A Drumhead Commemoration World War I - Scotland Remembers

Good evening and welcome to Edinburgh.

Earlier today, people gathered here at the castle for

Scotland's Drumhead Ceremony - held in honour and in memory

some fascinating stories of Scottish men and women during the Great War.

But first, what does a Drumhead Ceremony involve?

A Drumhead service is a religious occasion to service men in the field

held for the purposes of ordinary Sunday worship and before going into

battle or to remember fallen comrades. They've been in existence

for centuries and Jerry the First World War and beyond they were held

at home as a fitting way to remember the sacrifices of the men at the

front. This rare film footage shows one held in a London park in 1916.

By then most of the towns and villages of Britain would have been

affected by the losses in the trenches or stop the Drumhead is a

neatly piled set of drums with the colours draped over them to serve as

a makeshift altar. Historically the drum played a crucial role as a way

of communicating orders jarring the chaos of battle. With such an

important point to play, drummers were elite soldiers and their

important point to play, drummers colours. Drumhead services are

important point to play, drummers while the drums that give them their

name now have a purely ceremonial role, Drumhead services are as

meaningful as ever and remain a fitting way to worship and to

remember the fallen. Today?s Drumhead ceremony began

at 10am. Among those who gathered here were

people who had travelled from every corner of Scotland and

from every branch of the military. It began with a march.

Her Majesty's Royal Marines led the naval detachment onto the Esplanade.

The Navy led the way because they are the senior service. Next came

the army, led by the Band of The Royal Regiment of Scotland laying

Scotland The Brave. They were followed by the Scots borderers, 1st

Battalion Royal Reg and of Scotland, or one SCOTS, and finally

the newest service, the RAAF were led on by the central staff band

playing the RAF March Past. The First Minister Alex Salmond and the

Secretary of State for Scotland Alistair Carmichael attended, as did

senior officers from each branch of the military. Each service was

represented by its own powdery. We meet in the presence of Almighty

God. We've come together to mark the centenary of the outbreak of war in

1914, to reflect on sacrifices past and to look to the future in hope.

This year, and throughout the following five years, people in

communities across Scotland will gather together and remember the

exceptional sacrifice made by their forebears during the conflicts. What

became known as the Great War. We commit ourselves today to work in

penitence and faith, for reconciliation between people,

communities and nations, that all people may live together in

freedom, justice and peace. The hymn O God Our Help In Ages Past.

