The Thin Turbaned Line: the Indian Corps in France

How two Indian Divisions – the Meerut and the Lahore – sacrificed themselves to save the BEF and were critical to holding the line in 1914-15.

I’m very pleased that Tim Williamson has published today an article I’ve written on the Indian Corps in Flanders in the History of War magazine. I don’t think that my argument is new or revolutionary, as the role of the Indian Corps has been very well documented by Gordon Corrigan, Chandar S. Sundaram, George Morton-Jack, Simon Doherty, Tom Donovan and Rob Johnson and others, but it still seems surprisingly under-considered in the whole story of 1914 and 1915.

Please do consider buying the magazine and reading the article. For those who can’t, I’ve attached it below.

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In the first three months of the Great War the dramatic impact of massed European armies smashing into each other across the rolling grainfields of the French regions of Picardy, Artois and Flanders forced each of the combatant nations to face harsh new realities about the nature of modern, machine-driven warfare, especially the effect of artillery, machine guns and rifle fire on massed and unprotected infantry and cavalry.

The British Expeditionary Force, sent to the continent to support the much larger French Army in its attempt to prevent the German armies breaking through to Paris, was well-trained and professional. But it was small. The first battles of the Great War were shocking in their intensity and scale. Britain quickly realised that if battle continued on this trajectory, it would quickly run out of men, ammunition, artillery and the equipment needed to sustain its ability to fight beyond a few months, especially as it quickly appeared that the war wouldn’t be over by Christmas.

The initial German attack into France was halted by the ‘Miracle on the Marne’ (7 August – 13 September) following the desperate retreat of the BEF from Mons (23 August). The German armies then attempted to swing right, advancing behind the French block, to break out into open, undefended ground to the north. The French and the BEF (comprising a mere five divisions at the time), countered these moves at the first Battle of the Aisne (13-28 September), but German outflanking attacks through to 19 October, progressively moving north towards the English Channel, seriously stretched and exhausted the Anglo-French defenders. By now, with the route around the northern flank of the allied armies finally closed, a defensive line of sorts had been created, but it was weak, poorly defended and had lots of gaps. There simply weren’t enough troops to cover every inch of ground. It was through this that the Germans attacked at the Battle of the Yser River during the last two weeks of October 1914 and the first Battle of Ypres from 19 October to 22 November. At Ypres and La Bassée the BEF defence held the Germans off, but only just. It was desperately clear that reinforcements were required, and it was the Indian Corps, arriving just when it was required, that stepped into the breech.

The role of the Indian Corps (until late September described as the Indian Expeditionary Force (A), the IEFA) has historically been ignored, misunderstood or even grievously misrepresented.[1] Yet it was very significant at the time for Britain and its ability to help stem the tide of the German advance into France.[2] It was also very important in respect of India’s experience of a modernity forced upon it by the shock of war. From this experience the Indian Army was modernised and completely restructured in 1922, and the basis of its policy of recruiting solely from the ‘martial races’ radically reformed.[3] More subtle changes also resulted from the Indian Army’s experience of global war, not least in moves to ‘Indianise’ the officer base of the army.

The Indian Corps was to remain in Flanders until the end of 1915, having contributed very significantly to saving the BEF, filling a desperately needed hole in British battle resources at a time when there were no others available. Indeed, in 1915, a third of all ‘British’ troops in France were Indian.[4] The Indian Corps fought bravely and brilliantly, and by doing so saved the BEF’s bacon when there was a very high chance of it failing entirely. Indeed, without the contribution of the Indian Corps, as the historian George Morton-Jack asserts, the BEF could ‘have suffered a disastrous defeat.’[5] Against terrible odds, with almost non-existent training, the two Indian divisions of the Indian Corps – the 3rd Meerut and the 7th Lahore – suffered heavy casualties and deep privations in order to prevent the Germans breaking through the Allied line. And hold, it did. Tragically, their contribution to this key part of the Great War story is poorly remembered, both in Britain and India.

