The front! That was the phrase that had a magic ring for them all. At the camp the officers talked of nothing else. They showed me their Sikhs and their Pathans and their Gurkhas as who should say: “When the Empire gets _these_, victory is assured!” They had chafed in India, when the Empire went to war, lest their services might not be called upon. One gallant soul grieved so much, as we have read, that he deserted and enlisted in the ranks of a British Regular regiment and died at the front. The call came. I left them at Orléans, untried in European warfare, eager, impatient. When I saw them again six months later they were veterans of war. The despatch of the Indian Corps to take part in the war in Europe was an experiment. That the experiment was possible, that the Indian troops have shown themselves to be loyal and well-behaved while fighting our battles on foreign soil, that India has falsified the hopes of the enemy and the fears of the pessimists as to her fealty to the Empire in the event of a European war, seems to me to be the finest tribute to the wisdom and justice of our administration of India. The loyalty which our rule has fostered has withstood all attempts to corrupt it. The attempts of the Germans on the Western front to sow sedition among our Indian troops have failed as lamentably as the more redoubtable activity of their secret agents in India would appear to have done. At one time the Germans were wont to bombard the Indians holding the trenches in France with proclamations from the air. These manifestos, generally couched in incorrect Hindi or Pushtu, the work of painstaking _Herren Professoren_ at German Oriental Seminaries, announced the German victories and the proclamation of the “holy war” by the Khalifate against the Allies, and painted a rosy picture of the delights awaiting the Indians who would desert to the enemy. The Indian, who has a keen sense of humour, laughed at the bombast of these preposterous concoctions, and made fun of the grammatical mistakes. Two German airmen who were brought down in the lines of the Indians one day were found to have a large stock of these manifestos in their machine with them. The prisoners turned livid when the discovery was made, for, under military law, I believe, it rendered them liable to be shot. With perfect _sang-froid_, however, our officers distributed the pamphlets to the Indians who were present at the capture, and the two airmen had the mortification of seeing the broad grins of the sepoys as they read out, amid shouts of laughter, the grammatical mistakes in the work of the German Orientalists. This air propaganda was so barren of results that the Germans eventually abandoned it.