War Post

The Fall of Baghdad by Edmund Candler, Manchester Guardian, 16 March 1917

Our vanguard entered Baghdad soon after nine o’clock this morning.  The city is approached by an unmetalled road between palm groves and orange gardens.

Crowds of Baghdadis came out to meet us: Persians, Krabe, Jew, Armenians, Chaldeans and Christians of diverse sects and races.  They lined the streets, balconies and roofs, hurrahing and clapping their hands.  Groups of schoolchildren danced in front of us, shouting and cheering, and the women of the city turned out in their holiday dresses.

The people of the city have been robbed to supply the Turkish army for the last two years.  The oppression was becoming unendurable, and during the last week it degenerated into brigandage.  I am told that the mere mention of the British was punishable, and the people were afraid to talk freely about the war.

It appears that the enemy abandoned all hope of saving the city when we effected the crossing of the Tigris on February 23.  After that date, the Turkish government requisitioned private merchandise wholesale, and despatched it by train to Samara.  Thirty or forty thousand pounds worth of stuff is believed to have been officially looted, including five thousand sacks of flour.

The German Consul left weeks ago, and the Austrian two days since.  The bridge of boats, the Turkish army clothing factory and Messrs Lynch’s offices were blown up or otherwise destroyed last night, and the railway station, the Civil Hospital and most British property except the Residency, which had been used as a Turkish hospital, were either gutted or damaged.

As soon as the gendarmery left at two o’clock this morning, Kurds and others began looting.  As we entered from the east this morning, they were rifling, and among the first citizens we met were merchants who had run out to crave our protection.

Regiments were detailed to police, the bazaar, and houses and pickets and patrols were allotted, but there was much that it was too late to save.  Many shops had been gutted, and the valuables had all been cleared.  The rabble was found busily engaged in dismantling the interiors, tearing down bits of wood and iron and carrying off bedsteads.  They had even looted the seats from the public gardens.

Our entry was very easy and unofficial, and it was clear that the joy of the people was genuine.  No functionaries came out to meet us.  There was still fear of reprisals.  Our own attitude was characteristic.  There was no display, or attempt at creating an impression.

The troops entered, dusty and unshaven, after several days hard fighting.  Fighting between the 7th and 10th had been heavy, and extraordinary gallantry was shown in crossing the Diala river.

Source: Source Records of the Great War, Vol. V, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923. Find it online here.

Contemporary Baghdad reading can best be found here. The photo is from the Digital Journalist.

Runaway Raft on the Tigris (via Harper’s).

I’ve been going through Andrew Carroll’s two anthologies of war letters recently, trying to decide which letters to except and add to the archive here. Having just read Ken Silverstein’s feature in the newest Harper’s on the rise of Shi’a Iraqi death squads, this letter stood out. A Marine writes to his priest back home a month after Shock and Awe:

Father Bob,

With religious banners flying, truckload after truckload of cheering Iraqis pass our position. After decades of religious oppression, the Shi’a muslims are now free to worship as they wish. Old men have tears of joy and the younger generation try to thank us the best they can in their broken English. "Thank You America" and "Mr. Bush… good" are about all the Marines can understand, but the sight of the liberated people is an incredible gift to all of us on this most wonderful Easter.

Andrew Carroll, editor, Behind the Lines, (New York: 2006) p. 211.

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.

Many noble Arabs have perished in the cause of Arab freedom, at the hands of those alien rulers, the Turks, who oppressed them. It is the determination of the Government of Great Britain and the great Powers allied to Great Britain that these noble Arabs shall not have suffered in vain. It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth, and that it shall bind itself together to this end in unity and concord

Imperial British proclamations in newly-captured Baghdad can’t be compared directly to a soldier writing to his priest in 2003, relaying the joy of people free to worship. Some of Paul Bremer’s speeches are the more obvious comparisons to Maude. But in their contrast, the 1917 proclamation and this letter together express to how far things fell in Iraq in the years following both "successful" invasions. That, and the limits of "liberators."

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.

