The battle of Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915 was the first planned British offensive of the war and the Meerut and Lahore Divisions were central to it. The Garhwal Brigade took the village. Casualties were heavy.
The Indian Memorial at Neuve-Chapelle, unveiled in 1927 and designed by Herbert Baker, records the names of 4,742 Indian soldiers with no known grave. A very large number of them are Punjabi.
The names on it are given as they were recorded by British clerks: a name, a father's name, a village, a district. Those entries are often the only written record of the man's existence anywhere.
The memorial's inscription is in English, French, Hindi, Urdu and Gurmukhi.
A Punjabi family wanting to find an ancestor from that war has to work through the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database against a spelling made by someone who did not speak the language, which is why the Badduwal recovery at Moga took twenty-two years.
Thousands of the names on it belong to men with no known grave. The Indian Corps' first major action cost it heavily and it was withdrawn from France by the end of that year.
The clerks recorded name, father's name, village, tehsil and district in transliteration, and the spellings on the memorial and in the registers frequently do not match anything on a modern map.
The registers are searchable online. Any Punjabi with a family story about a great grandfather in France can test it in an afternoon, and almost nobody has.