Frontline Masculinity: The Indian Corps on the Western Front, 1914–1915

Abstract

India’s economic and military contributions to the war effort were immense. During the course of the conflict India expended in the range of £180–220 million, a sum that hit a desperately poor peasantry especially hard. Militarily, more than 1.2 million of the roughly nine million British and imperial troops raised during the conflict came from the subcontinent, with 118,000 South Asian soldiers joining the casualty list. Indian forces also served across every operational theater. By 1918, more than 138,000 labor and combat troops had passed through French ports on their way to the Western Front.² Britain conducted the bulk of the Mesopotamian campaign against Ottoman Turkey out of India. South Asia provided the financing and no fewer than 600,000 labor and combat troops. The “Mespot” was also the site of one of the war’s great blunders. Poor logistical planning by British Indian Army and ICS officials caused the needless deaths of thousands of British and Asian troops and resulted in the surrender of over 13,000 men, a disaster unrivaled since the Saratoga campaign of the American Revolutionary War.³

I would like to thank NYU Press for permission to reuse elements of my previously published chapter “The Indian Corps on the Western Front: A Reconsideration” that appeared in Geoffrey Jensen and Andrew Wiest, eds. War in the Age of Technology: Myriad Faces of Modern Armed Conflict (2001).