THE themes of tragedy and futility have come to dominate the popular memory of the Great War. In Scotland, its legacy is overlaid with a sense of inordinate sacrifice: a small nation, with a historic martial tradition, drawn into a global conflict of unprecedented destructive power. The emotional hold of this portrayal remains so powerful that the historian often struggles to confront the gap between memory and actual experience. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the conflict is precisely how its meaning has changed over time. The sense of waste, disillusionment, and moral bankruptcy that came to surround it originally drew strength from the continuing evolution of survivors’ memories in the interwar period, but also reflected the anti-heroic sensibilities of later decades. Yet, this unrelievedly negative interpretation would have surprised the many Scots in November 1918 who emerged from four years of struggle on both the home and fighting fronts, acutely conscious of the scale of loss, yet proud of and thankful for their contribution to an epic British victory.
Scotland has shared in the ‘boom in memory’ that has gathered ground since the 1990s. Popular historical treatments of the Great War have certainly flourished. Of varying quality, the best of these studies are capable of transcending military antiquarianism and the all-enveloping pathos of the ‘mud and misery’ genre to produce work that is well crafted and evocative.1 Unfortunately, attempts to stimulate the growth of a more critical scholarship on the impact of the conflict among the professional historical community have proved less successful. Elsewhere in Western Europe and in the UK, historians have probed the war’s dominant collective memory, notably through a reconsideration of issues of private and public remembrance. This has encouraged new perspectives on the war’s cultural and material legacy, evidenced not least in the desire of revisionist military historians to strip away the layers of mythology that still surrounds its conduct.2 In contrast, scholarly interest in Scotland during this period has remained largely located within an older social and labour-history framework, overwhelmingly concentrated on the wave of industrial disputes and rent strikes in the west of Scotland between 1915 and 1919.3 The latter have been recognized as some of the very few Scottish events in the twentieth century that ‘mattered vitally to the history of mainland Britain’, yet despite this ticket of entry to the historical mainstream, the impact of the preoccupation with ‘Red Clydeside’ has been curiously insular and restrictive.4 Even if newer, focused studies operating within the tradition have added to our knowledge of previously neglected social groups, such as women factory workers, the new emphasis on ‘those who cooked, transported and laboured’ has arguably marginalized other vital areas of the Scottish Great War experience, notably including the contours of military service and popular commemorative culture.5
The impact of the familiar contours of primary research can also be traced through the Great War’s treatment in the classic scholarly histories of Scotland. Appealing to a broad non-academic readership, these works are significant in their own right in helping anchor some of the most powerful ‘truths’ about the conflict in the popular consciousness. Not surprisingly, the first of these is that the war’s real significance for Scotland stems from the battles on the home front, which served to ‘raise the class consciousness of the workers by several degrees.’6 Unfortunately, this concentration on domestic tensions has encouraged a more broad brushstroke approach to Scotland’s military contribution; this is typically hailed as ‘unique’, although the precise scale of the associated ‘rush to the colours’ is seldom quantified or evidenced.7 Similarly, great emphasis is placed on the ‘disproportionate’ severity of Scottish casualties, with losses so catastrophic that ‘few working-class families escaped’.8 The conflict’s destructive power has in turn encouraged many commentators to frame the Great War as a turning point in Scotland’s historic development, leading to an inevitable loss of ‘mass innocence’ and the sapping of national confidence.9 Indeed, this sense of rupture and discontinuity has been recently carried over into the first comprehensive account of the Scottish war experience, with its dramatized image of a country turned from a productive powerhouse into a stagnant backwater through four years of extraordinary effort.10
Against this background, it becomes important for the present discussion to examine what was genuinely new, distinctive, and transforming about the Great War’s impact on Scotland. To this end, it takes a deliberately unbalanced approach by substituting the conventional debates on labour relations and class consciousness with an alternative focus on how the war was actually waged, won, and remembered. Here it is necessary to draw not only on new and unpublished doctoral research, but also on a more creative and outward-looking approach to Scottish history generally, characterized by increasing critical attention on Scotland’s military role in the imperial project.11 The picture that emerges is much more complex than any single dramatic watershed. On one hand, it was economic and demographic patterns rooted in Scotland’s historic engagement with the international economy prior to 1914 that maximized the national contribution to the British war effort. Meanwhile, the emotional and cultural resources on which people drew to make sense of this most disorientating of modern wars were equally shaped by a powerful pre-existing martial tradition. Conversely, it was not simply the war’s malign impact that dictated Scotland’s immediate future, but rather the uncertainty and failed hopes of the post-war decades, which ensured that the Great War would be remembered and represented for future generations as a national tragedy rather than as an achievement.
