Indian soldiers unload a wagon. The caption on the back refers to the soldiers helping the Allies by 'unloading their baggage,' but Indian soldiers fought on their own. © American Press Assciation
Reverse:India's army which is helping the allies unloading their baggage. (C) American Press AssociationSEP 14 1914
"On leaving St. Omer we took a short cut southward across rolling country. It was a happy accident that caused us to leave the main road, for presently, over the crest of a hill, we saw surging toward us a mighty movement of British and Indian troops. A great bath of silver sunlight lay on the wheat-fields, the clumps of woodland and the hilly blue horizon, and in that slanting radiance the cavalry rode toward us, regiment after regiment of slim turbaned Indians, with delicate proud faces like the faces of Princes in Persian miniatures. Then came a long train of artillery; splendid horses, clattering gun-carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping by all aglow in the sunset. The stream of them seemed never-ending. . . . For over an hour the procession poured by, so like and yet so unlike the French division we had met on the move as we went north a few days ago; so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front, and away from it again, through a great flashing gateway in the long wall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea to the Vosges."
Edith Wharton toured the Western Front in 1915, reporting from the Argonne, Alsace, Lorraine, and the Vosges. In June 1915 she went to the North and into Belgium, sectors held by the British (including Indians and Canadians) and Belgian armies. On June 19, she had stood in her car to watch 'the river of war,' French 'cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers and miners, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers' streaming to the west. On June 24 she admired its British and Indian counterpart.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 178, 179, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
1915-06-24, 1915, June, Wharton, Indian Army, British Army
