Battle of the Somme centenary: Thank you Babaji, my grandfather who fought for the Indian cavalry

I have recently returned from the Somme battlefields, the cemeteries that dot the breathtaking landscape, the victims who are known, and those who are unknown.

It is both beautiful and terrible.

And today I think of all those poor souls who went over the top to their deaths 100 years ago. And I think of someone else.

I think of a young Sikh man who left his village, Babak in the Jalandhar District of the Punjab, to come to this strange land far from home, to fight as part of the Indian cavalry, on these Somme fields.

My grandfather.

The Indian soldiers saw very little direct action on the Somme, the terrain not suitable for cavalry charges, the heavy fire beating them back. So he made it back home.

What I wondered, would Babaji and his comrades have made of this war, of his first foray away from his Punjabi home, to fight alongside his European allies?

He never spoke much about it when he returned to Babak. After all, marriage awaited, and there was a burgeoning Independence movement that occupied the hearts of many young Indians then - there had been a belief that enlisting with the British to fight this war in Europe might quickly help the cause of an Independent India, bringing freedom from British rule.

That battle, as we know, would be won 3 decades later.

And so Babaji raised his family. My father was born and he decided to cross the world again like Babaji, to Europe, to raise his family in a time of peace.

So I never knew my grandfather. And he never knew me, dying before I was born. But how I wish that my father was still alive, so I could ask him the questions you only think of on days like this.

And I wish that Babaji could know that on a battlefield in a foreign land, a hundred years on, I was thinking about him.