The sweeping scale of the Great War has often encouraged historians to identify great aggregations of experience at the expense of more subtle patterns of response. This is particularly the case in capturing the dynamics of volunteering, where one of the first difficulties is in penetrating the emotional layers of reinterpretation later elaborated by participants themselves. The post-war histories of individual Scottish ‘Pals’ battalions, such as the 16th Highland Light Infantry (HLI), characteristically emphasize the speed, spontaneity, and selflessness of the enlistment process.12 Although only seven of these units were actually raised in Scotland, their mythology has become emblematic of the wider national response to the call to arms in 1914.
In contrast, recent studies drawing on a detailed accumulation of official statistics, cross-referenced with local economic and demographic data, offer a much more nuanced understanding of the ‘distinctiveness’ of the Scottish manpower contribution. Scotland raised a total of 320,589 men during the period of voluntary enlistment—one in four of Scottish males between fifteen and forty-nine, and 13 per cent of the UK total.13 Despite recruiting rates which were only slightly (2.3 per cent) above the UK average for the period of voluntary enlistment as a whole, it was during the opening months of the war that Scotland made its largest proportionate contribution to the new mass army, with the surge of 9,657 enlistments in a single week in August, constituting a striking 19.32 per cent of the UK total.14 Although Scottish recruitment did not reach its highest volume until September 1914, this disproportionate contribution could not be maintained, as volunteering in England and Wales at last began to rise sharply from the end of the previous month.
Why were so many of the Scottish male population in a position to enlist immediately? The explanation seems to operate at two levels. In the first place, Scotland’s export-oriented economy was initially badly destabilized by the outbreak of war, with its industrial sector contracting by 11 per cent by October 1914. The fear of unemployment was a powerful recruitment driver among urban industrial workers, evidenced most clearly in the high enlistment rates for those practising particularly vulnerable trades, like building and mining.15 Lacking this immediate stimulant, agricultural workers and the middle classes were more measured in their response, balancing family security with national loyalty. Ultimately, however, the existence of this available manpower pool can best be understood as the product of long-term structural forces, in that it also contained the natural component of ‘excess’ labour which in peacetime had been absorbed by very high levels of emigration and internal migration. Disturbing the delicate balance between emigration and employment, the war had now conveniently released a potentially mobile population of young males for military service. The effects could be particularly felt in Scotland’s rural counties: official percentage figures for county recruitment of men of military age between August 1914 and April 1915 reveal that the seven UK counties with the highest rates were all in Scotland, with five of these in the Highlands, where the historic lack of employment opportunities had already had a profound demographic impact.16 Indeed, these records also reveal disparities in recruitment patterns within Scotland, with the highland region contributing an average of 57.8 per cent of males of military age, compared with the Central Belt’s 32.3 per cent.
Rather than representing a brutal form of economic conscription these material realities are best interpreted as a predisposing framework within which subjective forces and communal pressures could also shape individual enlistment decisions. Volunteering should indeed be situated in the context of a more widespread psychological mobilization behind the war effort. French historians of the Great War have been perhaps the most influential in bridging the gulf between current meanings of the conflict and those of the generation of 1914 who actually made an emotional investment in its outcome.17 In Scotland the keynote of this ‘investment’ was defensive patriotism. For many Scots, the war was a just and necessary crusade against an aggressor who threatened the very survival of the British Empire. At stake was not only the commercial self-interest expected of a free-trade economy, but the very ideals of ‘liberty’ and ‘progress’ that had long given popular imperialism its distinct local expression.
