It was time to go and the motor was waiting.
We set off in a driving sleet that covered the windows
of the car and made motoring even more than ordinarily
precarious. But the roads here were better than
those nearer the coast; wider, too, and not so crowded.
To Ham, where the Indian regiment I was to visit had
been retired for rest, was almost twenty miles.
“Ham!” I said. “What a place
to send Mohammedans to!”
In his long dispatch of February seventeenth Sir John
French said of the Indian troops:
“The Indian troops have
fought with the utmost steadfastness and
gallantry whenever they have
been called upon.”
This is the answer to many varying statements as to
the efficacy of the assistance furnished by her Indian
subjects to the British Empire at this time.
For Sir John French is a soldier, not a diplomat.
No question of the union of the Empire influences
his reports. The Indians have been valuable,
or he would not say so. He is chary of praise,
is the Field Marshal of the British Army.
But there is another answer—that everywhere
along the British front one sees the Ghurkas, slant-eyed
and Mongolian, with their broad-brimmed, khaki-coloured
hats, filling posts of responsibility. They are
little men, smaller than the Sikhs, rather reminiscent
of the Japanese in build and alertness.
When I was at the English front some of the Sikhs
had been retired to rest. But even in the small
villages on billet, relaxed and resting, they were
a fine and soldierly looking body of men, showing race
and their ancient civilisation.
It has been claimed that England called on her Indian
troops, not because she expected much assistance from
them but to show the essential unity of the British
Empire. The plain truth is, however, that she
needed the troops, needed men at once, needed experienced
soldiers to eke out her small and purely defensive
army of regulars. Volunteers had to be equipped
and drilled—a matter of months.
To say that she called to her aid barbarians is absurd.
The Ghurkas are fierce fighters, but carefully disciplined.
Compare the lances of the Indian cavalry regiments
and the kukri, the Ghurka knife, with the petrol
squirts, hand grenades, aeroplane darts and asphyxiating
bombs of Germany, and call one barbarian to the advantage
of the other! The truth is, of course, that war
itself is barbarous.
A STRANGE PARTY
The road to Ham turned off the main highway south
of Aire. It was a narrow clay road in unspeakable
condition. The car wallowed along. Once
we took a wrong turning and were obliged to go back
and start again.
It was still raining. Indian horsemen beat their
way stolidly along the road. We passed through
hamlets where cavalry horses in ruined stables were
scantily protected, where the familiar omnibuses of
London were parked in what appeared to be hundreds.
The cocoa and other advertisements had been taken
off and they had been hastily painted a yellowish
grey. Here and there we met one on the road,
filled and overflowing with troops, and looking curiously
like the “rubber-neck wagons” of New York.
