the muster roll of the Indian high command in Mesopotamia was a register of the infirm, myopic and bewildered. The commander-in-chief, General Sir Beauchamp Duff, was sixty and had spent the past thirty years pushing a pen in Canada. Nixon was fifty-eight, ailing, out of his depth, and indifferent to the welfare of his men: in June he rejected a suggestion that fitted ambulance motor boats should replace slower, converted native craft for shipping wounded men to the base hospital in Basra.15 He resigned early in 1916 and Duff replaced him with an older mediocrity, Lieutenant-General Sir Percy Lake, who had not heard a shot fired in anger for thirty years. In London, the Chief of the Imperial Staff, General Sir William (‘Wully’) Robertson, was appalled by the appointment of a general who was ‘too old and tired’ for command, although Duff assured him that Lake still played games, but did not specify which.16 Robertson persisted, sending Lake a pointed telegram which suggested that some of his brigade commanders were ‘too old and tired for the conditions of modern war’.17 Lake was not too weary to intercept and impound critical telegrams sent by the embattled Townshend to his friend, The Times’s military correspondent.18
What particularly irritated Robertson was that Mesopotamian blunders were driving him to divert scarce men and material from the Western Front to what he considered a strategically valueless sideshow. Furthermore, operations had been allowed to continue after it was clear that India lacked the wherewithal to
support them unaided. ‘Our military resources have been reduced to bedrock,’ Hardinge had admitted in March 1915.19 This was just part of the story; the truth was that the Mesopotamian army had been the victim of serious material deficiencies from the very beginning. Only in March 1915 did the army receive its first reconnaissance aircraft, and these and their pilots had been loaned by the Australian and New Zealand governments. Hitherto, and for some time to come, basic field intelligence about the enemy’s strength and positions was gathered by cavalry patrols. Communications were primitive thanks to a dearth of wirelesses, telephone and telegraphic equipment and signallers. Hasty efforts to train Indian signallers resulted in the appearance at the front of men who were slow at transmitting and receiving messages, not that this mattered, for their handwriting was ‘execrable’. Transport arrangements broke down under the burdens imposed on them, vital ice-making machines had to be purchased second-hand in India, and, unforgiveably at the onset of the summer hot season, supplies of beer ran out.20
Most tragic in terms of human suffering were the poor medical facilities, which added immeasurably to the miseries of British and Indian wounded. Springless wooden carts carried injured men from the front to under-staffed hospitals where they were cared for by untrained orderlies, including laundrymen. No nurses appeared in Mesopotamia until April 1916. Before then, no one had bothered to sterilise drinking water because prevailing medical wisdom insisted that cholera, dysentery and diarrhoea were transmitted by flies, which was why three divisions suffered a cholera epidemic during the spring of 1916.21 The local senior medical officer opposed sending convalescents to Karachi as it would encourage malingering, and there was abundant evidence that men sent back to India would desert rather than return to Mesopotamia.22 Faced with crumbling morale, Lake’s only reaction was to demand the death penalty for men with self-inflicted wounds. It is revealing that a British army medical officer, Surgeon-General F. H. Treharne, with Western Front experience, was ordered to Mesopotamia to take charge of overdue reform and reorganisation.
An army on its last legs was asked to perform superhuman feats during the first three months of 1916, when relief forces tried to break the Turkish grip on Kut. They failed, with heavy losses. In desperation and to the amazement of his superiors in London, Lake adopted a stratagem originally suggested by Townshend and offered a £2 million ransom for Kut’s defenders. The Turkish commander contemptuously spurned what looked like a bribe and Kut’s defenders were forced to surrender at the end of April. Their capitulation was a reverse equal in scale and damage to prestige of the Kabul débâcle of 1841–42, and a severe blow to the reputation not only of the Indian army but also the Indian government.
This signal catastrophe was followed by an official investigation into the events which had brought it about, and, in turn, a thorough overhaul of the administration and command of the Indian army. The offensive against Baghdad was renewed, and the city fell the following year as part of a general advance which, when Turkey surrendered at the end of October 1918, had put the Indian government in charge of what is today Iraq. There was no agreement as to its political future. On one hand, a faction within the Indian government, most notably Sir Alexander Hitrzel of the India Office political department, and a handful of officials on the spot, wished to retain the province under Indian administration with an open invitation to Indian settlers. On the other, there was a band of Foreign Office Arabophiles who wanted Iraq to become a British satellite under an Arab prince. This made sense in terms of political consistency, for since 1916 Britain had sponsored the Arab nationalist revolt which had spread northwards from Mecca into Palestine and Syria. The British government had promised the Arab leadership post-war self-determination, although nothing had been clarified as to the exact borders of the new Arab states or their form of government. Hardinge and many Indian officials had been horrified by British involvement in the Arab Revolt which, while it dulled the edge of jihadic propaganda, was bound to have repercussions in India. How was it that the British encouraged the aspirations of one people and frowned on those of another? Moreover, by the beginning of 1919 there were clear indications that many Iraqi Arabs and all the Kurds had no desire to become an outlying dependency of India, paying higher taxes to meet the expenses of an administration staffed by overbearing ex-Indian army officers. Those who felt this way placed naïve faith in the contents of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which proclaimed that the Allies were waging war for the rights of small nations to self-government.