The opportunities that ‘the common fight for freedom’ promised for community advancement also mobilized marginalized groups within Scottish society, like the Catholic Irish, who, their leaders claimed, raised an estimated 24.4 per cent of the local volunteer total in Glasgow.18 Yet such contributions were seldom acknowledged by contemporaries. Instead, the war would be hailed as an explicitly Scottish project—the work of a ‘warrior nation’. The use of enlistment as a temporary shelter from economic hardship was indeed already deeply rooted in Scottish society, the Scottish military tradition having emerged during the later eighteenth century as a cultural rejoinder to exactly this type of practical expediency.19 While population erosion during the later nineteenth century had progressively undermined traditional highland recruiting grounds, Scottish martial aspirations had nevertheless been exported in line with migration patterns, resulting in prestigious ‘Scottish’ territorial battalions in English cities and a host of ‘Highland’-branded Canadian regiments.20 The Great War now intensified this capacity for inclusion and adaptation—indeed, as J. G. Fuller suggests, at one stage in the conflict 143 Scottish battalions were included in the active list, with 86 of these alone bearing the appellation ‘Highland’.21 Although martial race ideology was hardly unique in 1914, the Scottish variant was particularly effective not only as a practical junction point between local patriotism, national identity, and imperial destiny, but also as a bond between the various disparate components of a rapidly expanding military establishment. Those joining the territorial and service battalions of historic Scottish regiments were now able to embrace the visible symbols of a heroic past despite suspicions over their own lack of military experience.22 Meanwhile, the territorial force itself had long proved attractive to recruits precisely because of its ability to associate military service with social networks and local loyalties—indeed ‘Pals’ units with their own hastily constructed ‘civic’ identities proved much less central to the recruiting effort in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK.23
Yet, regimental pride and the endorsement of tradition had their limits as well as uses. With industrial recovery ending Scotland’s manpower surplus by the end of 1914, the rallying call of collective solidarity became even more strident, with middle-class youth as a particular target for recruiters. The rhetoric of Scottish martial prowess was now fully exploited, but despite the persistent mythology of battalions being created ‘overnight’ or ‘in sixteen hours’, the process of recruitment had now become increasingly protracted. Nor did all volunteers wish to join the Scottish infantry battalions that had absorbed the initial recruitment surge. Far from displaying the gullibility with which they have been associated, many Scots chose the relative safety of engineering and technical corps, where their skills could earn extra pay and allowances.24
Where the fate of those who enlisted is concerned, the popular memory of the Great War has a definite end point: the doomed battalions of high-spirited youth who joined together and trained together during 1914 and 1915 were also wiped out in often less than half an hour, amid the mechanized slaughter of the modern battlefield. There is great truth in this grievous human narrative. The first two years of the war represented the most costly test for the new mass army. Repeated daylight frontal attacks at Gallipoli between June and July 1915 cost the 52nd (Lowland) Division over 4,800 killed and wounded—a disaster mourned as a ‘Second Flodden’ in small communities across central Scotland.25 Worse was to come. The Battle of Loos in September 1915, where forty-five Scottish battalions participated, is now recognized by military historians as the most lethal encounter of the war in terms of the percentage of combatant casualties: here the 15th (Scottish) Division lost 1,595 men killed, the highest number of any division engaged.26 At the Somme the total volume of casualties was even greater, with the 51st (Highland) Division suffering 3,500 casualties in two single assaults in July 1916.27
Yet the military narrative that emerges from war diaries and operational histories is instead one of continuity and survival. The idea of the regiment as a ‘living’ entity, greater than the sum of men who served and died in its ranks, was a cornerstone of the Scottish military tradition. This concept was challenged by the scale of loss in the Great War, but by no means negated. For, although increasing UK manpower exhaustion meant some depleted formations were eventually composited, even the most shattered battalions were generally withdrawn from the line, rested, and after receiving reinforcements, were often able to continue as effective fighting units. The 17th HLI, for example, which suffered 22 officer and 447 other-rank casualties on the opening day of the Somme, went on to regroup and pursue successful operations in the Hulluch-Cambrai sector: by 1917 it was reported to be ‘in the highest spirits, battle scarred and with a glorious record of great achievements established’.28 Indeed, the sanguinary reputation of this type of Scottish assault battalion on the Western Front has tended to eclipse the more varied experiences of Scots serving in line-holding units, technical arms, as well as in the Royal Navy and Air Force, or those involved in more distant campaigns, such as Salonika and Palestine.
