Indian Cavalry Transport, September 1916, on the Albert-Amiens Road, France. Via the Wilfred-Owen Digital Archive and the Imperial War Museum.
The stories of soldiers returning home from Iraq to divorces, separations, depression, and PTSD are not unique to the current conflict, perhaps, only the latest version in the narrative of the soldier-husband going off to fight, writing to his wife, and returning home only to find that it all has changed. Hold up the experience of going to and returning from Iraq now to other wars of the last few hundred years - the "summer soldier," Civil War Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs, and Indian men fighting in France and Iraq for the British army. Where do their stories converge and contrast? Iraq veteran/writer John Crawford, whom I just mentioned below, told an interviewer in Stop Smiling about his return home:
"Your relationships go to shit, nobody has a job, nobody’s going to school, so you’re just getting trashed every night…
…You’re talking to someone you know real well, but you’re a total stranger. You’re not having any of the same experiences. You’re not watching any of the same TV or listening to the same music. She’s talking about a traffic jam, and you’re talking about a firefight."
Historian David Omissi’s other fine book on the Indian Army during the Great War, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army 1860-1940, presents pieces of Indian soldier narrative not far off from the now-familiar agonies of American men returning from Iraq. The following is an excerpt on Indian soldier morale both in France and Mesopotamia.
More and more letters from men in the trenches betrayed ‘undeniable evidence of depression,’ while those written by the wounded from British hospital were often hopeless in tone. ‘Many of the men show a tendency to break into poetry,’ remarked the censor, ‘which I am inclined to regard as a sign of mental disquietude. Of 220 letters from injured soldiers examined by the censor in January 1915, only fifteen displayed what he termed ‘an admirable spirit.’ Twenty-eight had been written by despairing men who clearly regarded themselves as dead already; many of the remainder gave a ‘melancholy impression of fatalistic resignation.’ Morale picked up a little in the summer of 1915, but another general collapse was clearly imminent in the autumn as the weather cooed and victory seemd as distant as ever. Rather than expose the troops to a second morale-battering winter on the Western Front, the authorities sent the two infantry divisions to Mesopotamia where the fighting was arguably less fierce and its outcome less vital…
…Bad news from India compounded the worries of the men. They learned of the plague which afflicted the Punjab in the spring of 1915. Men grew anxious for the well-being of their families when they heard, second hand, that ‘the rain has spoiled the crops, and in the Doab the dacoits have ruined the place.’ One soldier’s wife told him bluntly, ‘I have been starving for lack of food.’ Long separations strained marriages, and by July 1915 many letters were filled with conjugal reproaches. One man was warned, ‘your honour is in danger. If you are a Pathan, and have any pride, look to you wife.’ Betrothals were broken off, and some wives, despairing that their men would ever return, took new husbands. ‘When our thoughts turn to our homes our hearts become soft like wax,’ wrote one Muslim trooper.
David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860-1940 (London, 1994), 115-116.
