What may eventually be the result of all the friendliness and _camaraderie_ between the French and Indians is hard to say. It will have its advantages; it will assuredly have its disadvantages. “East is East and West is West”: the Ganges and the Seine flow in different directions; the artificial meeting of these waters may not be an unmixed blessing. The Hindu on his return to Kashi (Benares) or the Mahomedan at his prayers at the Jumma Musjid at Delhi may think differently of the white races across the sea to what he thought before the transports bore him across the _kala-pani_, the black water. However, although everything may be changed after this war, personally I believe the East will return to its own ways, and very rightly so, and that the next generation of ordinary Indians will talk of France, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia much as we do of the conquest of Mexico or of Peru. Whilst the Corps was collecting and getting re-equipped with new rifles, etc., I was summoned to General Headquarters, on the Aisne, and travelled _via_ Paris and thence by motor-car. At General Headquarters I saw Sir John French, and learnt from him that our Army was very shortly to be transferred from the Aisne to Flanders, and that the Indian Corps was to hasten its departure and join them there; he indicated the region of La Bassée, and although heavy fighting went on before we actually took our place in the trenches, it was immediately west of La Bassée that we eventually did so. He asked me many questions, and whether I had anything particular to point out. My only request was that I hoped my Corps would not be split up before we could be more or less concentrated, for I had a very shrewd idea we should find ourselves in trenches in Flanders and that the days of normal past European warfare were near their end on the Western front. I was not far wrong, but, as I shall show later, the situation was such when the Lahore Division arrived, that several battalions were at once taken from their brigades and thrown in anyhow with cavalry and infantry to help stem the German rush between Ypres and La Bassée. The times were abnormal and the necessity was great, but it was very unfortunate for the Indian troops that before they had time to realise their position, or gather whether they were facing east or west, they were separated from their own British battalions and broken up into half battalions and even companies, and rushed into the whirlwind of Ypres amidst those who were strangers to them.