Injured Indian soldiers of the British Army at the Brighton Pavilion, converted into a military hospital, 1915. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images It was one of the happy ideas of the war - due, it is said, to the suggestion of the king - to house the wounded Indian soldiers in the Brighton Pavilion. That product of the bizarre imagination of King George the Fourth, after the interval of a century, played a really useful part in making our eastern soldiers feel at home. No one who ever visited the pavilion while it was an Indian hospital will forget the strange look of those huge saloons, with their faded oriental decorations in gilt, crimson and looking-glass, full of dark men from all the Indian races recovering from their wounds got on the fields of France. It was the most eerily foreign scene to be found in England. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/11/first-world-war-foreign-nationals-fighting