Local Hero

Tags

9th Dunbartonshire, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Blighty wound, Clyde, Clydebank, gas attack, Kilpatrick, King's Shilling, Picardy, shrapnel, Titan Crane, Wilfred Pip Squeak, Ypres

Robert- gassed at Ypres.  Lived to 90s

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

My hero.

 

Photo- Stephen Sweeney.  Titan crane

 

The trench gaped to receive him at last,

over seventy years since he’d escaped its maw

at Ypres.  Other bombshells had been cast:

his daughter’s death at four; her hair as straw-

hued as bales bedded in Picardy barns.

She’d waited for him in the nether tier,

between the pewter Clyde; Kilpatrick tarns –

close to where he’d toiled as an engineer,

in ruts of rusty shipyards, hail or thaw.

 

I stroked Wilfred, Pip, Squeak in childish awe;

loved the sepia photo of Five Bobs;

marvelled that only one of them came back

to supplement the King’s shilling with jobs,

where the main goal was to avoid ‘the sack.’

It was little better than digging graves.

I used to ask him how he’d survived the gas.

He said he’d run away from its green waves.

I asked him to recount how lads would burn, en masse,

lice from their tunic seams with candle flame,

until they heard shells crack.  Then and I unrolled

his trouser leg, amazed he was not lame,

with that lump of shrapnel, which was pure gold,

as a Blighty wound, taking him away

from the Front line, to Palestine.

 

The cranes, his guard of honour, now gone too.

 

 

.

 

 

Green on Blue

Tags

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Camp Bastion, Philip Hammond, Saturday, Scotland, Second Battle of Ypres, Stirling Castle, Trojan War, Yorkshire Regiment

On Saturday two young men from the 3^rd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment, were shot and killed by an Afghan soldier who pretended to have an injury and who then turned on them.  This is known as a green on blue attack.

The Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, said that he would not allow Allied strategy to be de-railed, but stressed the pain for all concerned by insider killings.  Henceforth, joint operations are to be greatly curtailed in number.

I mentioned dissimulation in an earlier, somewhat jocular post last week, but there is nothing more sinister than treachery and deception in the serious theatre of war, or indeed in any real life encounter.

Yet there is nothing new under the sun, and pretence has been practised on the perceived enemy, ever since the Trojan War and even since Jacob and Esau.

I visited the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum at Stirling Castle last week, to see if I could discover anything more about my grandfather, who served with the regiment in 1914-18.  The gentlemen on duty were very helpful, but it was later that I determined his precise engagement in the Second Battle of Ypres, after reading on-line descriptions of what the 1/9^th had experienced after being heavily shelled and gassed.  They attempted to flush out some of the enemy from a broken trench and then were stunned to see a line of what appeared to be Camerons approaching through the gas and smoke, wearing the kilt.  They ceased their machine gun fire and hesitated before the deadly realisation dawned that it was the enemy who had requisitioned the clothing from their dead Scottish comrades.

There is nothing fair in love and war.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012