At the outset of war the two divisions, accompanied by the Secunderabad Cavalry Brigade, were sent to Europe.[6] They landed in Marseille on 26 September 1914, the Lahore having dropped off a brigade in Suez, to guard the Canal. At the start the IEFA boasted a total of 20 infantry battalions together with divisional troops, totalling 24,000 trained men. They were rushed north to fill gaps in the thirteen mile line forward of Ypres, joining Lieutenant General Douglas Haig’s First Army. Numbers grew rapidly in following months. By the end of 1914 68 infantry battalions, 204 field guns and 21 cavalry regiments had arrived. In total the Indian Corps grew to 45,000 men (28,500 Indian and 16,500 British).

Indian troops were exceptionally well-trained, hardy and professional. But the troops arrived in France without warm weather clothing suitable for a European winter, sufficient machine guns, mortars or artillery (Indian divisions carried only 30 horse-drawn 13-pounder field guns compared to 76 in a British), medical or signalling equipment. Likewise, Indian soldiers were still equipped with the obsolete Lee-Metford rifle and for reasons of uniformity with the British Army were all issued on arrival at Marseilles with the Short Magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE).

Within two weeks of arrival, equipped with new rifles but with very little artillery, no barbed wire, grenades or mortars, and only two Vickers machine guns per battalion, the first two Indian battalions – the 129th Duke of Connaught's Own Baluchis[7] and the 57th (Wilde's Rifles)[8] – were thrust into the line at Ypres on 21 October. There was no time to prepare them for battle. The eighty-four exhausted and desperately weakened battalions of the BEF – most down to a third of their pre-Mons strength – could not be guaranteed to hold the porous line against heavy German probes. The BEF held about one tenth of the Allied line, and the 13 miles of the Indian Corps about a third of the total BEF line until reinforcements began arriving in 1915. The country was flat and low-lying, and just above the water table, making trench digging difficult.

Fighting was immediate, shocking and brutal but the performance of these otherwise unprepared units was outstanding. On 31 October the Germans made a concerted attempt to break through against a company of the Baluchis at Hollebeke, heavily bombarding the Indians with artillery for which they had no reply. The only surviving officer, Lieutenant H.V. Lewis, took command:

The trenches in the salient were being very heavily bombarded: many were obliterated. Captain Dill with his machine-guns and most of his men were, however, still in action. I brought up two platoons... but could not find a yard of trench for them to occupy... The men lay down in the open near the farm… in which were some men of the machine-gun sections filling belts. The farm was cut in half by a shell and caught fire and the occupants burnt before our eyes. Wounded were numerous and as, owing to casualties, stretchers had not arrived I ran back to fetch some. Coming up again… I saw English, Indian and German troops together coming out from the salient… Each man extricated himself as best he could from the mêlée and fell back on a position 600 yards behind.[9]

The machine-guns did a good killing before the crews were themselves overrun and killed. Sepoy Khuda Dad Khan, a Punjabi Mussulman, wounded and left for dead made his way back to the battalion that night. He was awarded the first Indian VC of war. A Dogra Company in the 57th Rifles in trenches near Messines on 31 October was killed to a man, the last soldier alive, Jemadar Kapur Singh, standing up before the advancing Germans and shooting himself with his last round. The 57th started with 740 men (11 British and 729 Indian) and finished the three-day battle with 279 (5 plus 274), a loss of 62 per cent.[10] Likewise, the 129th Baluchis arrived in Marseilles with a complement of 818 (9 plus 809). Within 6-months most but a tiny handful of this battalion had become casualties. By the end of 1914 the Meerut and Lahore divisions had suffered 9,779 casualties.[11] According to historian David Omissi, the average Indian battalion was 764 men strong when it landed in France, but by the beginning of November 1914, i.e., after no more than two weeks of fighting, this had fallen to 550, a loss of nearly thirty per cent.[12]