# Our shelter from the stormy blast and our eternal home!

Drumhead altars have been set up in many theatres of war, from Flanders

in France to Iraq and Afghanistan. This one is being held here to mark

the moment 100 years ago when the garrison of this castle went off to

war. The colours were placed on the Drumhead in the same order of the

Navy, whose colour is called and Benson, then the Army... And finally

the air force, to form the alter. This service is all

about remembering Scotland?s From the very first days of the war,

some truly remarkable Scottish men and women were putting themselves

in the line of fire. It all began on Tuesday, 4th August,

1914, when German forces attacked Belgium, a country Britain had

promised to protect. At 11pm that same day,

Britain declared war on Germany. Just four days later,

a glamorous Scottish aristocrat - Lady Millicent, the Duchess of

Sutherland - set off for the war. Her plan was to assemble and lead a

medical team into war-torn Belgium. Scottish crime writer Denise Mina

was herself a nurse. She?s travelled to the little

Belgian town of Namur to uncover In the August of 1914,

Belgium was the last place on earth Despite these massive

fortifications, despite a heroic resistance,

the Germans crashed violently Historians would come to describe

it as "the rape of Belgium". They killed civilians, women,

children. And in the first day

of the invasion, we count in the whole territory

of Belgium 6000 civilians killed. Into this terrifying and chaotic

war arrived a Scottish aristocrat. Lady Millicent,

the Duchess of Sutherland. And she is the least likely

person imaginable here. She is a 46-year-old aristocrat

with three kids, houses in London. She's a famous socialite,

but she comes here to a neutral country invaded by the might

of the German army to do nursing Millicent hired a team

of eight British nurses, Together, they travelled to

the town of Namur, just a few miles They based themselves in the centre

of the town, in the convent school She kept a meticulous diary

of her time in Belgium. And she described

the precise moment when the Germans On 21st August,

she's in the town, having dinner with her entire team, and they look

up and see a German plane in the sky, dropping a bomb over the

city, and they know it's started. They leave everything

and rush back to the convent. Down here in the cellar of the old

convent, the children are cowering. There is the sound of constant

bombardment from up above. It must have been deafening

down here. Shored up against the walls are

the supplies of flour and everything they need, and

above us, the nurses and the Duchess are preparing for the first men to

come in from the battlefield. Lady Millicent finds herself

tending wounded men. She says in her diary that she is

raising dying men up to receive She saw a surgeon cutting off a

man's fingers because they were so mangled, and she saw one man die of

sheer fright, which you can imagine. She writes in her diary,

"Until these awful things happen, "no-one can conceive of the untold

value of fully trained Two days after that first bomb,

the Germans took control of Namur. We count 109 houses on fire,

and also 75 civilians shot Working in desperate conditions,

Millicent and her team continued to treat wounded French and Belgian

soldiers. To guarantee their safety,

she marched down into the town to confront the German

commanding officer. In her diary, she noted that German

soldiers now filled every cafe. In fact,

she noted that they sang very well. In his hotel, General von Below

assured Millicent that all the All of her patients were

made prisoners of war. Some of them had just had

operations and had not recovered. They were bundled onto trains

and taken back to Germany. Millicent, quite a hardened,

middle-aged woman, said it was On 5th September, Millicent

was ordered to leave Namur. After a perilous two-week journey

across German occupied Belgium, For me, Millicent coming here wasn't

just a crazy act of bravery, she just didn't get caught up

in the roar of indignation that She came here

and started her nursing career, and she carried on nursing

in France until the end of the war. So she took that social rupture

and turned it I?m joined now by two of Scotland?s

leading historians - Trevor Royle If we think back to Scotland of 1914

when Lady Millicent arrived back home, what was happening? How did

news of war arrived? You're talking about a population that is very

reliant on the newspapers. There's no other immediate form of

communication. Each newspaper would publish a new addition during the

course of the day. These images we have of crowds forming very often

crowds forming to get news. If you lived in a more rural area where it

might be harder to get the latest edition of the newspaper, rather

than concrete news, you were depending on rumour. They need to

exchange information, the need to convert and gather in order to find

out what was happening becomes very, very powerful. August the 4th,

continuing over the fifth and sixth. The other thing to remember is that

this is a country which is not expecting it necessarily to be a

military response, but expecting a naval response. People aren't very

clear what their own roles will be in the war, unless they happen to be

in the Royal Navy. All they know is their lives are going to be thrown

up in the air, they will be changed forever, but they are not very sure

how or where they will be next month, let alone next year or the

next decade. Pretty soon afterwards, people did begin to be invited to

join up. What was the mood at that time? What was going through

people's heads? We know from the evidence there was a great deal of

excitement. Huge queues of people gathered, people lined up desperate

to get into the Armed Forces. And that breeds a chain reaction,

because there is a belief that if your body is going, you want to be

part of the excitement, too, and a very important thing is that if you

were going into the army, you would probably be going into your local

regiment, and this is a great element in establishing unity and

cohesion. Friends going off to war together. Nobody really knew with

any certainty what they were going off to and if you spoke to any of

those young men in August 1914, none of them would have any concrete idea

of what life in the army was going to be like, let alone fighting a

war. How did Britain go about building up what was at that time a

relatively small army? It was a very serious challenge. The base which

many people had expected to be the foundation of a larger army was the

Territorial Army. The Territorial Army had not recruited as

successfully as people had anticipated. It remained a big

component for recruiting in Scotland in 1914 and 15, bigger than the rest

of the UK. But the major change was to recruit what Kitchener called new

arms, thousands of men, and those were the ones who captured people's

imaginations, and it was those who provided the understanding that this

was going to be a long war. When you enlisted in the new armies, you

enlisted for three years or the duration of the war, and Kitchener

had turned up at the Cabinet and said, this will be a three-year war.