Amid the new realities of combat, it is important to consider how far morale and performance were sustained by the survival of a distinctive Scottish military identity. While the dangers and hardships facing soldiers serving in Scottish battalions may not have diverged dramatically from their UK counterparts, their collective motivation was often underpinned by a highly positive self-image.29 This in itself was enough to encourage robust responses from rival units. As Captain Owen of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers commented: ‘The Jocks are all the same; both the trousered kind and the bare arsed kind: they’re dirty in the trenches, they skite too much, and they charge like hell—both ways.’30
New research on the operational history of one of the most famous Scottish divisions illuminates the complex and fluid process through which corporate identity evolved.31 The 51st (Highland) Division was a territorial unit, whose strong sense of ‘Scottishness’ was achieved through a fusion of subformation loyalties, based on local and regimental allegiances. Corporate unity among its formerly geographically dispersed battalions was consciously fostered by the adoption of the familiar motivational symbols of pipes and tartan, but was further reinforced during training and initial deployment through contact with other national groups and military formations. Ultimately, however, it was the division’s battlefield success that bred a shared identity and self-belief, with the dramatic assault on Beaumont Hamel in November 1916 redeeming its earlier failures on the Somme. Continuing success also shaped public perceptions of the division, with positive press comment eagerly monitored and disseminated among its battalions—although there was little new in this desire for external validation, as Scottish soldiers had long played an active role in the creation of their own image.32
Good morale was, of course, also a reflection of features common to other British units, such as strong officer–men relationships, but there is evidence that the High Command recognized the importance of local, regional, and national homogeneity by particularly channelling Scots to the ‘Scottish’ divisions, where manpower demands permitted. Although recruitment to the 51st Division from its traditional local areas decreased markedly during 1916, locality was still an important focus even after conscription, and it was not until 1918 that the impact of dilution became critical. This official confidence was not misplaced, albeit the issue was less that of bolstering an innate Scottish ‘martial spirit’ than the maintenance of the type of powerful internal identity vital for any effective fighting unit. Combined with greater sophistication in tactical deployment, training, and preparation in successive campaigns, this would lay the basis for the reputation of the 51st as a crack ‘storming’ division.
Front-line soldiers were not only sustained by comradeship and unit solidarity but also through the eager continuation of links with families, workplaces, and the social and civic organizations of which they had been members in peacetime. Recent UK scholarship has increasingly emphasized the closeness of the home and fighting fronts, challenging the traditional image of the powerless, victimized soldier, alienated from civilian society. Instead, as Helen McCartney’s study suggests, men turned to the traditional and the familiar in order to survive.33 Through letters, leave, and the local press they presented accounts of their front-line experience that were often realistic and unmediated; in return they received practical and emotional support through gifts and written correspondence. This two-way contact may have helped produce a shared appreciation of the hardships experienced both at home and in the trenches, fostering a common perspective on the conflict.
Similar studies systematically probing the encounter between military and civilian society are sadly lacking for Scotland, constraining our understanding of how and why public commitment to the war effort endured over four years. However, the subtle, integrative account of the British home-front experience offered by Adrian Gregory does provide a valuable starting point for grasping the distinctive contours of civilian mobilization in Scotland.34 Overlaid with the familiar rhetoric of shared ‘sacrifice’, civilian commitment to the war effort kept pace with levels of military participation. Gregory notes that eight out of ten counties with the largest number of War Savings Associations were in Scotland; Glasgow exemplified the very high rate of Scottish subscription, raising a record-breaking £14 million during ‘Tank Week’, January 1918.
