A marble plaque on a temple wall in Depur reads: From this village, 152 men went to The Great War (1914-1919). Of these, seven gave up their lives. There are no names on it. No regiments, no dates beyond the span of the war.
The plaque stood for years beside a village pond. A former sarpanch, Ratan Lal, moved it onto the temple wall in 1996 and had the village gate inscribed ਪ੍ਰਣਾਮ ਸ਼ਹੀਦਾਂ ਨੂੰ. The Hoshiarpur Sainik Board had nothing further on the seven. Most people in the village today cannot say who they were.
Recruitment in the First World War ran through zaildars and lambardars working to quota, village by village. A settlement of this size sending 152 men was not unusual in Punjab. Writing the number down was.
Sixty kilometres south at Badduwal in Moga, 26 Sikhs of the 15th Sikh (Ludhiana) Regiment went to the same war and seven died. Karamjit Singh Kalia started looking for their names in 1996 and spent 22 years cross-referencing village cremation records against Commonwealth War Graves Commission registers. He recovered five: Banta Singh, Bhan Singh, Sujjan Singh, Uttam Singh, Khazan Singh. His family paid for a new memorial, inaugurated 25 November 2018.
The number on the memorial is what makes it. A hundred and fifty-two men from villages within reach of one another, in one war, recorded on one wall.
That is what a martial races recruiting policy looks like at the village scale, and there are dozens of such walls across the Majha and the Doaba.
Nobody has photographed them or compiled the names. The registers that would match them are online and free and in a language most of the families do not read.