Ceylon Sanitary Corps : Fighting an unseen battle for the Empire
The Great War, as it was known then, lasted from 1914 to 1918 when Ceylon was a British colony. As already recounted in these columns, there was a surge of patriotism to the Empire among Ceylon’s youth. Contemporary accounts, mainly from the Times of Ceylon and the Ceylon Independent, estimate that in excess of 1,200 British and Ceylonese volunteered for service. The majority of these were already resident in the UK when the war began, others made their way from Ceylon to volunteer. Both these groups were attached to British regiments.
The only official units from Ceylon to serve during the conflict were the Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps and the rather prosaically named Ceylon Sanitary Corps.
The CSC
The CSC, also known as the Ceylon Sanitary Company and the Ceylon Sanitary Section in other records, was tasked with providing sanitation and medical support for the troops of the British Indian Army in the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force. This was no minor assignment: by 1916–17, the British Army in Mesopotamia (known as Iraq today) faced a catastrophic health crisis. The region’s oppressive heat, inadequate drainage, contaminated water supplies, and the concentration of tens of thousands of soldiers in makeshift camps created ideal conditions for epidemic disease. Dysentery, malaria and typhoid killed and incapacitated far more men than enemy action. The British were desperately short of trained labour to manage sanitation infrastructure – latrine systems, water purification, waste disposal – that could contain the spread of disease.
From the archives: Ceylon Sanitary Corps
The Ceylonese were probably asked to supply a unit for practical and strategic reasons. First, Ceylon had developed a functioning public health system during the colonial period, meaning volunteers with sanitary and medical training were available. Second, there were Ceylonese eager to serve the Empire but unable to afford passage to the UK to enlist with British regiments. A dedicated sanitary corps offered them the opportunity to contribute to the war effort closer to home – and from Britain’s perspective, it solved both a manpower shortage and a morale problem in Ceylon.
Surprisingly little information about the Sanitary Corps exists. Why was the unit formed? It appears that the focus was purely on support duties, with no combat training given to the 165 men who served in it.
Only Major Holden, and Captain Stevens appear to be British,perhaps seconded from the Royal Army Medical Corps. The remaining officers – Major Moraes (Capt. J.A. Moraes of the PWD according to the Roll of Honour), Captain C.L. De Zylva (of the CLI) and Lieutenant Vanderziel (also spelt Vander Ziel in other sources who was from the Government medical department), were probably Ceylonese. De Zylva was from the Ceylon Light Infantry (CLI), the only unit of the Ceylon Defence Force which had Ceylonese officers.
The Sanitary Corps departed from Colombo after a ceremonial parade on September 10, 1917. They transited in Bombay (now Mumbai) India and reached Basra, Mesopotamia (Iraq) shortly thereafter. The first recorded death in service is logged as occurring in Basra on January 7, 1918.
Who were they?
The list of those who served in the CSC, for which we are beholden to Major Anton Edema (Retd.) of the Ceylon Light Infantry, presents a compact, mixed composition unit of 165 enlisted men supported by a small cadre of attached officers. The officers appear without regimental numbers, indicating their position outside the numbered establishment, while the enlisted ranks are organised under a sequential system running from 1 to 165, with a few gaps and minor clerical inconsistencies typical of wartime recordkeeping.
The roster reflects the ethnic and social diversity of colonial Ceylon. Sinhalese, Tamil, Moor, and Burgher names appear throughout the list, with no single group dominating the establishment. European and Burgher surnames are most visible among the technical specialists and some NCOs, while the majority of privates come from a broad crosssection of local communities. The NCO structure is narrow but present: a handful of sergeants, corporals, lance corporals, and a single Company Quartermaster Sergeant Francis Homer – a proctor (lawyer) and old boy of S. Thomas College) form the internal hierarchy beneath the officers.
Beyond routine sanitation duties in base camps and field hospitals, the CSC also played a humanitarian role in one of the war’s lesser-known dramas. The unit appears to have assisted in establishing and maintaining the sprawling Baqubah refugee camp, situated north of Baghdad. Beginning in 1915, as Ottoman forces retreated in the face of British advances, Turkish authorities and Kurdish irregulars systematically expelled Armenian and Assyrian Christian populations from their ancestral homelands – a campaign of ethnic cleansing that foreshadowed later atrocities. Tens of thousands of desperate refugees fled southward into British-controlled territory, where the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force found itself responsible for their welfare.
