The Gift of India

Over one million Indian troops from Britain’s colonial empire served in the British army in World War I.  Nearly 75, 000 died on foreign fields, never returning home, and over 70,000 were wounded.  Serving in the Ypres Sector and other sites on the Western Front, as well as in Mesopotamia and Gallipoli, Indian troops were of vital significance in many battles of the First World War.   

Sarojini Naidu, who served as governor of the provinces of Agra and Oudh and was elected the President of  the Indian National Congress, was also known as the nightingale of India.  Her poem “The Gift of India” commemorates the sacrifices of her countrymen.  

The Gift of India

Is there aught you need that my hands withhold,
Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?
Lo! I have flung to the East and West
Priceless treasures torn from my breast,
And yielded the sons of my stricken womb
To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom.

Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands,
They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands,
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.

Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep
Or compass the woe of the watch I keep?
Or the pride that thrills thro' my heart's despair
And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer?
And the far sad glorious vision I see
Of the torn red banners of Victory?

When the terror and tumult of hate shall cease
And life be refashioned on anvils of peace,
And your love shall offer memorial thanks
To the comrades who fought in your dauntless ranks,
And you honour the deeds of the deathless ones
Remember the blood of thy martyred sons!
                                           --Sarojini Naidu

Pressed down and overflowing, the gifts of India are abundantly extravagant.  Nothing has been withheld, not the richest of garments, grain, or gold.  More precious still, the sons of India have been entrusted to the British war cause, torn from their mothers’ breasts and yielded to “the drum beats of duty, the sabers of doom.”

How has the gift been received?  Broken and far from home, the dear bodies of the sons of India lie in “the blood-brown meadows of France and Flanders,” thousands of miles from their country, an insurmountable distance from their families who ache with loss.  The bright and shining gifts of India’s manhood are pearls buried in a foreign field, as numerous and scattered as shells on the sand. 

Sarojini Naidu

How does one measure the grief of Indian mothers whose sons have died too young? To cope with such unimaginable loss, the sacrifice is set against the pride, hope, and glory of Allied victory.  The poem imagines what Indian deaths have purchased: a world in which terror and hate will have ended, “refashioned on anvils of peace.”  Love and memory will be the building bricks of this new world, laid on the foundation of the gift of India – the lifeblood of her beloved sons.

"Strewn like blossoms mown down by chance," the gift of India has been commemorated on the Western Front battlefield of Neuve Chapelle, where Indian troops first fought as a unit.  There, a memorial honors Indian soldiers and laborers who were killed on the Western Front and who have no known graves – over 4,700.  At the Neuve Chapelle Memorial, one may “honour the deeds of the dauntless ones” and “Remember the blood of my [India’s] martyred sons!”

In 2015, the essay “Why the Indian soldiers of World War I were forgotten” was published in the BBC News Magazine.  Its author states “The Indian soldiers who died in the First World War …. gave their ‘todays’ for someone else's ‘yesterdays’. They left behind orphans, but history has orphaned them as well. As Imperialism has bitten the dust, it is recalled increasingly for its repression and racism, and its soldiers, when not reviled, are largely regarded as having served an unworthy cause.  But they were men who did their duty, as they saw it. And they were Indians. It is a matter of quiet satisfaction that their overdue rehabilitation has now begun.”

Screens

DON’T expect your own particular feelings or likes to be considered. You are but one of many.
DON’T think you can pick and choose your own work at first. Do all that comes your way with your whole heart, and others will soon see what you are best fitted for.

These were just some of the rules that were drilled into women joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), a unit that provided hospital services to millions of wounded during the First World War in an attempt to address the critical shortage of trained nurses and doctors.  An estimated 38,000 women served as VADs in hospitals, canteens, and ambulance corps in England, France, Belgium, Mesopotamia, and Gallipoli.  A BBC article explains, “Poorly paid VADs were used mainly as domestic labour, cleaning floors, changing bed linen, swilling out bedpans, but were rarely allowed until later in the war to change dressings or administer drugs.  The image and the conspicuous Red Cross uniforms were romantic but the work itself exhausting, unending and sometimes disgusting.”

Winifred Mary Letts enrolled as a VAD in June of 1915.  In 1916 she published a book of poetry that included the poem "Screens."

Screens

(In a Hospital)

They put the screens around his bed;
a crumpled heap I saw him lie,
White counterpane and rough dark head,
those screens — they showed that he would die.

They put the screens about his bed;
We might not play the gramophone,
And so we played at cards instead
And left him dying there alone.

The covers on the screens are red,
The counterpanes are white and clean;
He might have lived and loved and wed
But now he’s done for at nineteen.

An ounce or more of Turkish lead,
He got his wounds at Sulva Bay
They’ve brought the Union Jack to spread
Upon him when he goes away.

He’ll want those three red screens no more,
Another man will get his bed,
We’ll make the row we did before
But — Jove! — I’m sorry that he’s dead.              

Unnamed and faceless hospital workers (“They”) erect red screens that offer discrete privacy to the dying man, and yet the screens isolate him from the world before he has left it.  A respectful silence is imposed, and the music of the gramophone is temporarily forbidden.  Vera Brittain, who also served as a VAD, described the music that sounded from the “blaring, blatant gramophones.” Although the music was intended to comfort the wounded and dying, she felt that the upbeat popular tunes added “a strident grotesqueness to the cold, dark evenings of hurry and pain” (Testament of Youth 221).

The clean purity of the stark white sheets and the vivid red of the screens contrast with the untidy end of the nineteen-year-old who lies dying in a crumpled heap.  The voice in the poem "Screens" that bears witness to his death is most likely that of a wounded soldier, not a member of the hospital staff.  The other patients, helpless in the face of death, can do nothing but watch, and so they strike up a game of cards, an activity that may recall the dice game played by the soldiers at the foot of the cross.  

Canadian soldier suffering after mustard gas attack

In the mechanized world of war, in the assembly line of the hospital, the dying man will be moved out and others will take his place, for there exists a never-ending supply of wounded and dying men.  And after the nineteen-year-old has died, the surviving patients will return to making “the row that we did before,” their laughter, cries, and moans accompanied by the gramophone’s notes of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” 

These men in the hospital meet death with a brave front.  With the pluck and good cheer that the Tommies were famous for, they mask their grief and fear with an offhand expletive – "Jove!"  The speaker's last words -- "I'm sorry that he's dead" -- strike us as almost shockingly inadequate, a numb and blunted reaction. 

Scottish Women's Hospital by Norah Neilson-Gray
©IWM (Art.IWM ART3090)

By the end of the poem, we realize that the title carries a double meaning:  red screens shut the dying man off from the rest of the hospital ward, but the patients in the ward are also using screens to shield themselves from the wrenching realities of death and loss. 

Mary Borden, another volunteer who worked in hospitals near the front, described the detachment that was necessary to cope with the horrors of the war: “Someone near is having a fit.  Is it epilepsy?  I don’t know.  His mouth is frothy. His eyes are rolling.  He tries to fling himself on the floor.  He falls with a thud across his neighbor, who does not notice.  The man just beyond propped up against the wall, watches as if from a great distance.  He has a gentle patient face; this spectacle does not concern him” (The Forbidden Zone 154). 

The rules applied to everyone:  DON’T expect your own particular feelings or likes to be considered. You are but one of many.