He did not explain why he thought that but this was a clear indication

that this war might be a big undertaking. And just briefly,

Trevor, they marched off with a song in their hearts? They did indeed,

and very cleverly, the Army decided to build on the regimental system so

very few new regiments were raised but regiment is like the Royal Scots

and the light infantry just developed large numbers of

battalions so they kept the badge and the sense of collection to the

community. And this was a great age in recruiting and raising these

armies. Thank you. I will come back to you later.

Back in 1914, it was often said that everyone knew

And many of these volunteers first saw action at one the major battles

of 1915, the Battle of Loos, in the September of that year.

Amongst them was a 20-year-old Scottish Officer.

His name was Charles Hamilton Sorley and today he's considered Scotland's

The Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan has travelled to Loos to uncover the

story of the battle and the young poet who would immortalise its dead.

Several generations of British readers got

their introduction to poetry at school by studying the war poets.

Many of these names are very familiar -

Charles Sorley is less well-known, which is a surprise,

not only because of the quality of his poetry, but because he was

ahead of the others in understanding how the First World War would be

When Charles Sorley arrived here, almost a century ago, these fields

and mineworks were at the very centre of the Battle of Loos.

For three weeks 100,000 allied soldiers attacked well-defended

Amidst the fear, and noise and hell of the trenches, Sorley wrote

This is the very spot where Charles Sorley was leading an attack

against the German lines and, on the 13th of October 1915, was caught

When they opened his kitbag after his death,

they discovered the manuscript of what I think is the great poem

of the First World War - When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead.

It lacks jingoism, it lacks patriotism, it lacks

This is a poem about a young man facing his own death, but seeing

When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across

your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men

For, deaf, how should they know It is not

Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

Then add thereto, "Yet many a better one has died before."

Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you

perceive one face that you loved heretofore, it is a spook.

Great death has made all his for evermore.

the feel of the wind coming off the North Sea.

His father was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen,

That would really be the place of his childhood.

He wrote this poem, Stones, when he was merely a teenager,

This field is almost white with stones That cumber all its thirsty

crust And underneath I know are bones And all around is death and

dust And if you love a livelier hue Or if you love the youth of year

When all is clean and green and new Depart There is no summer here.

It's hard to think of another British poet who not only foresaw

his own death, but the death of an entire generation.

Even in the earliest poems, which were written around

about 1912, in other words when he was still at school, even then,

It is that sense of scepticism towards authority,

whether it's divine authority, or school authority, I think,

that then goes on to inform his writing about the war.

It's very striking, though, how early Sorley was

in his understanding of what a terrible disaster the war could be.

He says in the poem, it is easy to be dead.

Reducing it almost to the simplest of phrases.

You can see in your imagination, the lines of men,

hands on one another's shoulder, blind, deaf, dumb, ruined by war.

Heading off into a death which, in Sorley's view,

is not off to Valhalla, it's not off to some kind of reward

When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across

your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men

One of the things that led me here is a sense of pity, not only

for the millions of young men who died, but for Sorley himself.

The way he's been slightly forgotten as a poet.

To me, he's right at the forefront of the poets who

If it was up to me, I would put his great poem, When You

See Millions of the Mouthless Dead, in every classroom in Scotland.

# Death of death, and hell's destruction

We give thanks to all those who have served in the name of the Crown,

enabling us to live in peace and security. And those who are in

operations around the world, on land, in sea and in air. Protect

them from all danger and give to them courage to meet all occasions

with discipline and loyalty. To the honour of your name. Lord, in your

mercy, hear our prayer. This hymn for those in peril on the sea pays

tribute to the different branches of the military.

During this hymn, the altar was dismantled and the colours returned.

By 1915, people at home in Scotland were

coming to realise that this war was unlike any they had known before,

Every town began to hear of the casualties and one city - Dundee

Ricky Ross has returned to his native city to uncover how

Dundee came to terms with the loss of so many of her young men.

