Punjab supplied around 350,000 combatants to the First World War, roughly half of India's total, from a province with about a twentieth of India's population. Including non-combatants the figure is higher.
The Lahore and Meerut Divisions went to France in 1914 and held a section of the line through the first winter, at Neuve Chapelle, Festubert and Loos. Indian troops were in France before most of Kitchener's army. They were withdrawn to Mesopotamia at the end of 1915.
The Mesopotamia campaign, the siege of Kut and the eventual advance to Baghdad, was fought largely by Indian troops, a very large proportion of them Punjabi.
Recruitment was run through zaildars and lambardars working to district quotas. Villages that met their number were rewarded. Villages that did not were pressed. Land grants in the canal colonies were tied to service.
The reward at the end of it was the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh. That sequence, more than any argument, is why Punjab's politics changed in 1919.
The Commonwealth War Graves registers hold the names. Very few Punjabi villages have any record of their own.
The districts that gave most were Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Ludhiana, Amritsar and Ferozepur. The recruiting returns were published by district and by community, so the pressure being applied to each was a matter of public record while it was happening.
Something like sixty thousand Indian soldiers died in that war and the largest single share of them was Punjabi. The names are cut into stone at Neuve-Chapelle, at Basra, at Helles and on the Menin Gate, in places nobody from those villages has ever been.
A pension, a grant of land in a colony chak, a title of sardar bahadur, a jangi inam paid to a family for a man who served: those are what a village got and they were real money. The politics of the next thirty years runs through the difference between households that had one and households that did not.