Beyond solidarity with Scots in uniform, engagement on this scale drew on more diffuse patterns of cultural mobilization. Catriona Macdonald, for example, has highlighted the important role played by the Scottish provincial in this respect.35 Drama, history, and mythology, she argues, were all deployed by editors to make a terrifying conflict intelligible for local audiences, with Scotland’s martial heritage used to frame even the most severe reversals in the familiar iconography of heroic last stands and ‘death or glory’ charges. Whilst promoting the sense of a larger common struggle to defend the British Empire, these ‘imagined battlefields’ may also have been instrumental in reinforcing and legitimating a singular Scottish vision of a global war.
Scotland’s spiritual mobilization during the Great War has also received recent historical attention. As Michael Snape suggests, the religiosity of Scottish soldiers attracted favourable comment from army chaplains, when compared to their UK counterparts, albeit that attrition would claim many of those who had entered the war in a crusading spirit.36 The Church of Scotland’s own investigations suggested that 30 per cent of Scottish soldiers had ‘vital’ church connections, but even the 20 per cent figure presented in the 1919 Army and Religion report, which focused on the battered post-conscription army, was still double that for English troops.
While the war may have strengthened the ‘diffuse Christianity’ of citizen soldiers, the situation for institutional religion on the home front was rather more complex. As national Churches, claiming the adherence of the majority of Scots, both the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church had been enthusiastic supporters of the war from its outbreak.37 However, although religious belief constituted a further potential source of emotional solidarity and national identity, institutional religion throughout Europe was severely tested by the demands of rationalizing mortality on a previously unimaginable scale.38 Whereas the Roman Catholic Church already had clear rituals for dealing with sudden death, the Scottish Presbyterian denominations, already divided, struggled to develop controversial new liturgical and theological positions, such as prayers for the dead and salvation through death on the battlefield, to meet the needs of grieving congregations. The challenges that these denominations faced, suggests James McLeod, would circumscribe their impact on Scottish culture and society at a time of exceptional personal and national crisis.39 Indeed, the war was also a searing personal experience for many ministers, challenging the optimistic theological liberalism that had underpinned earlier enthusiasm for the ‘Social Gospel’.40
Naturally, it is industrial mobilization that has become the most fully documented aspect of the Scottish home front. This reflects the scale and significance of the phenomenon, but is also coherent with the prevailing socio-economic paradigm which has shaped Scottish historical writing on the war. After an initial period of dislocation, the highly specialized Scottish economy became increasingly directed towards war production, resulting in a massive increase in its productive capacity. The resultant concentration of reserved occupations meant that the conscription rate was much lower for Scotland than for England and Wales—14.6 per cent compared with 22.1 per cent. However, with 47 per cent of the male workforce already lost to the services, women’s employment also dramatically expanded, with 31,500 women employed in munitions alone by October 1918.41 Indeed, overlapping notions of ‘work’ and ‘service’ would grow to structure women’s participation in a range of wartime tasks in Scotland, as elsewhere in the UK, including the uniformed auxiliary services. The breadth of this contribution is vividly captured in the various ‘records of service’ in which Scottish communities in the immediate aftermath of war sought to demonstrate how the bonds of ‘civic unity’ and ‘common sacrifice’ had underpinned the local civilian war effort.42
This image of a collective, communal effort in itself may have heightened the sense of a truly national consensus for victory, yet in reality the boundaries of ‘the nation’ were also constantly being drawn and redrawn amid the strains of war. Naturally, industrial relations ensured a major flashpoint—again, as Gregory suggests, illustrating limitations of the discourse of ‘sacrifice’.43 Here it is important to place the Scottish experience in its larger British context. Both South Wales and the Clyde stood out as exceptions to the relative social harmony that prevailed during the early phase of the war, each with a distinctive local mix of pre-war bitterness and wartime pressure. By 1917, however, both were already being overtaken by the north of England in terms of the scale and intensity of industrial unrest. In the Clydeside case, although disputes were essentially related to state intervention and war production, the actual aims of the antagonists proved to be more complex and disparate, dividing both the employer and trade-union camps.
