Strains of Jana Gana Mana in Bavay

Vee Walker

The audience of several hundred waits expectantly. The conductor of the town band clears his throat and taps his music-stand. The first familiar sombre chords echo around the hall.

Tears rolling down my face, I think back over the past five years.

Around 2014, I translated a letter from the mayor of this little town to my grandfather, Tom Westmacott. It thanked him for having liberated Bavay, on the border between France and Belgium, on November 7, 1918. I telephoned the Town Hall and a few months later found myself here in person.

Tom Westmacott was born in Purnea in India and worked in Calcutta as a solicitor before the Great War. A widower with nothing to lose, he arrived in France as an Indian Army cavalry captain with the 38th King George’s Own Central India Horse, the regiment of the inspirational Sikh Granthi Risaldar, Major Amar Singh, who was his friend. Few remember today that the Indian cavalry fought on valiantly, long after the infantry had been despatched elsewhere, leaving France for Syria only in March 1918.

Tom, who by 1918 had become an assistant provost marshal (APM), a kind of military policeman, then faced an agonising choice. Should he continue with his old regiment to fight in Syria, or remain as the APM of the division and finish the job in France? Newly married to Evie, my grandmother, and knowing his future lay in England rather than India, he bid his comrades a sad farewell. Many Indian army officers opted to do the same, and so even though there was no official Indian army presence in France at the moment of the Armistice in 1918, some were still proudly serving here all the same.

In Bavay, my grandfather, the liberator of the town, is honoured as an Indian army officer. The battle to liberate Bavay was indiscriminately bloody. Shells thundered down like rain in a storm. Many young men who so nearly survived were killed. My grandfather found the bodies of six of them, still warm, lying in a heap where the shell had thrown them. I have stood at their graveside 100 years on.

I have also created an exhibition for the town about the history of the Indian cavalry on the Western Front. It has been viewed by hundreds over the past fortnight. It culminates in an account of Tom riding into Bavay to a joyful response as the inhabitants rush out into the streets, cheering and sobbing and lifting their babies for him to kiss.

So why am I weeping? On the 100th anniversary of its liberation, the town band did not begin by playing the Marseillaise, nor yet God Save the Queen. For the past year, the musicians have been learning Jana Gana Mana in Tom’s honour.

I lead the applause and shouts of approval as the last chords die away.  Here, the Indian army will never be forgotten.