Re-enactment reveals reality of trench life for our kilted heroes

Published on Tuesday 3 August 2010 14:24

FROM rats and gas attacks to the realities of fighting in the trenches wearing a kilt, visitors to Edinburgh Castle this weekend are to get a dose of Scottish soldiers' experiences in the First World War.

• Marching to war: Scottish soldiers wear kilt aprons to provide less of a target for sharpshooters. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

A group of volunteers including soldiers and ex-soldiers of the Gordon Highlanders are set to reenact the grim reality of life on the Western Front.

Life in the Trenches, which runs on 7 and 8 August at the National War Museum, is designed to explain to adults and children the tremendous hardships suffered.

Scott Neil, events coordinator at the museum, said: "For many Scottish soldiers, the kilt caused its own problems, often getting caught on barbed wire and with pleats that provided a home for lice."

The Gordon Highlanders regiment suffered close to 30,000 killed, missing and wounded during the Great War. Almost all their fighting in 1914-18 was concentrated on the Western Front, particularly at the bloody battlefields around Ypres, and Beaumont Hamel on the Somme.

The volunteers at the museum are from the group The Gordon Highlanders 1914-1918 which has close ties to the former regiment.

Using displays of authentic photographs and postcards from the time, along with examples of gas masks, shrapnel fragments, or helmets, they will re-enact the roles of both soldiers and war nurses, exploring the evolution of front-line surgery and wartime uniforms and equipment.

The Gordons' crowning moments in the First World War included the capture of Y Ravine, a steep-sided valley on the Somme, and the capture of the village of Beaumont Hamel itself.

Dave Clarke, a history teacher and member of the group, said: "The experience would have varied enormously. The first trenches around the town of Ypres in Belgium were extremely basic, with people up to their knees in mud and water. The trenches developed a lot throughout 1915 and by 1916 they had become extremely sophisticated, with the fighting across chalk uplands."

The Gordon Highlanders typically fought in kilts, although from the time of the Boer War Scottish soldiers were using khaki 'kilt aprons' that made their tartan and sporrans less of an inviting target for sharp-shooters.

"There were various attempts to put the Highland soldiers into trousers but it was extremely unpopular," he said. "Despite the cold, despite the lice, despite the fact it captured on barbed wire, the kilt was an iconic image the soldiers were proud of and they wished to retain them.

"When you see them up to their knees in mud and filth and slush, the vast majority would have been wearing nothing under the kilt."

The different types of gas masks used in the trenches will also be shown. The early versions were little more than a cloth placed over the mouth, soaked in any alkaline liquid that would counter-act the acid in the gas - from water mixed with baking soda, to urine.

"The thing that will surprise visitors the most is that the men suffered it by and large completely uncomplainingly," said Mr Clarke, whose wife Ailsa, also a teacher, will be re-enacting the role of a nurse.

"They wrote of the horrific conditions in their diaries or letters, he said, "but they seem to go ‘it's the war, we have to do it, we have to finish this off'.

"They understood there would be no comfort for anybody unless they suffered at that time, that their todays were our tomorrow," he said.