By the end of November 1914 GHQ concluded that the stretch of the front held by the Indian Corps would hold. The men used the opportunity, as trenches were being dug and positions consolidated, to dominate the German units opposite their positions. The Indian skill at musketry was recognised by friend and foe alike.[13] They launched patrols against the German lines at night and stalked them by day, using skills honed on the north west frontier. One such raid was undertaken by two battalions of the 39th Garhwal Regiment in the Garhwal Brigade of the Meerut Division.[14] Starting out at 3 a.m. on 10 November 1914 the men slipped undetected across the sixty-yards of No-Man’s-Land, probably in their stockinged feet. The Garhwali’s then silently attacked the left flank of the German trench and captured 105 Germans, two machine guns and a trench  mortar.[15] Philip Mason quotes a letter by a German soldier published in the Frankfurter Zeitung:

Today for the first time we had to fight against the Indians and the devil knows those brown rascals are not to be underrated. At first we spoke with contempt of the Indians. Today we learned to look on them in a different light—the devil knows what the English had put into those fellows. With a fearful shouting thousands of those brown forms. At a hundred metres we opened a destructive fire rushed upon us, which mowed down hundreds but in spite of that the others advanced ... in no time they were in our trenches and truly those brown enemies were not to be despised. With butt ends, bayonets, swords and daggers we fought each other and we had bitter hard work.[16]

The defensive bravery shown at First Ypres (19 October to 30 November 1914) was followed by an offensive at Givenchy between 18 and 22 December which failed horribly, and left many shaken. An attack by four brigades of the Lahore Division successfully captured two German trenches but a fast and aggressive counter-attack threw them back. The Germans then followed up with a successful attack the next day. The Indian trenches were waterlogged and in a poor state and part of the town was captured until repulsed by two British battalions brought up to counter-attack. The Lahore Division was withdrawn from the line for a rest.

The sacrifice of the Indian Corps at First Ypres was widely recognised in Britain at the time, and a range of welfare initiatives were undertaken to raise money for the comfort of the sepoys and the care of the wounded. Within a month £167,000 had been raised, the equivalent of over £22 million today.[17] From this largess came the 500-bed Lady Hardinge Hospital at Brockenhurst. This was one of seven hospitals dedicated in England to the treatment and rehabilitation of Indian soldiers, the most famous being the ‘Kitchener Indian Hospital’ in Brighton.

Nevertheless morale was very carefully watched, not least by censoring letters home. They revealed something of the shock the intensity of fighting at First Ypres and Givenchy had on the troops. David Omissi and Gajendra Singh have, among others, undertaken evaluations of the correspondence.[18] A letter from a sepoy in the 39th Garhwalis admitted that ‘It is very hard to endure  the bombs… It will be difficult for anyone to survive and come back safe and sound  from the war… The  bullets and cannon-balls come down like snow.’[19] Another, who warned members of his family not to join up, wrote from his hospital bed in England:

When we attack, they direct a terrific fire on us—thousands of men die daily. It looks as if not a single man can remain alive on either  side—then, when none is left, there will be peace. When the Germans attack they are killed in the same way. For us men it is a bad state of affairs here…[T]hose who return  from the battlefield…are  slightly wounded. No one is carried off. Even Sahibs are not lifted away. The battlefield resounds with cries.[20]

