this is not the place to detail it. Suffice it to say that the leaders among us received training in nursing the wounded and the sick, obtained medical certificates of physical fitness and sent a formal letter to the Government. This letter and the eagerness we evinced to serve in whatever capacity the Government would accept us created a very good impression. The Government thanked us in reply but rejected our offer for the time. Meanwhile the Boers continued to advance like a great flood, and it was feared that they might reach Durban. There were heaps of wounded and dead everywhere. We were continually renewing our offer, and sanction was given at last for the formation of an Indian Ambulance Corps. We had expressed our willingness even to do sweepers’ or scavengers’ work in hospitals. No wonder, therefore, that the idea of an Ambulance Corps was perfectly welcome to us. Our offer had been made, in the first instance, in respect of free and ex-indentured Indians, but we had suggested the desirability of permitting the indentured Indians too to join the rest. As Government was then in need of as many men as they could get, they approached the employers of indentured labourers to allow their men to volunteer. Thus a large and splendid Corps composed of nearly eleven hundred Indians left Durban for the front. At the time of our departure, we received the congratulations and the blessings of Mr Escombe, whose name is already familiar to the reader and who was the head of the European volunteers in Natal.
All this was a complete revelation to the English newspapers. No one expected that the Indians would take any part in the war. An Englishman wrote in a leading newspaper a poem eulogistic of the Indians with the following line as a refrain: ‘We are sons of the Empire after all.’
There were between three and four hundred ex-indentured Indians in the Corps, who had been recruited by the efforts of the free Indians. Of these, thirty-seven were looked upon as leaders, as the offer to Government had been sent under their signatures and as they had
