Indian Soldiers Landed at Marseille on 26 September 1914, Won the First Victoria Crosses Gazetted to Indians at Hollebeke and Festubert, and Helped Take Neuve Chapelle on 10 March 1915

About 1.5 million men were drawn into the Indian Army during the First World War, according to the historian David Omissi, and slightly more than one million of them were sent to battlefields in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, according to Andrew Tait Jarboe, who wrote the war-losses entry for the 1914-1918-Online encyclopedia. The army that started the war was much smaller. Omissi’s table gives 159,134 serving Indian officers and men in 1914, with 2,333 British officers above them.

This piece follows the Indian soldiers in France and Belgium in 1914 and 1915, the first Victoria Crosses won by Indians, the Garhwal Brigade at Neuve Chapelle, and the two memorials, one in northern France and one in Delhi, built to hold their names. What happened in Punjab in 1919, after the war, is told in the Jallianwala Bagh article, and an earlier case of Sikh soldiers holding a post to the last man is in the Saragarhi article.

How many served, and why the figures differ

The totals depend on who is counting and what counts as “served”. Jarboe gives 877,068 combatants and 563,369 non-combatants (the support workers the army called followers) joining between 1914 and the end of 1919, which adds up to 1,440,437. The National Army Museum in London says that nearly 1.4 million men from India served, some in non-combatant roles. Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu, speaking in France on 10 November 2018, said 1.5 million had volunteered and about 800,000 fought in the war’s theatres.

The count of the dead differs too. Jarboe quotes the British War Office’s 1922 statistics, which record 53,486 Indian dead, 64,350 wounded and 2,937 missing by the end of 1919, and he notes that the same book gives a second, “approximate” figure of 47,746 killed or died. Rana Chhina of the United Service Institution of India and Adil Chhina of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission write that India Gate commemorates “the over 74,000” personnel from undivided India who died in the war. Those figures have not been reconciled by the sources, so each is attributed here.

About half of the army was recruited in Punjab in 1914, Omissi writes, with about one sixth from the Pathans and Gurkhas and less than a third from the rest of India.

Marseille, 26 September 1914

The Embassy of India in Paris, in its guide to the war memorials in France, says the first two infantry divisions and three cavalry brigades of Indian Expeditionary Force A began arriving at Marseille and Orleans from 26 September 1914. French civilians greeted them with flowers and cheers of “Vive les Hindous!”.

The Imperial War Museums (IWM) set out why they were sent north at once. By October 1914 the British Expeditionary Force had lost 70 per cent of its troops, and the 45,000 men of Indian Expeditionary Force A arrived as it neared breaking point. The museum says they fought to hold the line against severe German attacks and likely kept the Allies in the fight in 1914.

Two Victoria Crosses in one Gazette notice

The London Gazette of 7 December 1914 printed the first Victoria Crosses for soldiers of the Indian Army in a single War Office notice. Naik Darwan Sing Negi of the 1st Battalion, 39th Garhwal Rifles, was cited for “the night of the 23rd-24th November, near Festubert”, when his regiment was retaking and clearing trenches. The Gazette says that, although wounded in two places in the head and in the arm, he was “one of the first to push round each successive traverse”, the bends in a trench that hide the enemy from view.

The same notice names Sepoy Khudadad of the 129th Duke of Connaught’s Own Baluchis, for 31 October 1914 at Hollebeke, Belgium. The British officer in charge of his detachment had been wounded and the other gun had been put out of action by a shell. The citation says that Khudadad, though wounded himself, “remained working his gun until all the other five men of the gun detachment had been killed.”

Khudadad Khan’s action came first, and the National Army Museum profile quoted by Birmingham City University calls him the first ever Indian recipient of the Victoria Cross. Victoria Cross Online adds that Negi was the first to be handed his medal, on 5 December 1914. Mir Dast later won the Cross at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 and, according to the same Birmingham City University page, was the fourth Indian to win it.

Neuve Chapelle, 10 March 1915

The Indian Corps, made up of the Lahore and Meerut divisions, fought its first major action as a single unit at Neuve Chapelle, according to the Embassy of India’s guide. The Western Front Association records that the infantry attack began at 8.05 a.m. on 10 March 1915 after a 35-minute bombardment, and that the Indian Corps attacked on the right of the assault, away from the village.

Sir John French’s despatch, published in the Gazette on 14 April 1915, states that at 8.05 a.m. the Garhwal Brigade of the Meerut Division assaulted the German trenches in its front and, with the British 25th Brigade, carried the enemy’s lines where the wire had been cut by shrapnel. Both brigades then pushed on and “succeeded in getting a footing in the village”. By 11 a.m., French wrote, the whole village of Neuve Chapelle was in British hands. The Embassy’s guide puts the Garhwal and Meerut divisions at the head of the breakthrough and says the village fell in about 90 minutes.

One of the Garhwalis was Rifleman Gobar Sing Negi of the 2nd Battalion, 39th Garhwal Rifles. His Victoria Cross citation, published on 28 April 1915, says he was one of a bayonet party with bombs that entered the German main trench and was “the first man to go round each traverse”, driving the enemy back until they surrendered. It adds that he was killed during the engagement.