In 1914, when the recruiting officers came to Dundee, they found

Both my grandfathers fought in the Great War, like

so many men from Dundee, but it is the 4th Battalion, The Black Watch,

Dundee's own, that came to symbolise the sacrifice made by the city.

The 4th was a territorial battalion and many men were already

We are currently standing outside the City of Dundee

This was where at the outbreak of the First World War,

local Territorials, men from the 4th Black Watch, men from

the local units of the Engineers, the Artillery, the Medical Corps,

The 4th Black Watch really represented Dundee society

So you have a good number of men from the textile jute works,

a good number from the engineering factories and shipyards.

The Officer Corps really reflect the great and good of Dundee society.

Was this an attractive proposition, to sign up?

The minute war was declared, people took the opportunity to

enlist, obviously in a patriotic spirit to do their bit for King and

This was an opportunity for men who probably had been no

further than Dundee to go abroad with their friends.

On February 23, 1915, the 4th Battalion Black Watch left

The farewell was a great event in the city, and families lined

the streets to say goodbye, not knowing whether they would ever

Getting news from the front became a priority for those at home.

In Dundee, if you need to know what's going on, it's all here

in the local papers, and it was exactly the same during the war.

This is where people came for the news from the trenches.

Lisa Giffen is opening the archives of publisher DC Thomson

to show me how the Dundee Courier reported the war.

It printed not just news, but also the soldiers' own letters

and accounts sent home from the battlefield.

One example of that is here, when you see this article -

"Dundee's own in trenches sends private letter to parents".

So people are actually writing to their families directly

from the trenches, and then the families are bringing it to the

Courier so that it can be published and others can read the letters.

And here, you see the battle of Neuve Chapelle.

This is Private James Forbes of the 4th Black Watch referring to

the battle of Neuve Chapelle as "three and a half hours' hell".

It's the men's direct experiences, simply being set in type

Almost a parallel to the modern-day bloggers.

By early 1915, the Courier itself had over 100 members

Among them was illustrator Joseph Gray.

He would have done small illustrations,

but he would write and send letters back from the front as well.

He took it all in and passed it on, and it certainly haunted him.

Gray's experiences in the war came to be reflected in his art.

One of his pictures still hangs in Dundee's McManus Galleries.

I have been in this gallery many times before

and I've passed this painting many times before, but today is probably

the first time I've realised the full significance of it.

It's a scene painted after the battle of Neuve Chapelle,

and you can see here, the officers, and on the other side,

This is the commanding officer, Harry Walker.

Who knows, perhaps at this side, one of these characters may well be

By the end of the year, nearly everyone in this painting was dead.

After Neuve Chapelle, the 4th Battalion joined

the 30,000 other Scotsmen who would fight at the Battle of Loos.

It commemorates all those who served in The Black Watch from 1914.

You're talking about nearly 9000 men who lost

What proportion of that number were at the Battle of Loos?

There would be quite a high proportion, actually,

because the Battle of Loos involved the majority of

The job of the City of Dundee battalion was to act as a feint

and to draw the German reserves away from the main battle.

They actually succeeded greatly and what they did.

Of course, that was at the city of Dundee's cost.

The 4th Battalion had come to embody Dundee's hopes, pride and sorrow.

As Joseph Gray wrote, "In the 4th, the whole city finds glory "

Every year on 25th September, the anniversary of the Battle

of Loos, a lantern is lit on top of this memorial in memory

of the men who lost their lives during the Great War.

63% of Dundee's eligible men joined the armed forces.

Of that number, over 4,000 were killed, one of the highest totals

As the Drumhead service finished, the military personnel began

their processional march down the Royal Mile to Holyrood Palace.

