Neuve Chapelle, France:
Loud cheers greeted Indian soldiers at Marseilles, in the South of France, as the Meerut and Lahore infantry divisions arrived in October 1914, barely two months after the Germans had invaded Belgium and Britain had declared war on Germany.
After long train journeys and much walking on foot, they reached what was called the "Western Front" on the border in the North, between France and Belgium. They were unprepared and unaware that they'd have to fight their fiercest battles in the most treacherous conditions.
Trench warfare was profoundly challenging to soldiers from both sides. Many died of pneumonia in the bitter cold or suffered from trench feet, which when untreated led to amputations.
"Hell is not fire. Hell is mud." read a French journal, Le Bochofage, in March, 1916.
Both camps would first bombard the enemy's trench line and then move forward. But the Germans held better strategic positions than the allies. Death and mutilation ravaged both sides.
The letters that Indian soldiers wrote to send home were monitored by the censors. Even though the originals may not have survived, their text remains preserved in records at the British Library in London.
Here is what one soldier wrote:
"The earth is full of dead men and not a vacant spot is left."
Recruitment posters in India promised "lots of rest, lot of respect, very little danger and good salary"; but the Indian soldiers' letters tried to apprise others back in India of the real hardships of the war.
"You should know that you should not at any account come out to the war."
Between 1915 and 1918, the German Phonographic commission made a series of audio recordings of Indian prisoners of war. One homesick soldier called Maal Singh, narrates the story of man who craves for butter and wants to go back to India.
These are only fragments from many stories of Indians as the world marks the centenary today of the end of World War 1. The war lasted a brutal four years from July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918. Nearly 1.5 million Indian soldiers and others served in it; more than 60,000 died.