World Wars Part 5: Indian Soldiers in the First World War: From Flanders to Mesopotamia

This is Part 5 of World Wars, our series on the First and Second World Wars, from the July Crisis of 1914 to the world that emerged in 1945. New parts appear every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

In Part 4 we followed the German cruiser Emden as it raided the Bay of Bengal and set the Madras oil tanks on fire in September 1914, bringing the war to India's own coast. This part follows the war the other way: the Indian soldiers and labourers who crossed the "black water" to fight for the British Empire in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The sources do not agree exactly on numbers. The Imperial War Museums (IWM) speak of 1.5 million men of the Indian Army; the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) says the army grew from about 150,000 in 1914 to nearly 1.4 million by 1918. All agree that more than a million served overseas.

An army of volunteers, and the "martial races" idea

In 1914 India was ruled directly by Britain (the period known as the Raj), and its army was a professional, volunteer force. Nobody was conscripted. Men joined for pay and pensions, family tradition and izzat (honour and standing in their community). Some low-caste men saw service as a route to social status.

Who could join was shaped by a colonial theory. After the uprising of 1857, British commanders increasingly preferred men from communities they labelled "martial races": Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans, Dogras, Jats, Gurkhas from Nepal and a few others. Regiments from the south were steadily reduced. According to the IWM, by 1914 just over half of all Indian soldiers came from the Punjab, and Sikhs made up about 20 per cent of the army while being only about 2 per cent of India's population.

Historians today treat "martial races" as a political and racial construct rather than a fact about who could fight. The war itself undermined it: as losses mounted, recruiters turned to groups barely touched before. In 1918 the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, told Parliament that recruitment had risen from about 15,000 a year before the war to more than 285,000 combatants in 1917.

There was also a colour bar at the top: until 1918, the most junior British officer outranked the most senior Indian officer.

The Indian Corps in France and Flanders, 1914-15

In August 1914 the War Council in London decided that the Indian Army should fight overseas. Two infantry divisions, the Lahore and Meerut divisions, formed the Indian Corps, landed at Marseilles from late September and were in action by October. The British Expeditionary Force was close to exhaustion, and in the IWM's words the 45,000 men of Indian Expeditionary Force A "likely kept the Allies in the fight in 1914." By the end of that year Indian troops made up about a third of British forces on the Western Front (the line of trenches that now ran from the Belgian coast to Switzerland).

Their first great test came in the First Battle of Ypres (Ieper, Belgium), as the Germans tried to break through to the Channel ports. On 31 October 1914, at Hollebeke, Sepoy Khudadad Khan of the 129th Duke of Connaught's Own Baluchis kept his machine gun firing after the British officer in charge was wounded and the rest of his detachment was killed around him. He survived to become the first Indian soldier awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest gallantry award, which Indians had become eligible for only in 1911. Born in what is now Chakwal district, Pakistan, he died in 1971. A few weeks later Naik Darwan Singh Negi of the Garhwal Rifles also won the VC near Festubert.

After a brutal first winter in flooded trenches, the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on 10-13 March 1915 was the first large planned British offensive of the war. Indian troops made up about half of the attacking force. The village was taken, but the gains were small and the losses heavy; Rifleman Gabar Singh Negi of the Garhwal Rifles won a posthumous VC there. The Indian Corps fought on at the Second Battle of Ypres in April, where the Germans first used poison gas on the Western Front, at Aubers Ridge and Festubert in May, and at Loos in September 1915.

By then the corps had lost many experienced officers, and reinforcements were hard to find. From December 1915 the Indian infantry moved to the Middle East; the cavalry stayed in France until 1918. According to the CWGC, more than 140,000 Indian soldiers, cavalrymen and labourers served on the Western Front.

Mesopotamia, East Africa, Gallipoli, Egypt and Palestine

Most Indian soldiers fought the Ottoman Empire, Germany's ally, rather than in Europe.

• Mesopotamia (Iraq). Indian Expeditionary Force D landed at the head of the Persian Gulf in November 1914 to secure the oil fields and took Basra. An over-ambitious advance on Baghdad ended in the siege of Kut al-Amara and its surrender in April 1916, when roughly 13,000 British and Indian troops became prisoners; we return to Kut in depth in Part 13. The army recovered, took Baghdad on 11 March 1917 and reached Mosul by the war's end. Mesopotamia was, in the IWM's words, a campaign "largely fought by Indian soldiers."
• East Africa. In November 1914 an Indian force landed at Tanga in German East Africa (Tanzania) and was badly beaten by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck's much smaller army; Indian units then served through a long, disease-ridden bush war.
• Egypt. On the night of 2-3 February 1915, Indian units were the main defenders when Ottoman troops tried to cross the Suez Canal, Britain's lifeline to India. The attack failed.
• Gallipoli (Turkey). An Indian brigade, mountain artillery and the Indian Mule Corps served there in 1915. The 14th Sikhs lost most of their men at Gully Ravine on 4 June. Estimates of Indian deaths there run from over 1,000 to about 1,500.
• Palestine and Syria. By summer 1918, the IWM notes, the Indian contingent was the largest in General Allenby's army. On 23 September 1918 the Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers charged into Haifa, remembered today at Delhi's Teen Murti memorial.