Not all British observers were enthusiastic supporters of the sepoys in France, and accusations of poor battlefield performance still find their way to the surface, some starting with the rout at Givenchy and others from a whispering campaign against the Indian Corps, emanating probably from General Douglas Haig’s First Army HQ, suggesting that the vast proportion of Indian injuries were self-inflicted.[21] A secret medical report at the time dismissed this as nonsense, but ugly rumours have a habit of sticking, despite evidence that refutes them. Instances of self-wounding was unlikely to have been less or greater than in other armies, although it does seem clear that for a short period of time self-inflicted wounds were a problem. It’s hard to identify a reason for this anti-Indian sentiment. Gordon Corrigan records the regimental history of a British unit for example, far from where the Indians were fighting, claiming that the Indians refused to fight.[22] It is true that there were a tiny number of desertions recorded from Indian ranks.[23] A recent study suggests that these were caused by war weariness, extreme stress and homesickness.[24] Jealousy no doubt played a part in these calumnies, as did racism. What is clear, however, is that there is no evidence whatsoever for poor battlefield performance by the Indian Corps, even when, in 1915, the battlefield circumstances would have placed unbearable stress on even the most professional and disciplined units of the BEF. Man for man, unit for unit, the soldiers of the Indian Corps thrust into the furnace of battle in 1914 and 1915 did so as well as, if not better than, any other combatants who found themselves struggling in the mud, blood and fury of battle in Flanders.

The Indian Corps was to remain an essential part of the order of battle of the BEF through that first terrible winter, fighting in the battles of Neuve-Chapelle (10-12 March 1915); the second battle of Ypres (April 1915), the battles of Aubers Ridge (9 May); Festubert (15-25 May) and Loos (25 September – 15 October 1915). It had provided much needed substance to a weakened BEF at the first battle of Ypres, and remained in the line for the year which followed. In the fighting over that first year the Indian Corps had sustained 22,000 casualties (8,000 dead and 14,000 wounded). In late October 1915 a decision was made, now that reinforcements from Kitchener’s call to arms in Britain was having its effect, to redeploy the Lahore and Meerut Divisions to Mesopotamia.

This wasn’t the end of the Indian contribution to the BEF, however. About 7,000 men of two cavalry divisions remained in France as part of the BEF’s Cavalry Corps until they departed for Egypt in March 1918 to take part in Allenby’s campaign in Palestine.

The final words needs to go to the commander of the Indian Corps, General  Sir James Willcocks, who reminded his fellow countrymen in 1917 of the debt their owed to their Indian brethren:

[T]he Indian  soldiers are due a great debt of gratitude  by the people [of  Britain],  because  at  a time  when  our  own  countrymen were fighting against enormous  odds and performing  deeds of deathless glory, the Indian  Corps was able to step in and fill the gap, and thus help roll…[back]… the billows thundering against that thin but still unshatterable granite wall…[T]hey  arrived at the very nick of time and took  their place in the sadly reduced  battle  line, thus relieving the strain which was becoming  nigh intolerable  for our own brave men.[25]

Additional Resources

https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/332

https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item124198.html

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/

Sources used in this article.

1.       https://geographicalimaginations.com/2014/07/25/all-white-on-the-western-front/

2.       Chandar S. Sundaram (2015): Arriving in the Nick of Time’: The Indian Corps in France, 1914-15, Journal of Defence Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4 October-December 2015, pp. 71-94.

3.       George  Morton-Jack, The  Indian  Army on the Western Front: India’s Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

4.       George Morton-Jack, The Indian Empire at War: From Jihad to Victory, The Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War (London: Little Brown 2018).

5.       Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1990)

6.       G. Corrigan, Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian  Corps on the Western Front, 1914–1915, (Staplehurst:  Spellmount, 1999)

7.       Charles Chenevix Trench The Indian Army and the King’s Enemies 1900-1947 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988)

8.       David Omissi ‘The Indian Army in the First World War, 1914-1918’ in Daniel Marston and Chandar Sundaram A Military History of India and South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

9.       Philip Mason A Matter of Honour: An account of the Indian Army, its officers and men (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974)

10.   Gajendra  Singh The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy, (London:  Bloomsbury  Academic, 2014)

11.   David Omissi The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Houndmills; Macmillan, 1994)

12.   A.T. Jarboe Soldiers of Empire: Indian Troops in and beyond the Imperial Metropole during the First World War, 1914–1919, Unpublished PhD thesis, Northeastern University, 2013, p. 126.