Massed pipes and bands included groups from the Commonwealth. Many

of those who attended the service also joined the parade. It was a

spectacle reminiscent also joined the parade. It was a

Scottish Greg Eden - regiment a century ago as they marched off to

war. There were mixed reactions

among those who witnessed their departure then and no doubt

many here felt the same today. A drum tap and the Edinburgh city

War Memorial. My great-great-grandfather worked in

the Adriatic and he was working to trap Austrian submarines with wire

nets. On the 15th of May 1917, they were confronted by Austrian cruisers

and the Austrians got a munch their drifter fleet and began to destroy

them all. 47 crews out there and 14 of them were sunk that day. One

house in Edinburgh also suffered a direct hit by a bomb dropped by a

German Zeppelin in April 1916. Hamish McLaren's father was a little

boy in the house. Everybody was in bed. There were two maids at the

very top, they were sheltering under the beds, but the other ones didn't

bother to move. My aunt, the wardrobe fell over her bed and the

rafters came down. Attending or watching today, it was a chance to

reflect and to show appreciation of what the men who marched along

streets like this all over Scotland 100 years ago gave to all of us who

came after. The second year of

the war didn?t go particularly well for the allies, including the Battle

Of Loos, where so many young Scots And the blame for that year's

failures was in every newspaper. They determined that Britain's brave

soldiers had been defeated To win the war, Britain would need

to dramatically increase production. The dangerous job

of building those shells fell Scottish actor and comedian Elaine C

Smith has travelled to Gretna in search of the women who risked

their lives to build the explosive Nine miles long and two miles wide,

from Eastriggs in the west, stretching past Gretna across the

border into Longtown in the east. This was once the biggest factory

in the world. This was His Majesty's Factory,

Gretna. Virtually all of the buildings have

either been removed or buried, but the footprint of the site is

still visible ? and is staggering. The site had to be

so spread out due to the dangerous It was a safety measure to ensure

that an explosion in one building The complex had 125 miles

of railway tracks, 30 miles At its peak, His Majesty's Factory,

Gretna, was turning out over 800 That is more than all the other

munitions factories put together. By the summer of 1915,

less than a year into the war, Britain was already desperately

short of artillery shells. of Munitions, David Lloyd George,

commissioned the factory. Two years later,

Gretna was at peak production. Two thirds

of the workers were women. I'm meeting Dr Chris Brader,

a historian who is currently writing So, Chris, tell me, what is it

that makes this place so special? I think it's true to say that

without this factory and the contribution it made,

that Britain might not have won So, Chris, this was obviously

a massive operation. Well, the Government issued

an open invitation to the women Those that answered

the call came from all over Scotland, from Ireland, from Wales

and from the north-east of England. You just said it was mainly

women that were here. Were they of

a certain age or was it all ages? A large proportion of them were

actually aged between 16 and 21. And we do know, actually,

that girls lied about their age to So there were 15-year-old

girls working here. Well, some

of it was incredibly hard and some If you worked in the sections where

you mixed the nitric acid with the sulphuric acid, you had to work

amid those fumes as well. It was also hard,

physical work as well. Women cut the cordite

into appropriate lengths. They then loaded them

into the trucks and pushed those trucks to the drying section,

which was a mile away. Sometimes,

in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Scottish winter,

with rats running around your feet. Now, that's hard physical work

by anyone's definition. I want to find out more

about the women who toiled Very nice to meet you,

I take it you're Jim? Three of his aunts went to work

in the factory in 1916. So, your aunts went to work at

the munitions factory, didn't they? Was it seen

as a good thing to work there? One aunt, my Aunt Margaret, within

a few months she was a supervisor. So she became one

of the high heid yins? This is a certificate of service,

given when she left employment. This is a report card I

would never have got. "Her conduct and efficiency during

the She is energetic, reliable

and has good control of labour." Jim's Aunt Margaret Wilkie lived

to the ripe old age of 91. But many munitions workers

were less fortunate. Across the UK it's believed there

were over 1,000 casualties from At the Gretna factory, seven lost

their lives, while many others poor health from handling the

hazardous chemicals, though suffered the long term impact of working

here has never been fully revealed. the past, when I've thought

about Gretna, it has conjured up images of blacksmiths and couples

running away to get married. Having been to this amazing place,

it feels almost haunted, as well. But it's made me realise that