I just discovered Stephen P. Cohen’s The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation, which offers glimpes of Indian home life during the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force. Most of all, the British Government of India wanted men, more and more of them, to send off to the desert plains of Iraq or the squalid trenches of France. Here Cohen portrays the rectruitment center of the Punjab.

The final two years of the war brought enormous pressure upon civilian and military officials to speed the flow of recruitment of the Punjab. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, toured the countryside from division to division, district to district, exhorting the youth of the martial classes—especially the Sikhs—to come forward. In numerous speeches he argued that India’s cause was that of Britain: therefore India should contribute a proportionate number of soldiers which we calculated to be three million. He threatened that conscription would be necessary if Indians would not volunteer. A quota system was informally introduced and the threat of conscription was used as an incentive. O’Dwyer praised the districts whcih had contributed large numbers of troops and shamed those that did poorly, especially with the taunt that Bengal had provided a "keen and capable" unit. 

And now, from Anthony Swafford’s Gulf War memoir Jarhead (a jarring, useful source, regardless of its film version), a description of idle Marines being interviewed by newspaper reporters. "They shake our hands and urge us to speak freely, but they know we’ve been scripted."

"I’m from Texas, ma’am. I joined when I was eighteen rather than go to jail for a few years. Petty stuff. I finds out later my dad talked to the judge the night before and set the whole thing up. How ’bout that shit? But I’m proud of what the Corps has made me."

…I’m proud to serve my country. This is what I signed for. I’m gonna make my mom and pop and my girl proud. I come from a little town in Missouri. They’re gonna make a parade for me, they got the ribbons up already. My mama says the whole town is behind us."

The photo is an undated inspection of Indian troops, perhaps in India, or France.

Baghdad’s North Gate War Cemetery, where thousands of British soldiers are buried.  

While I agreed to steer away from New York Times war coverage for a few days - admittedly it dominates other news links on this site - there are two articles from the past two Sundays that I want to include here. The first, from two Sundays ago, is an article where Dexter Filkins goes searching for Gertrude Bell’s tomb, and finds the old British diplomat buried with other foreign workers and soldiers in a British cemetery in Baghdad. The North Gate War Cemetery, described in detail in Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad, is a strange scene: thousands of British soldiers, plus a few British diplomat-types (Britain’s 1920s version of the Coalition Provisional Authority), buried in a cemetery that, despite the presence of devoted caretakers, is always described as aged and overgrown. There are five other British war cemeteries in Iraq, and Filkins explores most in this article, stopping for a while at Kut, the site of the disasterous seige of 1916. Here’s Robert Fisk’s own description from the early days of the current war.

Some of Anderson’s description of the North Gate War Cemetery:

"Some of the headstones had broken off and lay toppled and neglected. Those still standing were etched with Christian crosses and the insignias of the dead men’s regiments: an elephant and palm for the Ceylon Sanitary Section, a castle standard for the Essex Regiment, an a stag’s head for the Seaforth Highlanders. On the headstone for 201775 Private S. Brown of the Dorsetshire Regiment, who died on September 28, 1917, at the age of twenty-five, were carved the words,"Peace, Perfect Peace." Many of the graves were anonymous and inscribed with the same message: "Four Soldiers of the Great  War—Known unto God."

Yesterday, Sabrina Tavernise documented the injured civilians of Baghdad, whose numbers, stories, and suffering are never clearly presented, not least in the American media. First Filkins starts a thread of compelling, death-of-a-soldier stories, and now the Week in Review shows the Iraqi version of Eugene Richards photos for the Nation. The photographer of these Iraqi casualties is Farah Nosh of Getty Images. Included in the online post of "The Instant When Everything Changed" is a long slideshow of images and interviews (somehow I can’t lift a photo of a slideshow, or I’d include one here).

The rape and murder plot of Steven Green and five others from the 101st Airborne; the Southern Poverty Law Center study of white supremacists in the military; the continued misconduct of seemingly unsophisticated soldiers.

How did the British-Indian army in Iraq 90 years ago compare to today’s American force? One can’t offer a full sweep, but this excerpt from Radhika Singha’s 2004 article for The Hindu Magazine reveals some of the composition of the British-Indian force based in Basra during World War I.

