"...puffed out his chest and declared, "The Crown has called in her hour of need, and Canada will answer!" The response to the crisis of the Empire in other Dominions was no less ebullient than that of McCarthy; Prime Ministers Merriman (South Africa) and Fisher (Australia) were eager to demonstrate to their monarchist, working-class constituents that they, too, would not hesitate to stand up for British interests, and troops setting off from Durban and Sydney had the added advantage of not having angry Punjabi militants throw rotten vegetables or even stones at them as they boarded Royal Navy vessels bound for Calcutta or Bombay, as was the case for the Canadian divisions departing from Vancouver.
In all, the Dominions supplied close to a hundred thousand men, most of them volunteers. Propaganda across the British Empire in the spring of 1915 played heavily on stereotypes of Indians as an uppity people revolting against their rightful betters, and leaned in on institutional memory in London of the Great Mutiny of 1857. The advantage in present day, of course, was an even greater technological edge for the British Raj than the East India Company had enjoyed sixty years prior, particularly with artillery, but also the speed with which British forces could be routed to India and also the speed with which rumors of atrocities committed against white Britons, in particular women, could be relayed back to an outraged public.
This worldwide eagerness to answer the call to defend the Crown, steeped in grotesquely racist and paternalist sentiment, would support the India Field Force being formed by Lord Kitchener in Aden and then Bombay, drawing upon lessons learned by the British Army in the Boxer War. [1] Kitchener was of course not just famous for his brutally savage but effective service in China in 1901 or his brief tenure attempting to pacify Ireland's sectarian violence but also a long career in the Indian Army and he was familiar with the various princely states he would have to draw on for support, the geography, the capabilities of the Indian Army and the culture and attitudes of the enemy he was meant to crush. Kitchener understood as well as anyone that time was of the essence; the Punjab Mutiny needed to be destroyed before it could capture the imagination of the Indian street.
In that effort, the British counterattack was fortunate that the Ghadarites had failed in their core mission of achieving an all-Indian uprising across the subcontinent, for the variety of reasons discussed in previous chapters. That being said, most of Punjab and much of western Haryana had by early May fallen into enemy hands and a large but ragtag army of rebels was marching north of the Thar Desert towards the Yamuna and the capital at Delhi. General Duff and his men were well aware of the horrifying stories of the sieges of Delhi and Cawnpore in the hot, terrible autumn of 1857 and were keen not to see a repeat; studying Kitchener's own reports of the conditions around Tientsin and Peking, Duff built a massive line of fortifications running from the Delhi Ridge to the Yamuna throughout late April, as the Ghadarites consolidated in Amritsar and then lunged southeast around the upper northern edge of the Thar, really the only direction they had available to go, their force of nearly a hundred thousand men - most of whom were not professional soldiers or even men with any combat experience - aimed straight at the triangle formed by the cities of Panipat, Karnal and Kaithal, north of Delhi and just west of the Yamuna.
The sporadic rioting and communal violence in Bengal notwithstanding, the concentration of the mutiny in Punjab allowed Duff to concentrate his forces near Panipat, near the far end of the realistic supply lines of Ghadarite forces led by Bagha Jatin, who was nobody's idea of a military commander. Duff further had the advantage of artillery and heavy machine guns, which were generally only allowed to be used by European cadres of the Indian Army and thus in short supply for the rebels. Seeking to avoid a situation similar to the Siege of Delhi fifty-eight years earlier, Duff made clear to his men that a decisive rout of the enemy was the only acceptable result at Panipat - a place where in 1761 a battle between the Marathas and the Durranis had augured the end of Indian independence - and on May 11th, 1915, the battle began.
While not the killing blow Duff had boasted of in telegrams back to London, Panipat was still a clear British victory. Nearly ten thousand Indians were killed over the course of a day and thousands more wounded or captured, but the rest of the army was able to retreat back in relatively decent order to Kaithal, and Duff elected for the time being not to pursue them (to Kitchener's chagrin), instead deciding to regroup after the savage violence of the day in which over two thousand of his own men fell and maintain the Yamuna Line to defend Delhi and the Ganges Plain east of the Yamuna.
Both sides had thus at Panipat learned valuable lessons - the British that they could indeed rely somewhat on their superior firepower and the disinterest of the average Indian in the revolt, and the Ghadarites that despite their relative lack of discipline they could still credibly fight even if their threat to the capital was largely over and that their campaign to win over the skeptical, mainstream leadership of Indian nationalism embodied in the Congress was perhaps not entirely at an end..."
- Burning Punjab
[1] Suffice to say, much like Weyler was not a guy you want running loose in the Philippines, Kitchener is not a guy you want running loose in the Punjab