a lot of sacrifice took place here, of the munitions generated here did

go on and kill and maim thousands of people, without them go on and

kill and maim thousands of people, without them the course

of world history would have changed Much of that is

down to the women and men of Much of that is down to the women and men

of His Majesty's Factory, Gretna. During and after the war,

Scottish doctors pioneered life-saving treatments

for injuries to the body and mind. To the south of here, Craiglockhart

became the world leader On Clydeside, Erskine Hospital

would employ shipyard engineers Less well known is the story

of a humble family doctor from Ayr. A man who would revolutionise

the way injured men were treated on the battlefield, before they had

even reached a doctor. And, remarkably,

his medical techniques and philosophies are still used

by modern-day battlefield medics. Rory Bremner?s great-grandfather was

himself a military medic, in Crimea. And Rory has set out to

uncover Charles McKerrow?s At the outbreak of the Great War,

this house in Barns Street in Ayr was the home and surgery of

Dr Charles McKerrow. He'd inherited the practice

from his father, George. In January 1915 Charles married

his wife Jean. and in the June

of that same year he enlisted The young doctor was appointed to

the 10th Battalion Arriving in France,

he began to train the medical team around him, and in

particular his stretcher bearers. At that time,

these men were selected for their strength and bravery,

not their medical experience. The stretcher bearers are not

Royal Army Medical Corps, We could equate it to scoop

and run ? just put a dressing on, put them on a stretcher

and get them out the firing line. So along comes Charles McKerrow,

this physician surgeon from Ayr, McKerrow wants to make sure that

his regimental stretcher bearers are more highly trained than is

normally required. He wants to make sure that they

can stop haemorrhage that they can splint limbs, and they can do lots

of other basic medical chores. Not only does this help him,

as the regimental medical officer, from a morale point of view the men

in the battalion will be more than satisfied knowing, if they are

wounded, the chance of them having their life saved is a lot

better than would normally be. So, in a sense, he's almost like

the father of the modern paramedic? McKerrow's strategy

of getting trained medics to front But, in its day,

it represented a new way And, today, McKerrow's techniques

are still taught to a new generation The first ten minutes,

we call it the platinum ten minutes, that's the most important time for a

combat medical technician to really be on the ball, get in there and

treat the casualty straight away. The first thing that we deal with

in any port of call is catastrophic haemorrhage and we've got lots

of different things that we can use The role played by Charles McKerrow

in developing these techniques is The legacy that he provided

certainly lives on today, and the idea of pushing medical care

as far forward as possible. Because we realised, as he did,

that theres no point in having a wonderful hospital or casualty

clearing station if the casualties Late

in 1916 Charles was posted here, to the village of Vlamertinghe,

a few miles West of Ypres. On the 19th

of December he wrote to his wife "You say that this is our longest

separation so far. I shall tick off each day carefully

in my diary when it arrives. The very next day,

McKerrow was here, at Maple Copse, returning from an early morning

tour of the front line. A shell exploded nearby and Charles

was gravely wounded. As a medical officer, he would have

known how serious his injuries were. He was taken to a local dressing

station and spent the rest of the day conscious, asking after

the state of his pulse, even asking At half past eight

in the evening he lost consciousness Charles McKerrow is buried here,

in Lijssenthoek military cemetery. In the weeks and months

after his death, Jean received dozens of letters

from men of all ranks who had known For me, the most moving was one

written by the Regimental Chaplain, He wrote,

"Your dear husband yielded up his life nobly and grandly, ministering

to the wounded and the dying, that mothers might have their sons

back, and wives their husbands." For the final part of the day,

people assembled in Holyrood Park, where a memorial

of over 1,000 headstones has been built in the powerful form

of a Commonwealth War Cemetery. It was erected yesterday. I think

visiting a Commonwealth War Graves is a profoundly emotional and moral

moment. It is incredibly humbling and each grave carries its own

story, and I rather hope this particular Memorial here will

stimulant people into wanting to go to France and Belgium to see the

graves where the scale frankly dwarfs this. I think this should

simply be a catalyst. I'm joined here again by

Trevor Royle and At the end of the war, many, many

did not come back but some did. What kind of Scotland did they come back

to? Well, they came back to a Scotland that was of course divided

as the rest of the country was about whether this was a victory or moment

of mourning and reflection, and of course it is both of those things.

