Sepoys in the Trenches

When Britain needed trained troops in the opening months of the First World War, the Indian Corps was sent from the subcontinent to France. Its soldiers arrived with equipment and expectations shaped by imperial service in Asia and were rapidly committed to a European battlefield of mud, cold, artillery and trench warfare. Corrigan follows the Lahore and Meerut divisions through the fighting of 1914 and 1915, including Neuve Chapelle, Festubert and Loos.

Drawing on archival material and interviews in India and Nepal, the book examines the corps as a military institution as well as a fighting formation. It considers language, religion, food, reinforcement, officer casualties and the strains placed on units far from home, while restoring the Indian soldiers’ role in sustaining the British front during a period when trained manpower was desperately short.