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Short notes on the Great War

The Great War lives on in our everyday, commonplace words. The trenches of the Western Front were notorious—filth, mud, muck, human waste and rotting human remains—and the preponderance of vermin, rats and lice in particular. Lice were the common possession of all fighting men; it was terribly difficult to get rid of them and, consequently, ‘crumbing up’ was a highly social activ­ity. The lice was known as ‘mickies’, ‘cooties’ or ‘chats’, from which ‘chatting’ and ‘lousy’ have remained in our social vocab. Before the War, something kept as an aid to memory was known as a ‘keepsake’. But the Bri­tish soldier had been in Fra­nce for so long that he adopted the French word for it—‘souvenir’, which has all but edged ‘keepsake’ out. Each of the great war offensi­ves started with a ferocious assa­ult by hundreds of field guns. There were no words for this kind of thing. When we say we are ‘bombarded’ by mails, or that we faced a ‘barrage’ of questions, we are unconsciously remembering the Great War.

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The modern Middle East as we know it today was shaped by the First World War. The boundaries of most countries in the region were drafted in the aftermath of the war, as the defeated Ottoman Empire was partitioned into new nation-states. The shortcomings of that partition have also left the region with its most enduring conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kurdish statelessness, and repeated Iraqi claims to Kuwait.

As the world prepares for the centenary of the Great War, many are unaware of the way the Middle East and North Africa were drawn into Europe’s conflict. Turkey, Iran, Israel and nearly every Arab country were theatres of war, their young men recruited for service in the French, British or Ottoman army. In some cases, soldiers changed sides. Prisoners of war were actively recruited—Muslim soldiers to join the Ottoman sultan’s jehad, Arab soldiers to join the Sharif of Mecca’s Arab revolt.

The Middle East was the most international front of the Great War. In the Gallipoli campaign, British troops were reinforced by soldiers from Australia, New Zealand, India, France, Ireland, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Senegal. The Ottomans drew on their own nati­onal diversity of Turks, Kurds and Arabs, with assistance from Germans and Austrians. In all of these ways, it was the Ottoman Front that made the Great War a World War. And of the international troops engaged on the Ottoman Front, the largest contingent came from India.

While India remained distant from the battlefields of the Great War, commanders in both Britain and Germany saw India as central to the conflict. One quarter of India’s 255 million inhabitants were Muslims—over 65 million in all. German intelligence had identified the Muslims of India as the Achilles’ tendon of the British Empire and hoped to use the Ottoman call for a religious war (jehad) to provoke uprisings that would spell the end of the Raj and speed Britain’s defeat on the Western Front.

On the outbreak of war, George V, the British ‘king-emperor’, issued a proclamation to the ‘Princes and people of India’ on August 4. He explained Britain’s reasons for declaring war on Germany and called for India’s support for the imperial war effort. Much to the British government’s relief, the Indian ruling elite responded to the king’s appeal with effusive declarations of loyalty. “The loyalty of the Indian Muslims to the king-emperor,” the Aga Khan asserted, “is proof against any attempt of German diplomacy in the Near East or elsewhere to create a bastard pan-Islamic sentiment in favour of the ‘mailed fist’ made in Germany.” His views were repeated in public statements by Muslim princes from across India.

The Ottoman entry into the war in November 1914, and the Sultan’s declaration of jehad, actually prompted another wave of Indian Muslim declarations of support for the British. The Nawabs of Bhopal, Rampur, Murshidabad and Dhaka, along with the Nizam of Hydera­bad, all affirmed the Sultan had misled Muslims with his ‘erroneous’ call to jehad, and insisted that Indian Muslims had a duty to support Great Britain. The Aga Khan went so far as to withdraw his recognition of the Ottoman claim to caliphate: “Now that Turkey has so disastrously shown herself a tool in German hands she has not only ruined herself but has lost her position as Trustee of Islam and evil will overtake her.”

