One hundred and three years ago, two young Pirnmill men serving together in the Black Watch were killed in France.
They were 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, September 25, 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.