III
Indian soldiers serving in France faced as great hardships as their brothers-in-arms in Iraq, but were fortunate in that their ancillary services, largely managed by the British army, were superior. Home letters from the front convey a universal astonishment at the intensity of the fighting and the huge casualties caused by German artillery fire. Early in 1915 one sepoy spoke for all when he wrote: ‘The whole world is being brought to destruction. One cannot think about it. He will be a very lucky man who returns to India.’ ‘It is the ending of the world,’ claimed another. ‘It is not war.’23 During two days’ fighting on the Ypres perimeter at the end of October 1914, the 57th Gharwalis lost 314 dead, including all their officers, more than half their strength.24 Death and the bitter winter’s cold were endured with a stoicism which owed everything to a faith in the inexorable dispositions of Providence. Like British soldiers, some Indians turned to writing verse, a development which perturbed Captain Evelyn Howell of the ICS, who ran the censorship department. His report for January 1915 warned of a ‘tendency to break into poetry which I am inclined to regard as a rather ominous sign of mental disquietude’.25
There was reassurance in the repeated praise for the army’s medical and welfare services and regular visits by George V and Queen Mary to the Indian convalescent hospitals at Brighton (the converted Pavilion) and Netley. Both offered Indian soldiers the chance to sample what they called ‘fruit’, their code word for women. One reported that the girls in Brighton were ‘no better than the girls of the Adda Bazaar of Indore’. Another, a Lancer duffadar, sent a friend some saucy French postcards in January 1916, which the prissy Howell extracted from the letter, no doubt to the disappointment of the recipient.26 Possible sexual liaisons between Indian soldiers and English women were a constant headache for the authorities. General Sir James Willcocks, commander of the Indian contingent, while publicly praising his men’s courage in the field, privately regretted that they had to be invalided to Brighton. He also objected strongly to Indian wounded being tended by white nurses, as did Sir John French, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, who was indignant at a Daily Mail photograph which showed an Indian convalescent and an English nurse.27
Caste barriers proved as strong as sexual. In the behind-the-lines rest camps in France, the YMCA endeavoured to obtain better treatment for the ‘untouchable’ sweepers and servants from the lower castes. Traditional barriers proved resilient. In one hospital during the summer of 1915, a sepoy asked a Hindu babu for some milk and was told: ‘After placing your backside at the disposal of the Germans, you come here to drink milk.’ This insult enraged a Muslim invalid, Havildar Karum Ullah Khan, who grabbed a stick and thrashed the babu. Fearing a court martial, he appealed to his colonel: ‘Huzur, have we been fighting Germans or getting [buggered] by them?’ The officer shared Ullah Khan’s indignation at this affront to a member of the martial races, gave him ten rupees and ordered that ‘no black babu’ was to enter the ward where NCOs were convalescing.28
Accounts of incidents like this broke the monotony of the censors’ routine. Their major duty was to monitor war-weariness, which grew steadily among the Indians as it did in all armies during the latter half of 1916 and 1917, and keep an eye open for signs of sedition. Its commonest form was the repetition of those Pan-Islamic sentiments contained in the jihadic propaganda leaflets which found their way into Indian trenches. Details of the jihad, the astonishing claim that Kaiser Wilhelm II had converted to Isl
am and rumours that Enver Pasha was leading a Turkish army to Kabul cropped up in soldiers’ correspondence during the spring of 1915, which suggested a few believed enemy propaganda. More worrying for their effect on recruitment in India were letters home that reported heavy losses and replies which described the grief as news of casualties spread through Indian towns and villages.29
Eye-witness accounts of the death toll on the Western Front which had reached men serving in the 5th Light Infantry, stationed at Singapore, contributed to their mutiny in February 1915. What seems to have been a spontaneous uprising was triggered by rumours that the regiment was about to embark for France, although its actual destination was Hong Kong. Several officers were murdered and parties of mutineers fanned out into the city, killing Europeans at random. For a time there was panic as refugees fled to ships in the harbour; one woman recalled: ‘The Indian Mutiny flashed into my mind; also that we had no white troops.’30 A scratch force was hastily gathered, including Japanese, Russian and British sailors, and after some nail-biting days, every mutineer had been killed, imprisoned or was a fugitive. The suppression was easier than it might have been, for the insurgents lacked any organisation and an overall plan. After courts martial, eighty-nine were imprisoned and thirty-seven publicly shot by firing squad. Investigation into the causes of the outbreak revealed faults among the officers, factions among the men and undercurrents of religious fervour. Unusually, the 5th Light Infantry was an all-Muslim regiment and anxieties about fighting the Caliph had been exacerbated by two Pan-Islamic preachers, one of whom was later hanged. One sepoy believed that Algerian Muslims had refused to fight the Germans because they were allies of the Turks, and another was troubled by what he had heard from men serving in France: ‘We receive letters and we know real feelings.’31
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