The march of Willie Lawrie
Low proud Willie Lawrie’s descendants must be, and we all should be, to have heard his great retreat march The Battle of the Somme played by a lone piper at the Thiepval Memorial at the close of the BBC’s moving coverage of the Battle of the Somme commemoration.
The march has a special poignancy for me, since my grand-uncle Eric, who was in the same battalion as Willie Lawrie, was with him in the trenches earlier in the war, and would have heard Willie’s rousing pipes on the first day of the Somme on July 1, 1916.