England’s Indian Warriors
Who Made Up the Indian Army; and Some V. C. Heroes
In December of the first year of the war, a letter came to the Indian post-office in London with this address, written in the topknotted Marathi character, and hence perfectly incomprehensible to every one but the Jat orderly who read it:
“In the land of the European War
The country of the King of France
For my beloved son, the Sepoy Khundadad Khan
And the hand of any who bears this to him shall be that of a gentleman.”
It was an extraordinary epistle to look at, very thick, and its envelope was an old official one that had been carefully ungummed and refolded wrong side out. And it had come from a tiny village on the banks of the Jhelum River, far away in India. But what was more extraordinary still, its owner received it that very day. For Khundadad Khan had become a very great man indeed, and his name was fully as well known in London then, as ever it had been in his native village. Lying in the Kensington hospital, he stroked his long black curly beard, the exact color of his hair, and murmured, as he fingered the bulky contents of the letter (a parchment verse from the Koran tied up in silk with a dried serpent’s fang), “Oh, yes, it is a very good tawíz—charm—as such things go, and will no doubt keep off many demons. But the King-Emperor has given me a better one, is it not so, my friend?”
“Undoubtedly, oh son of a most high excellence,” replied the little brown orderly respectfully, in Hindustanie. And it was so. For the king had given him the highest military honor of Great Britain, the V. C., the first ever bestowed upon a member of the Indian Army. What he had done to win it sounds like many another brave deed recounted of the men in the Great War. There is a similarity even in brave deeds. He had remained in a trench, firing a Maxim, after his British captain and all the men with him were killed or wounded, holding back the Germans until he, too, fell, severely wounded, and they passed on over his body. But the Germans had been held back, and that was the important point.