Lala VC (20 April 187623 March 1927) was an Indian recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth soldiers. Details Lala was born at Parol village,Hamirpur, Kangra district in then the Punjab province, on 20 April 1876. Some accounts give 20 Feb. 1882. If 1876 is correct, he would have been nearly 40 when he earned the VC in 1916. The son of Dhinga, a 1st Grade zamindar, he was apparently not formally educated but could read and write Hindi and enlisted in the newly raised (1900) 41st Dogra regiment in 1901; he was by all accounts a good sportsman and a football player in his regiment. Before the war, he served with the 41st in their deployment to the China coast between 1904-1908.. In August 1923, Lala was commissioned as Jemadar, which means that his war record and his career become more easily traceable. "War Services" in Indian Army Lists show that he served initially in Egypt on the Suez Canal defences and then went with his regiment to France, where he was wounded in action and was one of those Indian casualties who were nursed in the converted Brighton Pavilion, adapted as a hospital for Indian soldiers on the grounds that Indians might feel more at home in the "eastern" architecture of that exotic building! On recovery, he joined his regiment in Mesopotamia. British and Indian forces (forming Expeditionary Force "D") had landed in the Persian Gulf as early as November 1914, initially only to secure the oil refineries at the head of the Shatt-al-Arab and around Basra. However, the commanding officer, General Charles Townshend, was drawn into a much larger campaign and, convinced he could take Baghdad, advanced up the Tigris. Defeating the Turks at Qurna, Es Sinn and Nasiriya, he fought the desperate three-day action at Ctesiphon in November 1915 but such were his losses in that pyrrhic victory that he was forced to retreat to Kut -al-Amara and there began the infamous "siege of Kut", which culminated in April 1916 with one of the most humiliating defeats in British military history - the surrender of the entire garrison, many of whom went on to face horrific conditions as Turkish prisoners of war. While the siege lasted, British and Indian reinforcements on a large scale were dispatched