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 The Black Watch: Fighting in the Front Line 1899-2006, The Official Regimental History, Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales, Introduction by Lieutenant General Sir Alistair Irwin, KCB, CBE
Excerpt:
There were no ‘thankful villages’ in Scotland after the Great War. Every town, village and settlement had lost someone from their midst. The same was true for Northern Ireland; only a handful of villages in England and Wales could be thankful that their inhabitants had escaped bereavement. Over one million soldiers in the United Kingdom and the British Empire had been killed, were missing or had been taken prisoner during four years of what became known as the Great War. Over two million had been wounded. 50,000 had been commissioned or enlisted in The Black Watch, two-thirds of whom had been wounded; 8,960 were recorded as killed in action or died of their wounds. Only one officer and twenty-nine other ranks served continuously in the 1st Black Watch. Among them was Lance Corporal Frank MacFarlane, who also wished to record that Allez-vous en, the white horse which had pulled the Battalion’s mess cart since 1914, also came ‘through the entire war.’ In the 2nd Black Watch six officers and forty-six others ranks served continuously. ‘Things were very quiet as the war was over and we were waiting to return to the UK,’ observed Captain Ritchie, who, after recovering from Spanish ‘flu and enjoying some leave, had returned to the 2nd Black Watch in early 1919. Reflecting back, he noted that having been one of five new subalterns at Nigg in 1914, three had been killed, one had lost a leg, leaving him as ‘the only one surviving relatively unscathed.’ The death of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne’s fourth son, the Hon. Fergus Bowes-Lyon, meant that Countess Strathmore did not reappear in public until 1923 when her daughter, Lady Elizabeth, married Prince Albert, Duke of York.
Demobilisation took place on a large scale, the 1st Black Watch returning to Britain in April, the 2nd in June, having been absent from Britain since leaving for South Africa in 1899. ‘We got a great civic welcome. A very touching finish to the First World War,’ continued Ritchie. The 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion, which had moved to Ireland in November 1917, had already returned to Scotland in March. The New Armies were disbanded and the Territorial Battalions reduced to cadre. ‘I joined up two months after the war started,’ commented Miller, 4/5th Black Watch, ‘and was home two months after it finished, to get back to the old life again.’ Briefly re-established as part of the newly named ‘Territorial Army’ in 1921, the territorials were again merged as the 4/5th and 6/7th. ‘As always, the Territorials withered first in the frost of military penury,’ commented Eric Linklater, author of The Black Watch’s history published in 1977...
‘For some years after the War, like many, many others who had been there a long time, I woke almost every night in terror from a nightmare of suffocation by gas, or of being trapped by a bombardment from which I ran this way and that, or of fighting a bayonet duel with a gigantic Prussian Guardsman,’ related Linton Andrews who resumed his career in journalism. ‘Having been advised by the ‘specialists’ to forget the war, he burnt nearly all the hundreds of letters he had sent home. ‘There were my War diaries. There were souvenirs, maps, battalion orders, German badges, the usual trophies and mementoes. I put them away in a worn-out trunk.’ A decade later he retrieved them, compiling a history of his three years with the 4th Black Watch: Haunting Years. Of the other ‘Fighter Writers’ in the 4th Black Watch, Joseph Lee was already well-known for his illustrations and poems, published in Ballads of Battle (1916) and Workaday Warriors (1917). In addition to publishing the history of the 4th Black Watch in the Dundee Advertiser, artist Joseph Gray depicted the realities of war in several paintings of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle.
Chapter 8: Their Name Liveth For Evermore, pp.176-78
Links
Head of Zeus, 2017, www.headofzeus.com
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