<p>On 26 April 1915, 444 men of the 47th Sikh Regiment went over the top at the Battle of Ypres. By nightfall, 347 could not answer roll call, a 78% casualty rate in a single day. Their names? Barely 16 or 17 appear on the Menin Gate.</p><p><br></p><p>This is the story Britain left out.</p><p><br></p><p>Right now, you can get 50% off your first three months of Audible using my link here: https://bit.ly/ROASAudible</p><p><br></p><p>I sat down with Dr Dominiek Dendooven, historian at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Belgium, to piece together what actually happened when Indian troops were sent to the Western Front in 1914. Not as a footnote. Not as support staff. But as combatants who held a third of the British front line at the height of the First Battle of Ypres, in autumn, in tropical kit, carrying weapons one generation behind the British soldiers beside them.</p><p><br></p><p>They were never supposed to be in Europe. Britain had never deployed Indian troops to the continent before, partly because officials feared what Indian soldiers might learn if they watched Europeans destroy each other up close. But by the end of September 1914, the British Expeditionary Force was in dire straits. They needed bodies, so they sent for India.</p><p><br></p><p>Yet something else happened in those trenches. Sikh soldiers, Hindu soldiers and Muslim soldiers ate together, slept side by side, and began describing themselves, perhaps for the first time, simply as Indian. The Western Front did not just take lives. It also planted a seed.</p><p><br></p><p>Dr Dendooven has spent more than two decades recovering this history at the In Flanders Fields Museum. This conversation is long overdue.</p><p><br></p><p>Explore the interactive WWI Indian Army map here: <a href="https://bit.ly/WW1IndianArmyMap" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://bit.ly/WW1IndianArmyMap</a></p><p><br></p><p>Read the guide, Who Was at Ypres: Every Indian Unit That Fought in the Battles of 1914–1915, here: <a href="https://bit.ly/WhoWasAtYpresGuide" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://bit.ly/WhoWasAtYpresGuide</a></p>