Baqubah became the primary holding camp for these displaced persons, and it was a hellish place: overcrowded, under-resourced, and ravaged by the same diseases that plagued the military camps. The CSC’s expertise in sanitation and disease prevention would have been vital in preventing the camp from becoming a charnel house.
From the available evidence, the CSC served solely in what was then known as Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq – their presence aligning with the wider deployment of colonial medical and labour units supporting British troops engaged against the Ottoman Turkish forces in the region. They were, in effect, part of a vast and often invisible infrastructure of empire: the thousands of colonial soldiers, labourers, and support personnel without whom Britain could never have sustained its military operations so far from home.
Casualties
Despite the non-combat conditions the CSC served in, the unit did suffer casualties, probably from disease. The first casualty was Corporal Prema Chandra Sirisena, who died in January 1918 in Basra. He is commemorated on the Basra Memorial but has no known grave. The cause of death is recorded as pneumonia, though it was probably an early case of the influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918, ultimately killing more people than the Great War itself. In the chaos of wartime record-keeping and the sheer scale of mortality, individual deaths often went unrecorded with precision.
Five other men of the CSC, Pvt. Samarawickreme, L. Cpl. McKue, Pvt. Shelley (the youngest just aged 19), Sergeant De Vos and Pvt. Poulier are buried in the North Gate cemetery in Baghdad. A seventh casualty, Pvt. Wijekoon, is at the Basra War cemetery.
In the decades following the armistice, the newly established Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) worked to locate, identify and maintain the graves of the Empire’s fallen across the globe, no matter how remote or difficult the location. War cemeteries in Iraq became permanent fixtures of the landscape, tended gardens in a hostile climate, bearing witness to sacrifice across the former Ottoman territories.
For nearly a century, these memorials stood largely undisturbed. But Iraq’s modern history proved far more turbulent than the post-war planners of the CWGC could have anticipated and in 2003, as security deteriorated following the invasion of Iraq by the US, the CWGC made the difficult decision to remove the gravestones and memorial panels from Basra and other locations, storing them in shipping containers for safekeeping. It was a pragmatic measure, born of necessity: the Commission could no longer guarantee the security of its staff or the integrity of the sites themselves.
The CWGC gradually withdrew its permanent presence from Iraq. The shipping containers holding the removed memorials were left in storage, and over time, contact with the sites was lost. The exact current status of these memorials – where they are physically located, whether they remain secure, or what condition they are in – remains unknown.
Return to Ceylon
The Sanitary Corps returned to Ceylon sometime in 1919. A report in the Ceylon Daily News on November 1, 1919 talks of the unit being feted at the Army YMCA in Colombo by the Governor Sir William Manning, the head of the Ceylon Defence Force, Brigadier General MacFarlane and Mr. H. L. de Mel, a prominent Ceylonese member of the Legislative Council Promises of compensation and land grants were made but never transpired.
A word of thanks
A great deal of our knowledge about this little known unit is due to the tireless efforts of Major Anton Edema. Two of Major Edema’s ancestors served in the Great War – Ernest Edema was a reporter with the Ceylon Independent who shipped out as part of the Milward Contingent, the first group of Volunteers to leave Ceylon. Ernest who was with the 7th Rifle Brigade was wounded, probably by artillery fire, and died in hospital in August 1915. Another, G. W. Edema, was a Lance Corporal with the Ceylon Sanitary Corps and survived the war.
In the words of Major Edema, ‘Except for a few descendants of the Ceylonese dead in the Great War, most Lankans do not remember these young men. They were the youth of our country who died for a global cause at that time. How many of us know that one of our ancestors had sacrificed his life for a better world. Are we grateful to them?
Unlike today they did not go to war to earn money. All of them were volunteers. The British Empire did not pay a pension to their kith & kin as we do now for families of our dead soldiers. They had a cause; ‘To safeguard the Empire’. We may think of them as foolish today, but these brave young men gave their youth, and some their lives, defending something they believed in.’
May they rest in peace.
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