The plan also aimed at the high ground of the Aubers Ridge, which was not reached. The Western Front Association says the attack brought no real short-term benefit to the Allied cause, and the Embassy’s guide counts more than 11,000 Allied casualties, including heavy Indian losses. Neither source gives a separate Indian total for the battle. The Western Front Association says the two Indian divisions suffered heavy casualties, though not on the scale of the British 7th and 8th Divisions, and Jarboe describes the toll on the Indian infantry battalions as heavy.

From Loos to Mesopotamia and Haifa

The Indian infantry divisions left the Western Front at the end of 1915. The Embassy’s guide names the Battle of Loos, which began on 25 September 1915, as their last major action in France, with about 4,000 casualties in the Lahore and Meerut divisions. Naidu said in 2018 that Indian troops were withdrawn from front-line duty at the end of 1915. Two cavalry divisions stayed in France.

Most of the army’s war was fought elsewhere. Jarboe writes that more than 675,000 Indian combatants and non-combatants were deployed to the Middle East, the army’s largest and longest campaign, with 29,555 dead, 32,608 wounded and 1,035 missing. In France 138,608 served, and 7,710 were killed, 16,441 wounded and 834 missing, which made France the more dangerous front in proportion to the numbers sent: about 18 per cent became casualties there against slightly under 10 per cent in Mesopotamia. The Embassy’s guide gives a different Western Front tally for combatants, over 8,550 killed and 50,000 wounded.

In September 1918 Indian cavalry played a central part in the Battle of Megiddo in Palestine, Jarboe writes. At Haifa that month Major Thakur Dalpat Singh of the Jodhpur Lancers was killed at the head of his regiment, and the Chhinas record that the Deccan Horse marks 23 September as Jordan Valley Day and the 61st Cavalry marks it as Haifa Day.

Hospitals in Brighton and letters home

Wounded men were treated in England as well as France. Jarboe writes that Sir Walter Lawrence found buildings for Indian hospitals in Boulogne, Marseille and Rouen, and in Brighton, where the Royal Pavilion, the York Place Schools and a block called the Kitchener Indian Hospital were used. Brighton Dome says the Pavilion became a hospital with 600 beds in under two weeks and took its first patients in early December 1914. The Boulogne hospital admitted 19,858 patients in 1914 and 1915 and 223 died, Jarboe records, and 26 of the 3,890 admitted to the Kitchener Hospital died.

Hindu and Sikh patients who died there were cremated on the South Downs at Patcham Down. Brighton and Hove City Council says the Chattri memorial, designed by E. C. Henriques of Mumbai and unveiled in 1921 by the Prince of Wales, commemorates 53 men.

Soldiers’ letters were read by censors, who produced weekly reports with translated extracts from 40 to 90 letters; Brighton Dome, citing Omissi, says the archive runs to about 4,000 pages and that most of the original letters have not survived. Omissi quotes one written in May 1915 by a Muslim havildar (an Indian Army sergeant): “For God’s sake don’t come, don’t come to this war in Europe.” He also writes that peacetime recruitment had averaged about 1,250 men a month, and that by the end of 1915 the army was taking in the 10,000 a month needed to replace its losses.

The names at Neuve-Chapelle and India Gate

The Indian Memorial at Neuve-Chapelle stands near the spot where the Indian Corps suffered its heaviest casualties, the Chhinas write. The Embassy’s guide says it was designed by Sir Herbert Baker, unveiled in 1927 in the presence of the Maharaja of Kapurthala, Marshal Ferdinand Foch and a large contingent of Indian veterans, and carries inscriptions in English, Gurmukhi, Hindi and Urdu. It gives 4,863 Indian soldiers and labourers with no known grave commemorated there, while the Western Front Association, repeating the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, says “over 4,700”. Foch told the veterans, in the Embassy’s transcription, “They showed us the way.”

India Gate, the All India War Memorial, was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and unveiled by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, on 12 February 1931, according to the Chhinas. Britannica gives its height as about 138 feet (42 metres), and says the Duke of Connaught laid the foundation stone in 1921. The inscription dedicates the arch to the dead of the Indian armies who fell in “France and Flanders, Mesopotamia and Persia, East Africa, Gallipoli” and elsewhere, and adds the dead “whose names are here recorded” who fell on the North West Frontier and in the Third Afghan War. The Chhinas write that 13,516 names are inscribed on it, and Britannica, citing the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, says more than 13,000.

Not every theatre was treated alike. Jarboe notes that the Basra Memorial in Iraq names 665 Indian officers but records 33,222 Indian other ranks only as a number for each unit. The Chhinas write that the Imperial War Graves Commission decided in Europe, where more visitors were expected, to name Indian rank and file as well.

Remembrance in India and France

The Chhinas write that after independence the war was seen as part of the colonial past, and that public remembrance returned with the centenary, led by the United Service Institution of India with the Ministry of External Affairs. Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Neuve-Chapelle on 11 April 2015, according to the Embassy’s guide. Vice President Naidu inaugurated a memorial built by the Government of India at Villers-Guislain, where Indian cavalry fought in the Battle of Cambrai, on 10 November 2018. President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Modi visited the Mazargues War Cemetery in Marseille, where 1,003 Indian soldiers are commemorated, on 12 February 2025.