Indian Corps leaves France

On the evening of 10 November 1915 the last units of the Indian Corps came out of the front line in France, which they had held for more than a year. Their sector around Neuve-Chapelle and Givenchy was taken over by the British XI Corps. The corps’ two infantry divisions, the 3rd (Lahore) and the 7th (Meerut), were to sail from Marseilles for a new theatre of war, Mesopotamia. The British chronology of the war records under this date that the corps began to leave France. The departure, however, was spread over weeks. The first units boarded trains as early as 7 November, and the last transport left Marseilles only on 26 December.

The decision

The withdrawal of the Indian infantry from France had been discussed since the summer. On 13 August the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, that he would like to take both divisions out of France before the winter. This was opposed by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, who did not want to reduce the number of divisions on the Western Front. Hardinge proposed sending them to Egypt as a reserve for Mesopotamia and other theatres of war in the East. The commander in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, after the victory at Kut, wanted to advance on Baghdad and asked for reinforcements. At the end of October the government in London agreed to the advance on Baghdad and promised Nixon that both Indian divisions from France would be sent to Mesopotamia as quickly as possible. On 31 October the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force received orders to prepare the corps for embarkation at Marseilles.

The corps was to leave behind in France the British Special Reserve and Territorial Force battalions attached to it, as well as three field artillery brigades of the Lahore Division. The Indian cavalry corps, which had served less in the trenches and coped better with the climate, also remained in France.

An exhausted corps

It was not only the needs of Mesopotamia that argued for the withdrawal. The Indian Corps had landed at Marseilles in the autumn of 1914 and had gone straight into heavy fighting at Ypres and La Bassée. In 1915 it fought at Neuve Chapelle, in the Second Battle of Ypres, at Festubert and in the subsidiary attack at Pietre on the first day of the Battle of Loos. According to the British official history, by 19 November 1915 it had lost 1,525 officers and 32,727 other ranks killed, wounded and missing.

The Indian reserve system could not withstand such a war. Replacements had to be drawn from other regiments in India, and in place of fallen British officers men were sent who often knew neither the soldiers nor even their language. The corps’ chroniclers state that of the 47th Sikhs, which had arrived in France in 1914, by the beginning of November 1915 not a single officer of the original complement was still serving who had not spent a longer period away from the front because of wounds or sickness, and of the other ranks only 28 such men remained. After the fighting at Loos the British command concluded that the corps would be better used in a theatre of war closer to India, in a milder climate.

Farewell

The relief began on 4 November. According to the British official history it ended on 6 November, when the Meerut Division came out of the trenches for the last time, but according to the corps’ chronicle the last units were relieved only on 10 November. On 7 November the first units, including the Garhwal Brigade and a battalion of Gurkhas, boarded trains for Marseilles. On 22 November Field Marshal John French thanked the soldiers in an order of the day, and on 25 November, at the château of Mazinghem, the Prince of Wales, Edward, read out to representatives of the units a letter from King George V. The King, who at the end of October had fallen from his horse and been injured during a visit to the front, could not bid the corps farewell in person. “You leave France with a just pride in honourable deeds,” he wrote.

The departure dragged on until the end of the year. The last units of the Meerut Division boarded trains on 30 November, and the first units of the Lahore Division only on 9 December. On 8 December the Indian Corps formally ceased to exist. There was a shortage of ships, because troops were being carried to Salonika at the same time, and German submarines in the Mediterranean held up the sailing of transports. The soldiers, who had been promised a halt and reorganisation in Egypt, reached Basra without that halt, in scattered groups and often without their transport. The first arrived at the beginning of December. A few days later Ottoman troops surrounded General Townshend’s division at Kut, and further units from France were sent straight to its relief.