Unfortunately, the extensive attempts made to unpick these ‘class’ dynamics have tended to divert attention away from the other internal tensions heightened by war. These were by no means confined to the workplace, but also reflected historic ethnic and religious divisions. Even the high initial enlistment rates among the Irish Catholic community in the west of Scotland were insufficient to prevent the reappearance of serious sectarian disturbances from autumn 1915 onwards in areas like Lanarkshire, where manpower shortages in munitions production had resulted in new migration and settlement from Ireland. In these cases, the timing of local military casualties also coincided with the highly publicized failure of recruitment drives in Ireland, casting the Irish as ‘a race apart’ from the imagined national community and rendering their war service invisible.44 Such instances should remind us of the powerful local dynamics shaping the experience of ‘total war’, despite the greater control and compulsion from the national state which it also imposed.
It is perhaps in the area of commemoration and remembrance that the limitations of the traditional class-based template for understanding the Scottish Great War experience appear most exposed. In contrast to the communal frictions produced by the onset of war-weariness, Jay Winter has written eloquently of the ‘bond of bereavement’ which overlaid that of nation, rank, or class; the great divide in post-war society, he argues, was between those who had lost someone and those who had not.45 The fact that Scotland’s war casualties provided the basis for such a bond is evident, although unlike enlistment figures, their extent still defies precise calculation. Indeed, this has led to wildly differing estimates among commentators, with a figure of 174,000, or even 26.4 per cent of enlisted Scots suggested at the upper limits; the result is that ambitious international comparisons of Scotland’s relative losses tend to rest on rather flimsy foundations.46 Crucially, these contemporary debates neglect the way in which both the naming and the numbering of the dead were intertwined as part of the commemorative process. Attempts at quantifying the extent of the national military contribution within the empire, for example, reasserted a more inclusive definition of ‘Scottishness’, which said much about how the war was handled in cultural terms. Thus the official figure of 74,000 war dead was almost immediately scaled up to 100,000 (13 per cent of the British total) and would continue to rise during subsequent decades, through the inclusion of those serving in the Scottish regiments, regardless of their country of origin, and also by drawing in those of Scottish birth or descent serving in UK regiments or in the dominion forces.47 Indeed a similar process of ‘acquisition’ also took place in constructing individual Rolls of Honour. In the case of the University of Glasgow, for example, the inclusion of casualties who had served in the officer-training battalion located at the university boosted its losses beyond that of other regional universities, enabling it to claim a contribution on a par with Oxford and Cambridge.48
Great War commemoration across the combatant nations was a massive creative endeavour, addressing a basic need for death to be given meaning through memorialization. Yet, the making and interpretation of symbols of remembrance would also be shaped by the self-representation of ‘the nation’ and by the collective identities and public values embedded in different societies.49 This fusion of the universal and the particular was given full expression as Scotland turned to grieve for its dead. Undoubtedly, the commemorative process was fuelled by vital spiritual and ethical imperatives that followed the broader European pattern.50 Yet, in keeping with Scottish popular culture, their expression was rather less emotive and grandiloquent than elsewhere in Europe, with a focus on the service of real regiments rather than the trappings of mythical heroes and allegorical symbolism. The concept of individual sacrifice as a crucial component of victory had gained ground during the war, but the process of remembrance would also be driven by an acute sense that Scotland as a nation had made a distinctive contribution within the empire. Reflecting the confluence of Scottish values and war memories, two main commemorative themes emerged during the ‘hurricane season of memorials’ between 1919 and 1922.51 The first was a sense of inconsolable sorrow, with the pain of survivors representing the ultimate homage to those who had been lost, while the second expressed sober pride in Scotland’s military achievements and celebrated these as grounded in a unique ‘national character’. Together these produced a powerful narrative of stoicism, survival, and deliverance which structured remembrance at both the national and the local level.
To date, scholarly attention in this area has largely focused on the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle.52 In constructing a truly national tribute, the memorial was also remarkable for its inclusivity, attempting to reconcile the tensions of wartime through a new, shared expression of solidarity. Here Scotland’s sacrifice was presented as the cement of imperial unity, with the memorial reaching out to audiences in the Scottish emigrant communities by representing their contribution in words and images, such as ‘The Tree of Empire’.53 With the initial disputes over its design and location almost forgotten by the time of the memorial’s inauguration in 1927, it became a site of mass pilgrimage for thousands of bereaved Scots.
