William joined 1st Battalion Gordon Highlanders in March 1903 using an inflated age - he was two months short of 17 at the time - and was sent to join the Battalion in Cork. We believe that he was finally bought-out by his mother, and his records certainly show a curtailment of the normal period of Regular Service on transfer to the Reserve in March 1905. He returned to Scotland and later went to join a brother working in Egypt. In due course he married Joan Couper, my grandmother, and started a motor-cycle garage in Leven , Fife. In the last year of his Reserve commitment, he was recalled to the colours on mobilisation in August 1914, my mother then being just 2 years old. He went with the Battalion to France and would have been in the line along the Conde Canal outside Mons during the battle on 23 August 1914. The Gordons were a regiment of 8 Brigade in II Corps and when the decision was taken to fight a delaying battle at Le Cateau on 26 August, D Company was in the line between Caudry and Le Cateau, in front of Audencourt. As is well known, 1 Gordons and elements of Royal Irish and Royal Scots on either side did not receive the order to withdraw later that afternoon and they fought on into the evening, seriously delaying the German advance on their front. There followed a disputed change of command and, at midnight, a withdrawal finally began. Unfortunately, as the troops moved south, they met a superior enemy force that had completed an encircling move around Le Cateau, near to Bertry. At some point in that encounter William was killed and, whilst he has no known grave, this was confirmed by a colleague a year later. Some 500 men were then taken prisoner in circumstances that were later disputed in court between the two senior officers involved, and the depleted 1 Gordons had to be taken out of the line until reinforced from home in late September. The 'fog of war' of which, as an ex-serving officer, I often heard mention at Staff College, certainly laid thick over the Gordons and their colleagues on 26/27 August 1914. On 25 August 2014, with my sister, my family and grandchildren, I visited the memorial at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre that commemorates those men of the BEF who died, but have no known grave, in the first two months of the war. My grand-daughters laid a wreath on behalf of us all and on the next afternoon, exactly 100 years after the battle, we visited the field in which the Gordons fought before the ill-fated withdrawal.

Ian Macmillan