Strange Things
John Bayley
- Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914-18 edited by David Omissi
Macmillan, 416 pp, £17.50, April 1999, ISBN 0 333 75144 2
From the recollections of the Roman centurion who tells his story to the children in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, we learn that a Libyan cohort, the Thirds, were stationed as part of the garrison on Hadrian’s Wall, and that when crisis comes and the ships of the Winged Hats attack out of the north, these troops were faithful and resolute: they ‘stood up in their padded cuirasses and did not whimper’. They must have felt the cold, poor devils, as did the two Indian Army corps, more than a hundred thousand men, stationed in Northern France during the damp and bitter winters of 1915 and 1916. But those troops, too, stood to it and did their duty.
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Vol. 21 No. 17 · 2 September 1999 » John Bayley » Strange Things
page 8 | 1722 words
