Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were buried next to each other thousands of miles away from their homeland. Their loved ones would have been so grateful for the way in which the British and French have preserved their graves. We stood quietly in front of the gravestones reading the inscriptions and imagining how these soldiers had travelled all the way from the Indian subcontinent , with their guns and their horses, to sacrifice their lives in some far corner of Northern France. As we slowly walked away from the cemetery a feeling of tremendous sadness overcame me. I felt I had visited the graves of someone very close to me and a lonely voice was thanking me for having visited them.
All wars are an exercise in futility.
The First World War was to be a war to end all wars. However twenty years later Europe was at war again. This time the rest of the world was dragged into the conflict. Both wars changed the political map of the world. The First World War resulted in the destruction of the Ottoman , Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.