The Western Front, Laventie, Fauquissart, France.
Photographer: Charles Hilton DeWit Girdwood.

Protected behind a breastwork built out of sandbags and earth, an infantry unit of the 58th Rifles undergo training in trench warfare at Fauquissart, France in this photo produced by Charles Hilton DeWit Girdwood on the 9th of August, 1915.

A small hamlet of Laventie in the Pas-de-Calais department of what is now the region of Hauts-de-France, Fauquissart, during World War I, was a tiny settlement of buildings sprouting on either side of a dirt road and a site that had witnessed pitched encounters between the allied forces and central powers.

The British who had arrived in the area in October 1914 had subsequently made use of the building at Fauquissart as a forward command post and on the 23rd of the same month, a battalion of the 4th Middlesex regiment had begun the work of erecting the earthen defences south-west of the settlement which after their rotation had been taken over by other military units including the 58th Rifles in 1915, that was part of the British Army’s Indian Corps send overseas to assist the allied forces.

Formally known during the war as Vaughan’s 58th Rifles after British general J.L Vaughan, the battalion was an Asian contingent of the British Indian Army drawing its recruits mainly from the Sikh, Punjabi Muslim, Kashmiri Dogra and Gurkha communities of British India.

Landing in Marseilles and reaching the western front after a journey of some 1,000 km, the battalion had participated in the battles of Neuve Chapelle (10th March 1915), Aubers Ridge (9th of May 1915) and Festubert (15th May, 1915) before being shipped to Egypt to serve on the Suez Canal and later the Palestine Front. In 1917 alongside other British forces, it had participated in the capture and occupation of Jerusalem and remained in the vicinity till the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918.

The gas mask that the men of this battalion can be seen wearing in the photo was known as the Hypo Helmet or British Smoke Hood. This protective gear had been issued to allied soldiers in June 1915 and had remained in service till replaced by the P Helmet in September 1915.

Thought-up by Dr. Cluny Macperson, a medical officer with the Canadian Newfoundland Regiment who is believed to have been inspired by a German soldier who had covered his head in a wet canvas bag during a gas attack, the protective gear was the third British invention in the race to produce an effective gas mask and had followed the Black Veiling Respirator issued in May 1915.

Made from an impregnable fabric with a small celluloid window for visibility, this gas mask was basically just like a small potato sack dipped in a solution of chemicals and had offered protection from the hazardous effects of chlorine for up to nearly 3 hours. During the three month period, the mask had been in use, nearly 2.5 million units had been manufactured and distributed not just among British soldiers serving on the front but also British allies.

Coloured beige and grey, the main advantage of this mask was that it could be easily and quickly used by soldiers who only had to slip it over their heads and tuck the open end into their shirts. The term Hypo had emerged from Sodium Hyposulphite – one of the chemicals that had been used in combination with Sodium thiosulphate and Glycerine to make the mask effective in the field.

While the Hypo Helmet had been eventually discarded for its inability to protect the wearer against Phosogen and Hydrogen Cyanide, it had nonetheless marked an important step in the evolution of the allied gas mask – especially from the early days of panic and helplessness that had gripped the British Army immediately after the battle of Ypres.

At Langemark on the 22nd of April 1915, the British had been so unprepared for gas warfare that in the moments that had followed the chlorine attack they had even advised soldiers to urinate on handkerchiefs and hold it over their mouth and nose with the hope the urea in the urine would help reduce the poisonous effects.

DeWit Girdwood who had captured this photo during his tour of the western front was at the time a 36-year-old artist of many talents and delightful doggedness. Born in Ottawa, Canada in 1878 he was a photographer, filmmaker and an adventurer who had earned a living by selling visual merchandise to publishers and other buyers, and in 1914 was determined to photograph the role of the Indian Corps, generally believed to be for the genuine admiration he had for the Corps and the opportunity to build his fame in the field of visual arts.

Shortly after war had been declared in Europe, Girdwood, who but recently had been photographing the Durbars of British India, had prevailed upon the British Indian Government to be permitted to cover the role of the Indian Expeditionary Force in action and upon receiving the approval had self-designated himself as a Geographical and Historical photographer for the Government of India.

Travelling with the Indian Corps to France and with great difficulty procuring a permit from the War Office to visit the front, he had captured countless photos of Indian soldiers that had later made up the extensive Girdwood collection.

To capture the scenes Girdwood had relied on a range of conventional and special stereoscopic cameras, and combining sensitivity and artistic sense he had created a wide variety of images that were visually arresting as well as revealing – and an enterprise that had cost him a great deal in expenses.

Though many of Girdwood’s critics have suspected his ulterior motive to have been monetary gains and self-publicity, in which he had most certainly excelled in. His undefeatable enthusiasm to photograph and film the war, especially with a ban in place prohibiting documentation, had resulted in the largest collection of wartime visual material ever produced by a single artist on Indian soldiers serving overseas.

The photos Girdwood had produced had ranged from genuine documentation to staged photos. While his images from behind the lines, hospitals, mess kitchens, barracks, the trenches and towns had captured real scenes of comradeship, bravery, training, medical care and cross-cultural exchange.

Many of his other photos had been declared as ‘fakes’ by the War Office – for the manner in which he had produced the photos and the captions he had used to describe them with the plausible reason being the refusal of the War Office to let him document the action as it had unfolded.

A prohibition that had led him to create illusions of battles like in the case of the image above that at first glance, and without a caption, can be mistaken for a line of infantry waiting to repel a real attack.

Most of Girdwood photos had been explicitly created for propaganda purposes, and likewise, they had been featured in newspapers and other tabloids, and along with his captions were largely responsible for uplifting the image of Indian soldiers, abroad as well as in British India – with special emphasis on the Gurkhas and Sikhs that the British had admired.

In the words of academic and professor of modern literature and culture, Santanu Das, author of the book, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, “Girdwood was essentially responsible for rebranding the image of the Indian soldier” – and not just with his photos and films but also lecture-tours in Britian, India and Canada.

The 58th Rifles that Girdwood had photographed with his stereoscopic camera had been originally raised in 1849 as a Frontier Force bearing the nomenclature of 5th Punjab Irregular Force and had served with distinction in numerous conflicts in the Indian Subcontinent including the Second Burmese War of 1852-53, the Anglo-Afghan War conflict of 1878-80 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 – where it had conducted counter-insurgency operations in Oudh to help curb the mutiny.

Following Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener’s reforms of the British Indian Army in 1903, the battalion had adopted the name of Vaughan’s 58th Rifles, and in 1920 it had merged with other frontier battalions to form the 5th battalion 13th Frontier Force Rifles – a name under which it had participated in World War II. Serving in North Africa, Italy, Iraq and Lebanon.

The Independence of India in 1947 and the creation of the country of Pakistan had brought to an end its 98 year-long-role as a battalion of the British Indian Army and during the partition of the armed forces, it had been reallocated to serve with the Pakistan Army as the 10th Battalion Frontier Force Regiment.

Bidding farewell to many soldiers who had opted for India and welcoming new recruits to replenish its ranks, it had later clashed with Indian forces on two separate occasions between 1948 and 1966.

In 1948 it had been pitted against the Indian Army in the Kashmir Valley and in 1965 deployed in the Kasur district of the Lahore sector, Pakistan Punjab.

During World War I, several soldiers of the battalion had been honoured for gallantry and service with the most widely recognized being Rifleman Kulbir Thapa. A Gurkha from the Palpa District of Nepal who had received the Victoria Cross for rescuing three fellow soldiers from behind enemy lines in spite of being wounded – at Fauquissart in 1915.