Basra had to be transformed into a port from which a major military campaign could be conducted. Roads, bridges and railways had to be constructed, unreliable rivers and water channels harnessed for transport and irrigation. The army command sent telegram after telegram pressing for labour from India to construct wharfs, quays, barracks, and storage units, and to provide a myriad other services. This could mean literally, like the Hebrews of old, digging into the mud of Mesopotamia to mould bricks for construction material. Porters were also needed to unload coal, munitions, food, and construction material and re-load it to send up river. Local labour was scarce, and the Arabs who were being "rescued from Ottoman tyranny" were usually described as vicious marauders or treacherous informers. Often a village or two or more was/were levelled to keep the locals in line.

Searching for this story in the National Archives I came across an urgent letter from the British military command in Mesopotamia asking for 450 latrine sweepers from India. This was followed by a flurry of telegrams pressing the issue. To put it impolitely, the s*** was piling up in Basra. But why was this correspondence put into a confidential file? Sweepers in the bazaars of India had heard enough about conditions in Mesopotamia to resist going overseas. The military and civil authorities were discussing whether they could impress this labour. There was another reason for discretion. Cholera had broken out in Basra, a fact which had to concealed from public knowledge, especially from those who were being sent unawares into this epidemic front. One suggestion was that the so called "criminal tribes", always under the shadow of the police, could be given a choice between some form of internment or going to Mesopotamia. The solution finally chosen was to recruit in jails, persuading low caste prisoners to become latrine sweepers for a remission of sentence.

… One strategy was to try and transform the stigmatising disciplines of jail into the honourable disciplines of the military. The men sent as sweepers began to refuse to clean latrines, saying they would only clean away mule droppings. Some of those in the labour corps began to fashion head gear and clothes resembling the soldier’s uniform. They would cultivate a military bearing, trying to take a disciplinary flogging with manly indifference, and giving a smart salute after it. Prisoners appointed as overseers asked for the designation havildar, evoking police or military service, instead of the jail designation — daffadar.

They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

- Rudyard Kipling, "Mesopotamia," 1917 

Many of the soldiers who return from this war survive injured in veteran hospitals, on edge at home (a former Time magazine Marine of the Year who fired his shotgun at a crowd from his home, "under attack"), on a Delta flight, (where one veteran now has been detained for charging the cockpit door as the flight prepared to land). Magazine stories, soldier’s memoirs, and now, even, breaking nightly news fill some of the answer to how soldier live after Iraq.

Indian cavalry on the march on the flooded Shaiba road, Mesopotamia.

50,000 Indians died during World War I - nearly half or more of them buried across Iraq or north towards Anatolia. Hundreds of thousands returned to India as veterans. With American veterans in mind, the image of an Indian man stepping of a ship in Bombay after his service in Mesopotamia is now filled with thoughts of similar agony. As he wandered down the city streets to arrange transporation northward to the Punjab (the home of a majority of Britain’s Indian recruits), how did he cope with his return? He did not have an airplane cockpit door to charge, or, likely, a shotgun to fire at party-goers outside his suburban home when thoughts of his Iraq war frayed his senses. How did he return home? What did he do?

On Thursday, I wondered where the voices to the major events of Britain’s Mesopotamian campaign were, acknowledging the value of David Omissi’s collection of letters against the stacks of history books that detail and dissect the war via the Government of India, London, and the memoirs of British generals and high officers on the ground.

Here are more excepts from Omissi’s book, three that give at least some voice to the thousands of Indian soldiers besieged at Kut along with commanding General Townshend, soldiers who then became Ottoman prisoners of war. Their experience as prisoners is vague. Again, British accounts exist of captivity after Kut, but their authors are mostly officers who received far better treatment than the ranks of the Poona Division (the 6th Indian Division). Over half of the soldier who surrendered at Kut died in captivity afterwards, some in prisons in Baghdad, Mosul, and elsewhere, and others in the desert between those cities, casualties of grueling marches. General Townshend, meanwhile, was sent to live in comfortable "captivity" near Constantinople. He was knighted by George V in 1917 while still a prisoner, for his service at Kut.

