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battle of loos
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This was far from unusual. The 8th Black Watch lost almost
seventy-five per cent of its strength, while an officer with 8th
Seaforths wrote ‘We went into the fight 21 combatant officers;
we came out 2. We went in 1000 men; we came out 300... The dead
– well the dead died gallantly and splendidly – and they died
for Britain.’
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The number of Scots who lost their lives at Loos
is difficult to calculate with real accuracy, but it has been
suggested that one in three of over twenty thousand names on
the memorial to the missing at Loos is that of a Scot.
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The battle’s impact on Scotland was eloquently summarised
by the writer Ian Hay who served at Loos, which provided the
backdrop to his book ‘The First Hundred Thousand’. He wrote
‘never a Scottish regiment comes under fire but the whole
of Scotland feels it. Scotland is small enough to know all
her sons by heart. You may live in Berwickshire, and the
man who has died may have come from Skye; but his name
is quite familiar to you.
Big England’s sorrow is national;
little Scotland’s is personal’.
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Memorial card