With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

By the time these pages will have seen the light the Indian Corps will have been a year at the front. In September last the first of them landed at Marseilles, a bizarre procession that might have passed out of the pages of The Thousand and One Nights, swarthy faces and bristling moustachios and glittering eyes beneath proud turbans, strange knives and implements, odd-looking carts, mules, goats. There was a spell of wild and delirious enthusiasm among the Marseillais, most imaginative of French populations ... and the Indians passed on.

I saw them later at Orléans, some of the cavalry and part of the Lahore Division. The principal hotel was full of Indian Army officers. They all seem to have a certain modesty of mien, a blend of reserve and simplicity, that marks them down, apart from the Indian drill uniform and the little forage-caps that so many of them wear.

The city swarmed with Indians. Their little mule-carts, in charge of dark-skinned mehtars, or sweepers, heads muffled up in all manner of cloths to keep out the first touch of autumnal damp, stood outside shops, surrounded by gaping crowds. To and fro in the streets native orderlies passed with their curious straight stride, their impassive faces, scarcely seeming to note the air of profound curiosity wherewith the good people of Orléans followed them.

Here a Pathan sowar in khaki puggaree held a pair of stamping horses outside an office; there a fatigue-party of Gurkhas with pronounced Mongolian cast of features, slouch hats and kukri slung at the back of the belt, came marching solidly over the cobble-stones, and swung their heads smartly over at the command of their havildar in his curious clipped English: “Eyes ... rait!” as a Brigade Major went by resplendent in new “brass hat” and red tabs.

The barber’s shop in the principal street was crowded with healthy, dusty young men, back from long drills at the camp outside the town, clamouring for hair-cuts and shaves, and buying hair-oils and soap and razor blades with a reckless extravagance that made the proprietor pinch himself to make sure he was not dreaming.

The front! That was the phrase that had a magic ring for them all. At the camp the officers talked of nothing else. They showed me their Sikhs and their Pathans and their Gurkhas as who should say: “When the Empire gets these, victory is assured!” They had chafed in India, when the Empire went to war, lest their services might not be called upon. One gallant soul grieved so much, as we have read, that he deserted and enlisted in the ranks of a British Regular regiment and died at the front.

The call came. I left them at Orléans, untried in European warfare, eager, impatient. When I saw them again six months later they were veterans of war.

The despatch of the Indian Corps to take part in the war in Europe was an experiment. That the experiment was possible, that the Indian troops have shown themselves to be loyal and well-behaved while fighting our battles on foreign soil, that India has falsified the hopes of the enemy and the fears of the pessimists as to her fealty to the Empire in the event of a European war, seems to me to be the finest tribute to the wisdom and justice of our administration of India. The loyalty which our rule has fostered has withstood all attempts to corrupt it. The attempts of the Germans on the Western front to sow sedition among our Indian troops have failed as lamentably as the more redoubtable activity of their secret agents in India would appear to have done.

At one time the Germans were wont to bombard the Indians holding the trenches in France with proclamations from the air. These manifestos, generally couched in incorrect Hindi or Pushtu, the work of painstaking Herren Professoren at German Oriental Seminaries, announced the German victories and the proclamation of the “holy war” by the Khalifate against the Allies, and painted a rosy picture of the delights awaiting the Indians who would desert to the enemy. The Indian, who has a keen sense of humour, laughed at the bombast of these preposterous concoctions, and made fun of the grammatical mistakes.

Two German airmen who were brought down in the lines of the Indians one day were found to have a large stock of these manifestos in their machine with them. The prisoners turned livid when the discovery was made, for, under military law, I believe, it rendered them liable to be shot. With perfect sang-froid, however, our officers distributed the pamphlets to the Indians who were present at the capture, and the two airmen had the mortification of seeing the broad grins of the sepoys as they read out, amid shouts of laughter, the grammatical mistakes in the work of the German Orientalists. This air propaganda was so barren of results that the Germans eventually abandoned it.