PUNE: A day before the National War Memorial in Delhi is inaugurated, the Maratha War Memorial, located near Diamond Queen restaurant in Camp, was cleaned by the soldiers from HQ Dakshin Maharashtra Sub Area, Pune. The memorial was in a bad shape due to lack of maintenance. It was renovated in 2016. 

This war memorial has been constructed in memory of those men of Maharashtra who laid down their lives in the World-War 1 of 1914-18. In the four-year war, more than 70,000 Indian soldiers died, mainly on the battlefields between Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the trenches of Flanders in Belgium. About 5,000 came from areas, which are a part of Maharashtra now.

The foundation stone of the memorial was laid in 1921 by the then-Prince of Wales, Edward, who would later become Britain’s monarch in early 1936.

There are cannons at each of the corners of the memorial. The names of every infantry division from the region, which participated in the War, are written in English and Marathi and has an inscription dedicating the structure to the fallen, with a quote, ‘Their name liveth for evermore,’ from the Bible.