13.   General Sir James Willcocks, The Indian Army Corps in France, Blackwood’s Magazine, MCCXXI, 1917

14.   Simon Doherty and Tom Donovan, The Indian Corps on the Western Front. A handbook and battlefield guide, (Brighton: Tom Donovan Editions, 2014)

15.   David Olusoga The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (London: Head of Zeus, 2014).

16.   Alan Jeffreys The Indian Army in the First World War: New Perspectives (Helion and Company, 2018)

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[1] See Dr Derek Gregory at https://geographicalimaginations.com/2014/07/25/all-white-on-the-western-front/  and Chandar S. Sundaram (2015): Arriving in the Nick of Time’: The Indian Corps in France, 1914-15, Journal of Defence Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4 October-December 2015, pp. 71-94. I acknowledge my debt to Dr Sundaram in helping me to understand better the nature and impact of the pre-partition Indian Army on battlefields at home and abroad.

[2] George  Morton-Jack, The  Indian  Army on the Western Front: India’s Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Morton-Jack has subsequently expanded this book to examine the Indian Army’s experience of the Great War as a whole. It is superb. George Morton-Jack The Indian Empire at War: From Jihad to Victory, The Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War (London: Little Brown 2018).

[3] See Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 45-56.

[4] G. Corrigan,  Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian  Corps on the Western Front, 1914–1915, (Staplehurst:  Spellmount, 1999), p.  xvi. This, too, is a first class, empathetic and empirical treatment.

[5] Morton-Jack, The Indian Army on the Western Front, op. cit., n. 2, p. 148.

[6] At the time the Army in India comprised 155,000 Indian troops and 30,000 British, was organised into seven regionally-based infantry divisions.

[7] Later the 4th Battalion, 10th Baluch Regiment.

[8] Later the 4th Battalion (Wilde’s), 13th Frontier Force Rifles.

[9] Charles Chenevix Trench The Indian Army and the King’s Enemies 1900-1947 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p.32.

[10] Ibid., p. 33.

[11] 1,597 (653 British and 944 Indians) killed, together with 8,182 (2,000 British and 6,182 Indians) wounded or missing.

[12] David Omissi ‘The Indian Army in the First World War, 1914-1918’ in Daniel Marston and Chandar Sundaram A Military History of India and South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 77.

[13] Morton-Jack, The  Indian   Army  on  the  Western   Front, op. cit., n. 29, p. 339.

[14] Later, the 18th Garhwal Rifles.

[15] Morton-Jack, The  Indian   Army  on  the  Western  Front, op. cit., n. 29, p. 343.

[16] Quoted in Philip Mason A Matter of Honour: An account of the Indian Army, its officers and men (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), p. 413.

[17] David Omissi ‘The Indian Army in the First World War, 1914-1918’ in Daniel Marston and Chandar Sundaram A Military History of India and South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 78.

[18] Gajendra  Singh The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy, (London:  Bloomsbury  Academic, 2014); David Omissi The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Houndmills; Macmillan, 1994)

[19] Omissi Indian Voices of the Great War, n. 62, pp. 27–28.

[20] Ibid., p. 59.

[21] The British surgeon, Colonel Sir Bruce Seton, examined 1,000 cases of sepoy wounds and injuries received in combat and concluded that only six or 0.06 per cent could be classified as self-inflicted. See Chandar S. Sundaram op. cit., p. 80 for a discussion on this point.

[22] Corrigan, op. it., n. 2, p. xi.

[23] About 90 desertions, from a total of nearly 90,000 troops deployed, are recorded from the Indian Corps between 1914-15. Most were Pathans from the tribal areas not under British control. Only 50 of the 1,000 Indian POWs taken by the Germans joined the Turkish Army.

[24] A.T. Jarboe Soldiers of Empire: Indian Troops in and beyond the Imperial Metropole during the First World War, 1914–1919, Unpublished PhD thesis, Northeastern University, 2013, p. 126.

[25] General Sir James Willcocks, ‘The Indian Army Corps in France’, Blackwood’s Magazine, MCCXXI, 1917,  p. 8.