Colonel Rothe

British Army personnel being seconded to the India Army was in fact quite common in the Great War. My own grandfather went from the 2/5th Somerset Light Infantry to the 3/9th Bhopal Infantry in 1918/19, serving a sergeant in the Indian Army as a Lewis Gun instructor. Interestingly, whilst he wore a 3/9th Bhopal puggaree flash upon his Wolseley helmet, he retained his Somerset Light Infantry shoulder titles. Also seconded from the 2/5th Somerset Light Infantry was my grandafather's fellow soldier, Bert Rendall, who joined, in 1917, as a corporal the Indian Army's 2nd Mechanical Transport Company as a lorry driver. He served through top 1920. I believe that British soldiers being attached to the Indian Army was reasonably common. This would undoubtedly have saved the Indian Government money in reducing the numbers of Indian Army officers needed. The native army also undoubtedly benefitted from being stiffened up by British soldiers. I am unsure that British soldiers ever taught the native army how to speak English; a more pressing need was to teach them how to use machine guns and the like. At its lowest ebb during the Great War, the Indian sub-continent was ruled by as few as 15,000 British soldiers. Chris Mills.