Corporal J. Sullivan

(British soldiers in India, early 20th century)

26th of May, 1906, Bangalore, India – After four weeks of struggle, Corporal J. Sullivan of H Company, 1st Battalion, Essex Regiment, closes his eyes, squeezes the hand of the nurse who has been wiping the sweat from his forehead and finally succumbs to Enteric Fever. He is 25, a veteran of campaigns in Burma and Natal, South Africa and impossibly far from home and the people he loves.

Outside the hospital a half dozen of his friends smoke the day’s last cigarettes and wait for the news they know is coming. Some of them comb their hair to pass the time, others twist mustaches and all of them wear thousand-yard stares as they contemplate the inevitable.

The doctor finally walks towards them, delivers the news and they comfort each other as soldiers do. No one cries; they are used to death, but after a long silence they all agree to write letters home to Sullivan’s young wife and his mother, and pitch-in to purchase him a proper Granite tombstone.

Corporal J. Sullivan will be one of dozens of soldiers from the 1st Essex laid to rest between April and August of 1906 in the new, tree-lined Protestant cemetery along Hosur Road in Bangalore. After surviving skirmishes and battles, bullets and shells, these men, like so many soldiers before them, fell to tainted drinking water.

I stumbled onto this cemetery about a week ago and was overwhelmed by the scene. This solemn monument to British history in Bangalore has been repurposed for the needs of new India. In between, or at the base of, forgotten British headstones are new crosses and graves of Bangalore’s Christian Indian population. The cemetery is unkempt but still beautiful.

After my first accidental visit, I promised myself I would return with a camera and notepad and try to give this seemingly forgotten place a little bit of new life.

I returned a few days ago at dusk and picked out J. Sullivan’s grave. As I sat and scribbled down his name, and the names of a few other men, four rickshaw drivers walked behind me, smoking hash as they ended their day, and stared inquisitively in my direction. I’m sure they were thinking, “What the hell is this guy doing?”

But after a little research, a few small pieces of Sullivan’s story materialized. While his grave made no mention of his cause of death, clues from surrounding markers put things in focus. At first, I thought he may have died, with dozens of his comrades, during a small campaign in India. But, Bangalore in 1906 was a place for R&R and polo games. An online history of the Essex Regiment confirmed that the 1st Battalion did not see action that year.

One grave in Sullivan’s row gave me my best clue. At the base of Driver Edward Collin’s tombstone, of C Battery, Royal Horse Artillery, was the phrase “From Enteric Fever.”

Enteric Fever is in fact Typhoid Fever, which remains to this day a killer in India. Typhoid Fever is picked up from contaminated drinking water and kills its hosts with 104 degree Fahrenheit fevers, unrelenting diarrhea and eventual fatal dehydration. It is a slow and awful way to die.

Bangalore in 1906 was hit with a rash of Typhoid cases. If the mortality rate spiked in the British army, one can only imagine the suffering laid on the local Indian population.

This, unfortunately, is as far as I got. The scene I described at the beginning of the post is fiction but I don’t believe too far from the truth.

(Sullivan's cemetery today)