Gunga Singh (Sikh) to Dafadar Jaswant Singh (attached to 6th Cavalry, France)

16th Cavalry Depot
Lucknow
21st April 1916

The 7th Brigade is surrounded in Mesopotamia. Attempts have been made to rescue them, but without success. There was a fight on 6th March and heavy losses to us in he attempt to relieve them. Some men of ours are in the besieged force, twenty in number. They have eaten their horses and mules. They have a quarter of a pound of flour each per diem. We are hopeful of being sent to join the relieving force. [Letter passed]

David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 178.

Risaldar-Major Kalandar Khan Bahadur to Risaldar Khurshed Ali Khan (Hindustani Muslim, 20th Deccan Horse, France)

7th Lancers
Poona Division (6th Indian Division)
Bombay, 5th Mary 1916

It is with great regreat that I tell you that our besieged for in Kut-al-Amara (of which our squadron formed a part) surrendered on 28th April after a five months’ siege, owing to want of provisions. They fought to the last with the greatest gallantry. There were 9,000 of them. It was a great grief to all that relief could not reach them and that all our efforts were in vain. The greatest regret of all is that our squadron with all the Sirdars are prisoners. Risaldar [Ressaidar?] Ajaib Singh and Jemadar Manna Singh were with them, as they were in hospital with wounds and the hospital was taken. [Letter passed]

Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 181.

Karm Singh (Sikh) to Kalyan Singh (Jhelum District, Punjab)
Machine Gun Section
Sialkot Cavalry Brigade
France, 8th June, 1916

It is a matter of very great regret that our brother Chet Singh has been taken prisoner at Kut-al-Amara. Other men from Dhudial [Jhelum District, Punjab] who were with him have also been captured. Well, we should no grieve; nothing is to be gained by grieving. At the end of the war, they will return home alive. [In fact, many of them did not.] All those brave fellows did their duty faithfully to the very end. They deserve the highest praise. This event was written in their fate, and no one could have prevented it.

Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 194-195.

Something new from inter-library loan: Briton Cooper Busch’s Britain, India, and the Arabs: 1914-1921, a history of British and Indian (that is, the British Government of India’s) policies in the Middle East during the First World War. Busch argues that the Indian Office had far more of an effect on British war and post-war policy in the region than it’s usually credited for. The imperial Government of India was skeptical and argued with London when British diplomats like Henry McMahon were negotiating with Hussein ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, or Ibn Sa’ud, eventual king of Saudi Arabia, on Arab state indepedence. To officials in New Delhi, the idea of Arab Muslim independece was unsettling. Indian Muslim opinion was a concern (some of the war strategy in Mesopotamia often considered possibile Muslim reaction in India), but it existed for the sake of British control over India. In the end, of course, Britain was never actually genuine about those negotiations.

Map from The Times (London), Monday, May 1, 1916. Times Digital Archive. 

But onto the better point from this read: where are the Indian voices? The author states outright that his research was of government archives in London and New Dehli—like the recommended articles of a few days ago—but it is a shame that the history of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, though pretty widely and extensively told, relies so heavily on memos, telegrams, and minutes from Whitehall and New Dehli. A number of first-hand accounts of the British-Indian war in Mesopotamia do exist, from generals and majors, on down to more common army captains. None of these are Indian soldier accounts, though; publishing opportunities for a Punjabi soldier, it seems, were barely available in British India and among an army where even the highest-ranking Indian officer was subordinate to a British officer. 

The value of a book like David Omissi’s, then, only increases as the variously-titled histories of Britain’s early Iraq war pile up. Because without the likes of Indian Voices of the Great War, which itself only includes a handful of Mesopotamian letters, steady examples like this remain voiceless, hardly quoting or conveying the soldiers’ experience then:

In December 1915 the hopes and plans of total victory in Iraq had been undermined, then destroyed, by Townshend’s retreat and the siege at Kut al-’Amara. Every relief attempt failed, and in April 1916 Townshend’s men marched into captivity, many never to be heard from again. The story is a gruesome one of incompetence and overoptimism, and survivors’ accounts bear witness to near-criminal negligence in matters of supply, transport, and medical facilities. Kut’s surrender had only one virtue: it made perfectly clear that India [the British Government of India] was incompetent to conduct an overseas campaign of this scope.

