A hundred and three years ago, two young Pirnmill men serving together in the Black Watch were killed in France. John Craig aged 29 and Ronald Robertson aged just 20. In fact they were killed, not just in the same week, but on the same day, 25 September 1915 … the first day of the battle of Loos, the largest battle in British military history.
It lasted three weeks and when it was over there were 60,000 British casualties, twice as many as the German losses. It was a disaster, a complete bloody failure from beginning to end. On that first fateful day the carnage was terrible, 8,000 out of 10,000 became casualties in the first four hours. The German machine gunners had a field day.
We don’t know the precise fate of John Craig or Ronald Robertson, two out of 500 casualties suffered that day by their battalion the 9th Black Watch. But we wonder.
Yet until now, only those who died in the Second World War have had their names and their sacrifice remembered here. Previously you would have had to go along to the village hall to read the list of those who were killed in the Great War. That never made any sense to me, it didn’t feel right, in fact it felt wrong. Today, thanks to the huge efforts of Fiona and others, a long-standing wrong has at last been righted.
And when we read those names added here of eight young Pirnmill men killed during WW 1 and think of what they had to suffer, it stuns us. And they were young men, all bar one of them didn’t live to see past 30. Eight young men from one tiny village, five killed in the same fateful year of 1915, two on the same day.
Two of the eight were also brothers, Duncan Robertson, the afore-mentioned Ronald Robertson’s older brother was killed serving with the Canadian Infantry on the first day of the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915.
Eight men from Pirnmill lost, a 10th of those from the island who gave their lives fighting for their country. Eighty Arran men left these island shores never to return, not to mention the 80 horses also taken to the slaughter of Flanders and Passchendaele and the Somme. Tragedy on a scale unimaginable to us now. Almost unbearable sorrow for those left behind.
All those now remembered here were beloved sons of Pirnmill, sorely grieved, but the fate ofthe brothers Duncan and Ronald Robertson perhaps emphasises the utter destruction and waste … for their deaths marked not only the death of two siblings, but the extinction of a line of Pirnmill men stretching back 600 years.
Their direct forebears had been granted the land above us at Penrioch by Robert the Bruce for services rendered during the Wars of Scottish Independence. In all probability the ancestors of these sons of Robert fought with Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, as had other Arran men fought for Wallace on the fateful field of Falkirk 16 years before when three-quarters of the Scots army were left dead on the field, some 16 000.
Medieval chronicler, the makar Blind Harry tells of the ‘Westland men of Arane and Rauchline’, who formed the fierce band of fighting men known as the Brandani, present both with the Wallace at Falkirk and after his execution, out in support of the Bruce.
A call to arms, to ‘do or die’ answered by the first to bear the name Robertson of Penrioch and answered centuries later by their direct descendants Duncan and Ranald destined to be the last of the Robertsons of Penrioch.
And so that warlike family of Robertsons might have survived the carnage of the Wars of Scottish Independence and wars of centuries since, but it could not survive the carnage of the Great War, the so-called ‘War to end all Wars’.
There is bitter irony in that, ‘the war to end all wars’ was hardly that, as the names inscribed here of those who died between 1939 and 1945 in the Second World War clearly testify. And consider this just 21 years after the guns fell silent on the western front in 1918, within a single generation, the whole world was once again …. at war, the killing and the bloodshed begun all over again.
This should remind us, our independence as a nation, our freedom, the freedom we are privileged to enjoy today was bought dear at a price incalculable in human suffering.
Rev Angus Adamson
The post The sacrifice of the men who never came home appeared first on Arran Banner.