Kut Relief Force Captured Turkish prisoners as the British advance 

The Council of the All India Muslim League went out of its way to pass a resolution in Novem­ber 1914 asserting “the participation of Turkey in the present war” had no impact on the “loyalty and devotion” of Indian Mus­lims to the British Empire. The Council affirmed its confidence “that no Mussal­man [sic] in India will swerve even to a hair’s breadth from his paramount duty to his sovereign”, the king-emperor. Similar resolutions were passed by mass meetings of Muslim notables across India in November 1914.

Loyalty confirmed, Britain turned next to mobilise Indian troops for the war. India responded to George V’s call with more volunteers for the war effort than all other colonies and domini­ons combined. Between 1914 and the end of 1919, some 1.1 million Indians signed up for military service and up to 6,00,000 served as non-combatants—a total of some 1.7 million men sent abroad to participate in the war effort as soldiers, workers, medics and other auxiliaries. Soldiers of the Indian army fought in every front of the war—over 1,30,000 on the Western Front alone. Yet their greatest contribution to the British war effort came in the Near and Middle East, where nearly 80 per cent of Indian soldiers served—in Gallipoli (9,400 men), in Aden and the Persian Gulf (50,000 men), in Egypt (1,16,000 men) and overwhelmingly in Meso­potamia (nearly 5,90,000 men).

According to official figures, 65,000 Indian soldiers died and another 70,000 were wounded in the Great War. Their sacrifice is memorialised on the majestic India Gate in Delhi, dedicated to the “dead of the Indian armies who fell honoured in France and Flanders, Mesopotamia and Persia, East Africa, Gallipoli and Elsewhere in the Near and the Far East in the 1914-1918 war”.

Given the very great number of ­Indian men who served as soldiers, non-combatants and labourers in the First World War, it is all the more surprising how little we know about their war experiences. Unlike soldiers in Europe and the Middle East, there have been very few war diaries, journals or memoirs published by Indian soldiers and officers. Scholars are working actively to fill this gap. Santanu Das in the University of London (see Stream That in the Wadi, p 96), and David Omissi in Hull, have each contributed new sources, including letters and diaries, written by Ind­ian soldiers. Yet the quantity of material currently available represents an insignificant proportion of the Indian men who lived, fought, suffered and in many cases died in the Great War.

To give but one example of a letter written by an Indian soldier passed by the British censors, Ressaidar Hushyar Singh, who was serving in Meso­po­tamia, wrote in Urdu to a Sikh friend serving in France at the end of January 1916. “We have got a fine opportunity of fighting,” he boasted. “No doubt you are right in thinking that you too are fighting; but you are having a very different time from us, for you have everything you can want while the country here is absolutely uninhabited and desolate. Never mind,” he concluded, “when we are winning we are equally indifferent to comfort and inconvenience.”

Ressaidar Singh’s letter is all the more poignant given that it was written in the early weeks of the siege of Kut. General Townshend’s Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force was driven back from the gates of Baghdad in December 1915 to Kut al-Amara, where they were surrounded and besieged for 145 days. Starved and emaciated, the men of Kut were finally forced to surrender when the last of their food rations was exhausted. While 277 British officers and 2,592 men were taken prisoner, there were 204 Indian officers, 6,988 Indian soldiers and 3,248 Indian non-combatants who made up the largest part of the Kut prisoners.

The hardships faced by the Kut prisoners were terrible. Of the 2,592 British soldiers led into captivity from Kut, more than 1,700 died in captivity or in death marches—nearly 70 per cent. The figures for Indian ‘other ranks’ are less precise, but no fewer than 2,500 of the 9,300 soldiers perished in Ottoman captivity. Those who survived—Britons and Indians alike—were put to work on the Ottoman railways.

In this season of remembrance of the Great War, it is essential that all historians remember the part played by the soldiers of India. Given their numbers, the fronts on which they fought, and the hardships they suffered, no account of the Great War is complete that neglects the role of Indian forces.

Eugene Rogan is Associate Professor of the Modern History of the Middle East; Fellow of the Middle East Centre, St Anthony’s College, Oxford University