War Post

    The current New Yorker features a cover of entrenched soldiers, one reading by flashlight, and inside 12 pages of soldiers’ letters anchor their "Life During Wartime" issue. A selection from "Dispatches from Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories" can be heard on The New Yorker’s website; if audio tracks of war letters are of interest, more can be heard at the Gilder Lehrman Institute—letters from the American Revolution to the current war.

   From this New Yorker: in 2003, Captain Donna Kahout wrote to members of her Colorado church about fighting on religious land:

   One clear day, I looked down at the rich greens of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates and pondered over the fact that these were the Tigris and Euphrates that I’d learned about in chruch and school my whole life. Genesis describes the Garden of Eden standing at the headwater of four rivers, two of which are the Tigris and Euphrates. That places the Garden just north of Basa, within sight of where I flew almost daily.

   Abraham, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, the whole displaced Israelite nation, and perhaps even Adam and Eve all trod the ground I was looking down on daily. And I was living in the same desert where the Israelities wandered. We complain about being there for three months—it’s so barren, flat, windy, hot, sandy, and dry—it’s no wonder the Israelites complained during the forty years that they followed God around the Sinai Peninsula between their exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the Promised Land, near Jerusalem.

Indian medical orderlies attending to wounded soldiers on stretchers outside a dressing station, Mesopotamia, 1914-1918.

    While current soldiers remark at a combat zone with Biblical connection, some of the Indian soldiers in Iraq in the 1910s, trodding the same ground, refused to fight against the local population for their own religious reasons. A 1916 letter from a Punjabi Muslim named Fateh Ullah to his friend, Fateh Ahmed, who was stationed in France, relates a friend’s refusal to fight in Mesopotamia:

    We have learnt from Nasir Khan’s letter that his brother Raja Khan has been sentenced by court martial to fourteen years’ imprisonment. This has caused us much grief. The details which he gives are that when the 15th Lancers reach Basra they were ordered to fight against the Turks. They, however, declined to take up arms against their brother Muslims and asked to be sent to some other theatre of war. A court martial was convened and 400 men were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

- David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War (London, 1999), p. 199.

    The British-led Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force landed near Basra in November, 1914, just after Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul were Ottoman-controlled provinces then, with a disparate population of Sunnis, Shi’as, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. Dispatched from India, the Expeditionary Force counted thousands of Indian soldiers among its ranks. During all of World War I, India provided over 1.25 milion men to the war effort, including 827,000 combatants; 250,000 Indian men were serving abroad at any one time, whether in France, Egypt, East Africa, though mostly Mesopotomia– Turkish Arabia in contemporary British language. Their experience in France was well-presented David Omissi’s book Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-1918, but how Indian soldiers reacted to duty in Mesopotamia is less documented.

Indian cavalry advancing near Basra, 1914-1918

This site will seek to present the experience of the Indian soldier in the Mesopotamian Expedtionary Force during World War I as part of a greater effort to approach and imagine the expererience of foreign soldiers in Iraq. The March 2003 American-led invasion, Operation Iraqi Freedom, is still underway, and while reaching a kind of transhistorical truth about Iraq and foreign soldiers is not the goal of comparing 1916 to 2006, the narrative of the soldier, whether an Indian cavalryman near Basra or an American Marine calling in an smart-bomb airstrike outside Fallujah, seems crucial to imagining the current war. Knowing whose boots pounded the desert before American soldiers does not offer the same rapid hit as contemporary political talk. Perhaps that’s the point. While the daily dispatches from field reporters are vital to understanding this war, the unguided political commentary could stand to be replaced by other ideas: the history of the region, visual contrasts of desert combat across a century, and a new imagination of Iraq not as a place translated by cable news, but instead by its historical record, even if that record exists partly in India Office reports and letters home to Bombay.

Charlie Company, First Marine Battalion, Eighth Regiment, Fallujah, December 2004. Photograph by Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times.