- Briton Cooper Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs: 1914-1921 (Los Angeles: 1971), 110.

More from David Omissi’s fine collection of Indian soldiers’ letters.

Ressaidar Hushyar Singh (Sikh, 34) to Jemadar Harband Singh (9th Hodson’s Horse, France, 24)
16th Cavalry, Mesopotamia, 30 January 1916

We have got a fine opportunity of fighting. No doubt you are right in thinking that you too are fighting; but you are having a very different time from us, for you have everything you can want while the country here is absolutely uninhabited and desolate. Never mind: when we are winning we are equally indifferent to comfort and inconvenience. [Letter passed]

- David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-1918 (London: 1999), 144.

Abdul Rauf Khan to Lance Dafadar Abdul Jabar Khan (Hindustani Muslim, 6th Cavalry, France)
21st Combined Field Ambulance, Mesopotamia, 7th March 1916

You know very well that I am not in India. I am here with Force D. You must know very well where Force D is [Mesopotamia]. Since coming here I have met many men who were formerly in France. From them we have heard all about France. In truth you must be very comfortable there, since the ‘public’ there are so civilized, and money, too, is plentiful. The particular part of the world where I am is a strange place. The seasons here are quite different from what you experience anywhere else. We have already had experience of the cold and wet. Now the heat is threatening us from afar. It rains very heavily and the entire surface of the land becomes a quagmire in which the slush is knee deep. When I used to march in this slush, I used to remember God! Since I left India I have not seen a metalled road. Except for date trees which one sees here and there along the course of the river, there is not another tree to swear by. We drink river water. Wells cannot be dug here. Except for the barren, naked plain, there is nothing to see. The soil certainly is fertile, but the ‘public’ here are so thoughtless and careless that they do not make any attempt to till it. The lice infest one’s clothes to such an extent that our hope [of release from them] is in God alone. The summer is coming on gradually. It is stated here that the mosquitoes are enormous, and I have been afraid of them from the beginning.

- Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 160-161.

Adbul Najid Khan (Muslim) to Suliman Khan (3rd Skinner’s Horse, France)
Rohtak, Punjab, 18th March 1916

I had a letter received today from my brother Sadikall Khan from Basrah, three days ago. He says he is constantly ill, and that every few days his health changes. He says also that the heat is unbearable and that the country [Mesopotamia] is the very opposite of France; that he is neither fit to fight nor ill enough to return to India; that, except for dates and the heat, nothing is to be found. Where, he asks, is that France, and those courteous people; where those fine open roads; where all those nice things? In short, this country, he says, is the entire opposite of France. [Letter passed]

- Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 165.

In 1919, Major E. W. C. Sandes published his account of war as an officer with the Sixth Indian Division of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force. In Kut and Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division includes field sketches of the early battles of 1914 in southern Iraq—victories for the British/Indian forces—to the November 1915 battle at Ctesiphon, site of an ancient Mesopotamian city marked by the massive, ruined arch of the same name. Because of heavy losses at Ctesiphon, where some 11,000 British and Indian troops fought over 30,000 soldiers of the Ottoman Empire, the MEP retreated to Kut, where they were besieged for months leading into 1916, until a final surrender to Ottoman troops in April, 1916.

Sandes account is that of a British officer, and it reads as such, full of strategic military language and long-winded explanations of troops movements along the Tigris and Euphrates that account for the length of this old source. For the sake of this site, though, Sandes account of his soldiers’ experience is useful in the details of war: food shortages during and after the siege at Kut, transport up-river to Baghdad as Ottoman prisoners of war, and a grueling northward desert march to Mosul, which eventually led all to the way to Anatolia.

