Scotland

7th July 2014

Dear Soldier,

I am from the future which will be hard to fathom and I have been asked to write to you as part of the 100th year remembrance of the First World War. You are the Unknown Soldier and I try hard to be in your shoes using stories from my Great Grandmother and my Grandma who told me accounts of the hardship in the trenches and an unbelievable story about a boy who refused to go to war and hid in the woods above his village during the day and came to his mother’s home in the night. The soldiers took him to France and shot him in the back. We used to argue with Grandma that her story was wrong but it turned out to be right.

Not many men came back to my Grandma’s village after the war. There were stories of hunger and more hunger in the trenches. So many hunger pains that one morning after a night of gassing her husband reported to his friend that he felt ‘no richt’. The answer was that they were all sick for the want of food but then his pal asked if he had had his mask on during the gassing. Grandpa said that he had but on inspection found a bullet hole in his mask. He was put on a ship for the UK, sick and mute. The story goes that he swapped his ticket around his neck indicating that he had to be billeted to the south of England for recuperation with an unconscious soldier scheduled to go to Edinburgh for an amputation. That might be considered survival behaviour. He got right home anyway but didn’t talk for many months. In fact he only made a noise when he caught one of his hospital pals cheating at cards and after this first noise of exasperation the nurses were on to him immediately to repeat the noise. I never met him because as the doctor told him he would never get past the age of 50. He died around that age and left my dad and his sister to help Grandma make a living.

Great Granny told stranger stories of illnesses. Rotting feet because of the mud in the trenches, eating from tins and illnesses from doing so and a terrible family story of brothers going over the top at night to secretly go through the German lines to find their dead brother who had his money sewn into the hem of his kilt. This must have taken some guts and is again an example of survival behaviour. When these men got home the kilts were hard to wash and even when dry my Granny would take a candle up and down the creases in the kilt to crack and kill the lice.

I love the book Sunset Song written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon from the Mearns in the North East of Scotland and think of all the men who went to war for the King’s Shilling. Another example of survival behaviour. Unknown Soldier I want you to survive.

Haste ye hame to kith and kin.

Maris

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