The Unknown Soldier

Friday November 11 2016

Inspired by a visit to the First World War battlefields of Ypres, Graeme Giles reflects on the possible story of the ‘unknown soldier’.

SO who were you? You who stare earnestly out of that sepia image, ramrod-straight, snapped in some long-forgotten photographer’s studio in far off Scotland. Earnest and self-conscious in your Sunday best. Not smiling....not the done thing in those days....wife and children - boy and girl - proudly by your side. Did you carry this image of home into battle? Only now, you and yours stand sentinel in a small glass case in one of the many museums scattered throughout the Fields of Flanders.

Was it snapped before you volunteered? Or were you called to join the ranks of those tasked with keeping the invader at bay? Were you one of the thousands of Jocks captured on jerky, grainy film, celebrating the fact that you and your comrades were off to do your bit? After all, did your country not need you?

Did you march off cheerfully for the front, whistling that “Tipperary” tune or the one about troubles in the old kit bag? No worries. After all, it would be over by Christmas, wouldn’t it? That’s what they said. But didn’t they say that last Christmas?....And the Christmas before that? And then, the petrifying horror of the trenches, the machine gun bullet, the grenade, the crashing, thundering artillery, shrapnel which scythed indiscriminately through man and beast. The cloying, bubbling mud, the stench of decay and death, the unimaginable slaughter on an industrial scale.

Was that the awful reality for you? Did you survive? Did you return to your loved ones, scarred by all you had seen, destined never to talk of it? Or, like so many others, did you pay the ultimate sacrifice? Was this photograph, this poignant reminder of home, retrieved from your lifeless body or from the detritus of the battlefield to, somehow, find its way into this, its final resting place? That spoon...that cigarette case....those dog-eared, tattered, blood-stained letters lying alongside your photograph...were they yours?

And if you did fall, where do you lie now? Perhaps among the battalions of dead, in the seried ranks of gleaming headstones, still lovingly tended a century on. Or are you commemorated on one of the myriad of memorials which recall the sacrifice within this, the Ypres Salient, during four years of unimaginable violence. Or are you simply recorded as A Soldier of the Great War? Name unknown. But, rest assured, Known Unto God.


And what of your family? Did they come to terms with the dreadful loss? Did your wife stoically carry on like thousands of other bereaved wives and mothers? Perhaps she found new love. Or did she live with the hope that one day....any day...you might once again walk through that door....that the dreaded “I regret to inform you” telegram was all a horrible mistake? And your son and daughter....what of them? Did they live to enjoy full and happy lives? Or were they, too, destined to be swallowed up just two decades later in that war which followed the war to end all wars? Who were you?

Fading away like the stars in the morning

Losing their light in the glorious sun

Thus would we pass from this earth and its toiling

Only remembered for what we have done

Only remembered, only remembered,

only remembered for what we have done

Thus would we pass from this earth and its toiling

Only remembered for what we have done.

This is the first verse of a hymn written by the Rev Horatius Bonar, from Edinburgh. One of 11 children, he came from a long line of ministers and wrote a number of hymns during his lifetime. “Only Remembered” was, in fact, penned before World War I - in 1891, in fact - but has been used in various Great War theatrical productions, including “War Horse”. It seems wholly appropriate for t!hat time.

*I WAS prompted to write this piece after a visit to the Ypres Salient last summer. Nowhere, with the exception of the Somme region of France, illustrates the horror and human cost of the Great War more than this corner of Belgium. Within a small radius of Ypres there are no fewer than 160 Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries. The photograph which I refer to is displayed in the Hooge Crater Museum, just 4km from the centre of the town.

Graeme Giles is an elder at Perth: St Leonard’s-in-the-Fields

Remembrance Prayer by the Moderator of the General Assembly