After the surrender at Kut, in the first days as Turkish prisoners, Sande wrote:

    The great problem naturally was to feed the British and Indian troops rapidly assembling on this bare plain seven  or eight miles from Kut. The Turkish camp, a mile farther up river, held all the available supplies, and the only food sent to us during the first day was some Turkish biscuits which were thrown on the ground and lay there in a dusty heap till distributed to us at 6 p.m. by our own Supply and Transport officers.

    The Turkish army biscuit is a curiosity in its way. Imagine an enormous slab of rock-like material, brown in colour, about 5 inches in diameter and 3/4 inch thick, made of the coarsest flour interspersed with bits of husk and a goodly proportion of earth, and you have a tolerable idea of the staple article of diet on which the Turkish soldier seems to thrive…There is no doubt that the Turkish biscuit, whatever its ingredients may be, is a nourishing form of food for a cast-iron interior, but does not agree with people weakened by a five-months siege.

-Major E.W.C. Sandes, In Kut and Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division (London: 1919), 269-270.

 
 From the National Archives: "This photograph shows an emaciated Indian army soldier who survived the siege of Kut (December 1915-April 1916). It was probably taken in July 1916, after he and other British POWs had been released from Turkish captivity in Baghdad during a prisoner exchange. The soldier’s skeletal frame indicates not only the appalling conditions inside Kut during the siege, but also the harsh treatment meted out to ‘other ranks’ while in enemy hands afterwards."

After being transported with thousands of British and Indian men of the Sixth Indian Division up the Tigris, Sandes described their landing in Baghdad and their procession through the city as prisoners of war:

      Guards with fixed bayonets were placed at intervals along our line, and we turned to the left and started our march through Baghdad, where we were apparently to be exhibited exactly as in a Roman triumph, except that we wore no chains and had our full complement of clothes. We were marched through the most densely populated area of Baghdad. There was no necessity for this. For some reason best known to the Turks, the Indian officers were put at the head of the procession, followed by the British officers in  order of seniority of rank. Whether this was done to annoy us, or whether through ignorance, I do not know; but it is almost incredible that the Turks could be wholly ignorant of the fact that all Indian officers of whatever rank are junior to the land-joined British subaltern. We passed out into the streets, turned to the left, and entered the mercantile and bazaar portions of the city….

        …We traversed all the main bazaar roads of the city, where interested crowds thronged the route to see us…We tried to keep up a cheerful appearance before the crowd, and found the unique bazaar with its vaulted roof quite interesting and comparatively cool after the glare outside. From several windows in the upper floors of houses pretty faces looked down on us in curiously—and I think even in pity—for a large portion of the populace was very unfriendly to the Turk.

 - Sandes, In Kut and Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division, 283-284.

    Britain’s build-up to war in Mesopotamia was a back-and-forth affair, with interests ranging from the Admiralty’s desire for oil for battleships (a war aim expressed in agreement quite late in the campaign) to the belief that the vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul would be the great breadbasket for India, as well a home for an expanding, spill-over population.

     Some very good sources on the development and deployment of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force were published in The Historical Journal and the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in the 1970s. V.H. Rothwell’s "Mesopotamia in British War Aims, 1914-1918" in The Historical Journal charts British interests and tactics, both in the India Office and on the ground in Iraq, following certain military and political figures (Lord Hardinge, Viceroy of India, and Percy Cox, the chief political officer with the MEP, among others). Douglas Goold’s "Lord Hardinge and the Mesopotamian Expedition and Inquiry, 1914-1917," also in the The Historical Journal, focuses more specifically on Hardinge, who had a major hand in drafting British policy in Iraq, and had to answer for its failures (namely the surrender of 9,000 MEP soldiers - 3,000 British; 6,000 Indian - to Ottoman forces at Kut, outside Baghdad, in April 1916) during an inquiry in London. Finally, Stuart Cohen’s "Mesopotamia in British Strategy, 1904-1914" in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies relates pre-war British tactics in Iraq and argues that "the extension of the Mesopotamian campaign contradicted previous British strategy toward the region."

     There are many other sources, but these three articles offer substantial insight to the British invasion strategy, relating what effect India Office memos and minutes had on the eventual lives of British and Indian soldiers soon to be deployed in Iraq.

    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.