Throughout the 1920s, those two emotions, if you like, were in

competition. The notion that this was all about waste and futility

took time to becoming drenched. I think most historians would date it

from the late 1920s. But in the early 1920s, people had many

competing responses to this war. Remember, particularly for Glasgow,

this has been an Iraqi industrial boom. The shipbuilding and munitions

facility is thrived on the back of the war. -- and industrial boom. It

brought people back home. In 1919, 1920, there was a lot of uncertainty

about which direction people were going to, just as there was

uncertainty at the beginning of the war. Is your place going to be in

Scotland or outside Scotland? Things over a much remembered about the war

in shorthand. Much trenches, massive loss and a portrait of the war

poets, of course. To what extent was that a uniform experience and to

what extent is it right that the shorthand should be what dominates

our view? We have to be very careful when we bring forward the war poets

and novelists as witnesses. As important as their work is, one of

the things that has happened because of the writing, a lot of it very

fine and observational, heartfelt and passionate, is that every day of

the war becomes the first day of the Battle of the song, with huge

courtesies, or every battlefield is not all around you. The war wasn't

like that. But it was for some people and it was in doses, so to

speak. But it wasn't like that all the time. But for those coming back,

I think the principal feeling was one en route -- of relief, because

we have to put it into context. These are young people who have come

back and they are alive and certainly reading the letters of a

lot of soldiers of the First World War, relief is their utmost feeling

in 1918, 1919. Behind the programme of commemorations that begin today

in Scotland, is the idea, what can we learn from this? The centenary,

because it is a five-year programme in Scotland, it is a real

educational opportunity, a wonderful opportunity. And I think it is very

important that we don't rush to the end, that we don't rush to

remembrance, rushed to commemoration. Because if we do

that, first of all we will reproduce what we do already. And secondly,

what we won't do is go through the war as they did. They were not all

dead at the beginning of the war and most of them were not dead at the

end of the war. 88% of the UK population came back and there is

good reason to say that applies to most Scots in the same proportion.

So there is time and we should use that time. Thank you very much

indeed to both of you. For almost 100 years since the first

war memorials were built, the people of Scotland have come together to

remember their fallen sons. This living memorial in Holyrood

Park is only the most recent. And it's a Scotsman who wrote some

of the finest songs in memory From his home town of Adelaide,

this is Eric Bogle. # Well, how do you do

Private Willie McBride? # Do you mind if I sit here

down by your graveside? # I wrote No Man's Land

after a trip to Flanders in 1975. You can read all the books you

like and see all the pictures you like, but to be there walking among

the gravestones, walking in the old battlefields, seeing the monuments -

that's when it really hits home, # Well, how do you do

Private Willie McBride? # Do you mind if I sit here

down by your graveside? # And I'll rest for a while

in the warm summer sun # Been walking all day long

and I'm nearly done # And I see by your gravestone

you're only 19 # When you joined

the glorious fallen in 1916 # I hope you died quick

and I hope you died clean # Or, Willie McBride,

was it slow and obscene? # Did they beat the drum slowly?

Did they sound the fife lowly? # Did the rifles fire o'er ye

as they lowered ye down? # Did the bugles sing The Last Post

in chorus? # Did the pipes play

the Flowers Of The Forest? # And I can't help but wonder

Willie McBride # Do all those who lie here

know why they died? # Did you really believe them

when they told you The Cause? # Did you really believe that

this war would end wars? # Well the suffering, the sorrow

The glory, the shame # The killing, the dying

It was all done in vain # For, Willie McBride

It's all happened again # And again, and again

And again, and again # Did they beat the drum slowly?

Did they sound the fife lowly? # Did the rifles fire o'er ye

as they lowered ye down? # Did the bugles sing The Last Post

in chorus? # Did the pipes play

the Flowers Of The Forest? # Did the bugles sing The Last Post

in chorus? # And did the pipes play

the Flowers Of The Forest? # Eric Bogle with

his personal tribute to one fallen soldier on a truly remarkable day

when we've seen tributes to tens