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6. The Indian Corps on the Western Front: A Reconsideration
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chapter 6 ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ The Indian Corps on the Western Front A Reconsideration Robert McLain When the Great War began in 1914, few in British military circles envisioned that it would be of such a long or sanguinary nature. Similarly, no one realized that the empire would be forced to look eastward, to India, to offset its tremendous losses. British High Command balked at employing Asian troops in Europe, yet the long casualty list, rather than delicate colonial sensibilities, dictated the decision to do so. By the end of October 1914, the first elements of a twenty-four-thousand-man force, the Indian Corps, or Indian Expeditionary Force (IEF) as it was also termed, began to filter into the trenches that snaked along the Western Front. Within one year, war on the Western Front had reduced its two divisions, the Third Lahore and Seventh Meerut, to skeletons of their former selves. While the IEF represented only a small fraction of the more than 1 million Indians who were to be recruited during the war, it nonetheless possessed a significance greater than its numbers.1 Indian nationalists hoped that the Indian Corps would be the lever they needed to gain political autonomy . Militarily, the unit provided the razor-thin margin between a stalemate in the autumn of 1914, which led rather tortuously to victory , and an outright Allied defeat. In societal terms, the IEF stood as 167 a microcosm of the colonial encounter, fraught with those elements of race and caste that informed the overall Anglo-Indian relationship. Despite its importance, the IEF has garnered scant historical notoriety , particularly when compared to the array of material dedicated to the empire’s other forces.2 The purpose of this chapter is thus to offer a timely and appropriate reconsideration of the Indian role in France, not only awarding overdue credit but also affirming, modifying, or challenging the most commonly held notions regarding the Indian Corps. The essay raises a number of questions: How does one assess the IEF’s first two months in the trenches, a period that laid waste to the Kiplingesque likeness of the stalwart Indian sepoy, or enlisted man, and replaced it with an unflattering depiction of the Indian troops as panicky and inclined to self-inflicted wounds? How did the Indian army’s reliance on the peculiar “martial races” recruiting system, an ideology that maintained the military superiority of particular castes and tribes of northern India, affect its ability to recoup its losses? Were the heavy casualties among white officers the essential cause of the IEF’s supposedly poor performance , as the British surmised, or did deaths and wounds among Indian officers also play a significant role? Last, how did the attitudes of the IEF’s contemporaries, who saw the Indian Corps as a perilous, misguided failure, affect the historical record? Prior to the Great War, Indian troops had rarely served outside South Asia, and only once had the army sent units west of the Suez; they occupied Malta and Cyprus during the Balkan Crisis of 1878.3 Not until August 1913 did the Committee of Imperial Defense reconsider plans for the Indian army should England become embroiled in a continental war. The government of India agreed in principle to deploy Indian troops overseas, but with the understanding that they would serve merely as garrisons to release British units for the main fighting.4 These best-laid plans hardly survived the start of hostilities. By 23 August, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and Alexander von Kluck’s First Army had locked in a bloody death grip after Kluck had blundered into General Horace robert mclain 168 [3.236.145.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:04 GMT) Smith-Dorrien’s Second Corps at Mons. Just two days later, the Second Corps blunted another German assault at Le Cateau, but at a distressing cost. In the span of one week, the BEF had suffered over fifteen thousand killed, wounded, and missing, approximately 10 percent of its total force. September offered no respite as Douglas Haig’s First Corps lost thirty-five hundred men in one day along the Aisne, while in October, the beleaguered Second Corps incurred another fourteen thousand casualties.5 It took no great feat of statistical genius to realize that the BEF had to have immediate relief or it would soon exist only on paper. British High Command quickly reached a rather unsettling conclusion: of all the empire’s forces, only India could provide immediate reinforcements...