While grief was given an impressively stylized expression at a national level, its local dynamics were more personal and immediate. War losses were perhaps felt most keenly in those highland communities already stripped by emigration, where the largest percentages of men of military age had enlisted in the opening months of the war. These volunteers had also pursued their front-line service in the critical first two years—often in the ranks of local territorial battalions where casualty rates were particularly high.54
The wave of local commemoration in Scotland that followed the war has been slow to generate detailed research. Yet Great War memorials remain Scotland’s most widespread public monument, with a total of 1,545 currently listed in the UK National War Memorials Inventory.55 Their total cost has been estimated at £652,000—equivalent to an expenditure of £6 per head of the fallen.56 Most followed traditional commemorative styles. The commonest commemorative type was the simple memorial tablet, remembering individuals or groups of workmates, classmates, or fellow parishioners. It was, however, through the more visible town and village memorials, and the ceremonies which came to surround them, that civic Scotland attempted to come to terms with the destructiveness of war. Here the dead were symbolically cast as ‘ideal citizens’ whose sacrifice had imposed duties on survivors.57 Therefore, while memorials functioned as sites for personal mourning, they also served as conduits for ethical and political ideas of community loyalty and disinterested service, leaving a space where a variety of different meanings of ‘citizenship’ and ‘responsibility’ could flourish, as long as these did not deny the basic affirmative purpose of commemoration.58
The mechanics of monument building did not differ from elsewhere in Britain. Local memorial committees featured municipal leaders, businessmen, and other interest groups; designs were frequently chosen by competition, usually from among the local Scottish architectural community, or commissioned from pattern books and supplied direct from the Aberdeen granite yards. However, the iconography that emerged from Scottish commemoration also reflected the struggle to give Scotland’s wartime contribution a distinctive physical expression. The most common monument was the cross, often in its Celtic variant. Despite lingering suspicions over its pre-Reformation antecedents, this form actually proved more popular than in the UK as a whole.59 The shortcomings of conventional religion during the war had clearly not damaged popular identification with Christian ideals, and through this familiar symbolism the recent struggle was presented as an ethical triumph of good over evil rather than a simple military victory, an emphasis strengthened by frequent references to ‘peace’ in inaugurating the memorials.60
Other abstract forms, such as obelisks and columns, also proved popular in Scotland, again reflecting the popular taste for simplicity and reticence.61 However, where figurative memorials were selected, these were also tangibly linked into national sentiment, with iconic visualizations of Scottish servicemen in their distinctive modern service dress predominating. Portrayals like the ‘rugged, elemental soldier’ created by Alexander Carrick for the Killin war memorial reassured audiences of the survival of pre-war ideals of Scottishness and masculinity, while providing a literal and metaphorical replacement for those who had fallen.62
To conclude, the Great War demonstrated both the strength and limits of Scotland’s historic role as a military manpower reserve. Distinctive issues of national identity mediated Scottish engagement with the conflict, not least its traditional identification with the British imperial system. Yet, an introspective analysis, which remains at the level of particularity and excludes wider European comparisons, risks overstating the extent to which the conflict was really a key turning point in Scottish history.
In terms of Scottish politics, the evidence at first sight seems stark. In August 1914 there were fifty-four Liberal MPs, but ten years later only eight, while the number of Conservative and Unionist MPs rose over the same period from thirteen to thirty-six, and Labour from three to twenty-six.63 However, the terminal decline of Liberalism both as a ‘living faith’ and an electoral force hardly approached the cataclysm which in Ireland swept away the old politics of constitutional nationalism and substituted a new revolutionary order.64 Nor did the growing vitality of Scottish Unionism create corrosive fault-lines of the type that would come to haunt French and German society in the interwar years, for in this instance the party at the heart of the ‘anti-Labour front’ was sustained by a non-ideological, interventionist approach to social and economic problems. Indeed, local studies also question how direct and deterministic the link actually is between these developments and the effects of war.65
There is no doubt, however, that the crisis of the world economy did come to dominate and defeat the reconstruction of post-war Scotland. Here the role of the Great War was again a complex one, accelerating an already established pattern of decline rather than initiating it. The demands of war had extended productive capacity and encouraged immediate technological and social gains, such as the enhanced participation of women in the workplace. Yet these proved all too easily reversible, as the subsequent destabilization and restructuring of international trade and finance would prove disastrous for a vulnerable, export-oriented economy. The implications of failing overseas competitiveness would also become increasingly pressing for many individual Scots during the 1920s. The regular Scottish battalions may have quickly resumed the business of imperial soldiering, but returning ‘citizen soldiers’ soon discovered that they faced a new battle to secure employment—particularly the large and visible ex-service population who had suffered physical and mental injury as a result of the war.