Labourers, hospitals and letters home

Alongside the soldiers went a huge non-combatant army. Of roughly 1.4 million Indians recruited up to the end of 1919, 563,369 were non-combatants: porters, mule drivers, stretcher-bearers, boatmen and construction workers. From 1917 the Indian Labour Corps worked in France, including clearing the Somme battlefields. In Mesopotamia labour corps laid railways and dug canals in extreme heat; the historian Radhika Singha found an officer of the 1st Madras Labour Corps reporting that many of his men had "no boots at all, and only one blanket a piece."

Wounded Indian soldiers from France were sent to England, above all to Brighton. The Royal Pavilion, a seaside palace in a mock-Indian style, opened as a hospital in December 1914 and treated more than 2,300 Indian patients before it closed in January 1916; the Kitchener Hospital took more. There were separate water supplies and nine kitchens so that food could be cooked by men of the patients' own religion and caste, and Sikhs had a tented gurdwara in the grounds. Hindus and Sikhs who died were cremated on the Downs at Patcham, and Muslims were buried near the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking.

We know a great deal about what the soldiers thought because their letters were censored. Censors translated extracts each week to track morale, and the reports survive at the British Library. The letters mix pride and homesickness with horror. "The shells are pouring like rain in the monsoon," one man wrote. "The corpses cover the country, like sheaves of harvested corn," wrote another.

Money, loans and a promise

India paid for the war as well as fighting it. In 1917 it made a gift of £100 million to the British war effort, raised partly through war loans in India; Montagu told Parliament in 1918 that the first loan had raised £35 million, far above expectations. India also sent wheat, jute and other materials, and its people paid through taxes and rising prices.

Many Indian leaders backed the war in the hope of a political reward; Mahatma Gandhi even ran a recruiting campaign in Gujarat in 1918. On 20 August 1917 Montagu announced in the House of Commons that British policy was "the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire." The same statement made Britain the judge of "the time and measure of each advance."

The reforms that followed, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919, gave Indians a limited share of power in the provinces. For many nationalists it was too little, and it came alongside the repressive Rowlatt Act and the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, on 13 April 1919. The sense of a broken bargain fed the mass protests of the 1920s.

Myth vs evidence: what historians debate

• Did Indian troops "fail" in France? Post-war writers blamed unfamiliar weapons, the European weather and low morale. As the IWM notes, modern historians disagree: pre-war Indian troops were well trained, and in late 1914 they suffered trench foot and frostbite about half as much as British troops.
• Mercenaries or patriots? Neither label fits well. The soldiers were professionals serving an empire, with mixed motives of pay, honour, loyalty and family duty. Because it was seen as a colonial war, Shashi Tharoor argued for the BBC in 2015, they were long forgotten in independent India.
• How many died? It depends on what is counted. The IWM gives about 53,000 killed and 64,000 wounded; the CWGC commemorates about 74,000 Indian servicemen of the First World War, a figure that includes deaths from disease and runs to 1921.

Remembering them

The Neuve-Chapelle Indian Memorial in northern France, designed by Sir Herbert Baker and unveiled in 1927, names more than 4,700 Indian soldiers and labourers who died on the Western Front and have no known grave. In New Delhi, the All India War Memorial, now India Gate, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and unveiled in 1931, bears more than 13,000 names and serves as a national memorial to about 70,000 soldiers of undivided India who died between 1914 and 1921. On the Downs above Brighton, the Chattri marks the place where 53 Hindu and Sikh soldiers were cremated.

For the wider story of how the war began, see our explainer on how World War I began, and find more coverage on our World War I tag page.

At a glance: India in the First World War

Next in the series

Part 6: Life and Death in the Trenches: The Western Front. Next, we go inside the trench system the Indian Corps helped to hold: the front line and no man's land, mud, rats, trench foot and shell shock. You can follow every part on our World Wars series page.

Sources

• India and the First World War, Imperial War Museums
• 5 facts about Indian forces in WW1 and WW2, Commonwealth War Graves Commission
• How to find and visit Indian war dead from the world wars, Commonwealth War Graves Commission (Neuve-Chapelle, India Gate, Patcham Down)
• The Victoria Cross, National Army Museum (Khudadad Khan)
• WW1 and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton & Hove Museums
• Mr Montagu's statement, House of Commons, 6 August 1918, Hansard (quotes the 20 August 1917 declaration)
• Shashi Tharoor, 'Why the Indian soldiers of WW1 were forgotten', BBC News (2015)
• Suzanne Bardgett, 'The Invisible' (review of Radhika Singha, The Coolie's Great War), History Today (2021)