(Image: “The Lions of Ypres,” Commando No. 5903)
In November 2025, someone forwarded me the cover of a new British comic from the long-running Commando series — The Lions of Ypres. The cover shows a Sikh soldier in a trench, hands clenched on a machine gun, firing through snow, mud, and chaos. It is a scene from the Western Front, 1915.
What struck me immediately was not the art — though it is powerful — but the fact that the British are still making such comics.
And we in India… are not.
We have never mythologized the Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front in the First World War. We have no graphic novels, no popular histories, no cinematic accounts of what those men faced in Flanders fields. But India’s role at Ypres — especially during the first gas attacks in history — was immense, tragic, heroic, and almost entirely forgotten.
This post is my attempt to revisit that forgotten chapter.
I. When India Went to Europe
In 1914, when the First World War erupted, the British Empire found itself short of trained infantry. The Indian Army — already battle-hardened — was rushed to Europe with almost no preparation.
Two full divisions arrived:
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Lahore Division
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Meerut Division
Many of these soldiers had never seen snow. They had no winter gear, no heavy coats, no woolen gloves, no understanding of a European trench.
Yet, within weeks, they were defending the most dangerous section of the Western Front: the Ypres Salient.
**II. The First Battle of Ypres (1914):
Saving a Breaking Line**
German forces were advancing relentlessly. British regiments had been decimated. There were literal gaps in the front line — empty trenches, undefended woods, collapsing morale.
Into these gaps the Indian Corps was sent.
Battalions like:
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47th Sikhs
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57th Wilde’s Rifles
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129th Baluchis
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59th Scinde Rifles
fought in freezing rain and sleet, with uniforms meant for the plains of Punjab and the Deccan.
Their casualties were enormous. Some units lost 50–80% of their strength. The British commander wrote in his diary:
“Had it not been for the Indians, the line would have given way.”
But the worst was yet to come.
**III. Ypres, April 1915:
The World’s First Gas Attack**
On 22 April 1915, the Germans released 168 tons of chlorine gas. It drifted as a yellow-green cloud across No Man’s Land. French colonial troops and Algerians broke. A huge breach opened in the line.
And once again, Indian soldiers were thrown into the gap.
They had:
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no gas masks
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no training
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no protective equipment
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not even the knowledge of what the gas was
Soldiers wrapped wet cloths around their faces and went in anyway.
The Ferozepore Brigade and Jullundur Brigade took the full impact. Entire companies collapsed with burned eyes and lungs. The 47th Sikhs lost 350 out of 444 men. Gurkhas counter-attacked through clouds of chlorine. Punjabi Muslims held on in trenches filled with bodies.
A British officer later wrote:
“They died as only brave men can die.”
It was one of the most violent weeks of the war.
And India remembers none of it.
IV. Why Don’t We Remember?
I often ask myself this when I see British, French, Belgian memorials to Indian soldiers — and yet almost no Indian memorials to them in our own cultural memory.
Several reasons come to mind:
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The war was fought for the British Empire.
Independent India wanted to forget that story. -
The fighters and the writers were two different classes.
Marathas, Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Dogras, Gurkhas — the actual soldiers — had no writing tradition that reached newspapers or printing presses.
And those who wrote — especially in Marathi — seldom had relatives in the army. -
Popular culture never took up the theme.
No comics, no films, no novels, no school textbooks. -
The British preserved their archives. We did not.
Their war diaries are intact; our oral memories evaporated.
And so, the story of Ypres — where thousands of Indian soldiers bled into the Belgian mud — is simply gone.
V. Why This Comic Matters
This Commando cover — drawn in 2024 — is not just art.
It is an act of remembrance.
It shows the world as it was in 1915:
Indian soldiers at the front, not as secondary characters, not as footnotes, but as protagonists in the defence of Europe.
The British have remembered them — sometimes imperfectly, sometimes sentimentally — but at least they have remembered.
We have not even begun.
VI. The Lions of Ypres Were Ours
Today, cemeteries across Belgium and France hold:
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Sikh graves engraved with Ik Onkar
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Muslim graves oriented toward Mecca
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Hindu soldiers commemorated as “cremated nearby,” because the flames of their funeral pyres are not recorded in stone
Thousands of them never returned to Punjab or Maharashtra or UP or Tamil Nadu.
But their footsteps — untraceable now in the mud of Flanders — were part of the making of modern India, whether we acknowledge it or not.
The Lions of Ypres were ours.
Perhaps it is time we said so.
About the picture above: The Ypres Lions, even at first sight, possess a commanding visual presence: their silhouettes are so decisively carved that the form reads instantly, even from a distance. Time has softened their surfaces, giving the stone a weathered texture that adds its own quiet dignity — the patina of rain, wind, and decades of watchfulness. What strikes the eye is not ferocity but a poised, restrained alertness; the sculptor chooses awareness over aggression, creating an emotional depth that feels perfectly suited to a memorial landscape. Light plays beautifully across the planes of the face and the shadows of the mane, giving the lions volume and a sense of living mass. Placed as guardians at the gateway, they do more than decorate the entrance — they frame it, turning the very act of approaching the place into a moment of reflection. Their artistic power lies in this synthesis of form, weight, texture, and purpose: two sculptures that stand not just as lions of stone, but as sentinels of memory.