It was against the background of industrial decline and ebbing national self-confidence that some survivors began to create a new popular memory of the war in which the solemn evocation of its moral purpose was replaced by a sense of waste and disappointment. Here national pride in a unique sacrifice for the empire gave way to resentment over casualties that were considered to be ‘disproportionate’, and which, for nationalists like Duncan Duff, reflected the exploitation and exhaustion of Scottish manpower and an unfair allocation of front-line risks.66 In this analysis Scotland’s war losses became in themselves part of the explanation of economic decline. In a Scottish variant of the ‘lost generation’ myth, it was the death of university students as junior officers that was believed to have robbed Scottish industry of its future leaders. This was despite an actual increase in graduate numbers at Scottish universities during the 1920s, reflecting the admission of women and the growth of undergraduate capacity to meet the demand from those returning from the war.67
Most veterans did not disclaim their own war service, nor did they repudiate their former leaders: when Douglas Haig died in 1928, his body lay in state in Edinburgh, and one hundred thousand people filed past his coffin.68 Yet, they did struggle to reconcile the magnitude of the conflict with the shrinking hopes of the post-war decades. This growing sense of disenchantment is captured eloquently in two commemorative volumes dedicated to Glasgow’s volunteer battalions. The 17th HLI’s history was published in 1920, and presented a simple and direct account of its war service. Confident that the meaning and significance of this contribution would be shared by their audience, little more than a tense dedication was necessary: ‘They ask a better Britain as their monument’. By 1934, when a further volume commemorating the 15th HLI eventually appeared, survivors had taken time to re-evaluate their experiences of both war and peace. The result was a much more self-consciously ‘literary’ production, where the battalion’s service is represented as a tragic journey—An Epic of Glasgow. The tone is also more contemplative, insisting that personal sacrifice should be remembered for its own sake, rather than for the nobility of its purpose—indeed the cause for which the war was fought is nowhere elaborated. Instead, reflected its author: ‘The most wonderful memory which has survived the Great Disillusion is the memory of the greatness and grandeur of ordinary men … who faced unflinchingly all the hellish devices of modern war’.69 Tragically, there could no longer be any guarantee that this sacrifice would be appreciated by wider society. A new generation was growing up without any direct experience of war, and for whom the conflict had to be ‘imagined’ before it could be remembered.
Brown, S. J., ‘“A Solemn Purification by Fire”: Responses to the Great War in the Scottish Presbyterian Churches, 1914–1919’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 45, 1 (January 1994), 82–104.
Fussell, P., The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1977).
Gregory, A., The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008).
King, A., Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford, 1998).
Macdonald, C. M. M., and McFarland, E. W., Scotland and the Great War (East Linton, 1999).
Macleod, J. L., ‘“By Scottish Hands, with Scottish Money, on Scottish Soil”: The Scottish National War Memorial and National Identity’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (January 2010), 73–96.
—— ‘“Greater Love Hath No Man Than This”: Scotland’s Conflicting Religious Response to Death in the Great War’, Scottish Historical Review, lxxxi, no. 211 (April 2002), 70–96.
Royle, T., Flowers of the Forest (Edinburgh, 2006).
Spiers, E., ‘The Scottish Soldier at War’, in H. Cecil and P. H. Liddle, eds., Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London, 1996), 314–35.
Winter, J., Sites of Memory: Sites of Mourning (Cambridge, 1995).