First Indian soldiers at the front

A British chronicle of the war records under 19 October 1914 the arrival at the front in Flanders of the first units of Indian Expeditionary Force “A”. This was the Indian Lahore Division, which had landed at Marseille in September. In practice the date marks the start of the division’s move north. The first soldiers from India entered the trenches a few days later, on 22 and 23 October.

From Orléans to Flanders

After landing at Marseille the Lahore Division spent several weeks completing its preparations in a camp near Orléans. The soldiers were issued new rifles, and missing transport was made up with carts bought from French dealers. On 18 October the division, without the Sirhind Brigade, which had stayed in Egypt, boarded trains for the Saint-Omer area. Field Marshal John French wrote in his dispatch that the division reached its concentration area behind II Corps on 19 and 20 October. According to the British official history its units were still detraining on the night of 20/21 October near Hazebrouck, where the transfer of the British army from the Aisne had just been completed.

The soldiers from India appeared at a moment when the British cavalry and infantry were already utterly exhausted and a great German offensive was beginning at Ypres and Armentières. The British command needed every battalion, so the division was not assembled as a whole but split up among the most threatened sectors.

The first battalions in the trenches

On 22 October the Lahore Division moved from Hazebrouck to the area of Bailleul. Two battalions of the Ferozepore Brigade, the British 1st Battalion, Connaught Rangers, and the Indian 57th Wilde’s Rifles, were taken by bus to Wulvergem to help General Edmund Allenby’s cavalry corps, which had been defending the Messines ridge for several days. On the evening of 22 October the 57th went into the trenches alongside the British cavalrymen. According to some accounts the first Indian soldier killed on the Western Front, Naik (corporal) Laturia of that regiment, also died that day.

On the morning of 23 October the 129th Baluchis relieved one of the cavalry brigades, and during the day the brigade’s last battalion, the 9th Bhopal Infantry, arrived and remained in reserve. That same day the rest of the division, the Jullundur Brigade, reached Estaires and during the night relieved the French cavalry on the left flank of the British II Corps, which was fighting at La Bassée.

Under fire

On 26 October the 57th and the Connaught Rangers took part in a cavalry attack towards Oosttaverne and captured the first line of German trenches. A few days later, on 30 and 31 October, came the great German attack on the Messines ridge and Hollebeke. In the last two days of October the 57th lost some 300 of its 750 men, and the 129th Baluchis about 240. On 31 October at Hollebeke Sepoy Khudadad Khan of the 129th became the first soldier of the Indian Army to win the Victoria Cross.

At the end of October the corps’ second division, the Meerut Division, reached Flanders, and the two divisions under General James Willcocks took over a sector of the front at La Bassée and Neuve-Chapelle. In the first winter of the war the soldiers from India largely filled the gap left by the bled-white battalions of the old British army.