History
A shared legacy
Two forces, raised eight thousand miles apart, sent into the same war. This is where their paths ran together — and where they did not.
The Indian Army in the First World War
The Indian Army entered the war in 1914 as a professional volunteer force. Indian Expeditionary Force A landed at Marseille in late September 1914 and was in the line in Flanders within weeks — arriving in a European winter, with equipment and clothing suited to a different climate, to fight a kind of war nobody had fought before.
Over the course of the war, Indian troops served on the Western Front, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli and East Africa. The Mesopotamia campaign in particular was fought overwhelmingly by Indian formations.
Source: National Army Museum, London; Imperial War Museums
The Canadian Expeditionary Force
Canada entered the war automatically as part of the British Empire, but decided the scale of its own contribution. The first Canadian contingent sailed in October 1914. The Canadian Corps took shape on the Western Front and remained there to the Armistice, fighting at Ypres, the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele and through the final Hundred Days.
Source: Canadian War Museum; Veterans Affairs Canada
Where the two histories meet
The overlap is concentrated in 1914 and 1915. Both forces were in Flanders through that first winter. At the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, the 1st Canadian Division met the first large-scale gas attack of the war while units of the Indian Corps were moved into the same sector for the counter-attacks that followed.
By the end of 1915 the Indian infantry divisions had been withdrawn from France for service in other theatres, though Indian cavalry remained and took part in the Somme fighting in 1916. From 1917 onwards the two stories run in parallel rather than together — the Canadian Corps in France and Flanders, Indian formations in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Palestine.
This memorial holds both. Not a claim that they fought shoulder to shoulder everywhere, but that they served in the same war, under the same command, and that their sacrifice belongs in the same place of remembrance.
Source: Imperial War Museums; Commonwealth War Graves Commission