The Cairn[Frontispiece]
Before the Unveiling* Face page[4]
The Moment of Unveiling*”[6]
Some of the Wreath-Bearers*”[10]
The Day after the Unveiling”[12]
* By kind permission of The Daily Mirror.

9TH (SCOTTISH) DIVISION MEMORIAL

THE FINAL PAGE.

The history of the Ninth Division opens upon the day when certain ragged regiments—without uniforms, without rifles, without experience; fortified by nothing but their own native courage and great expectations—came tramping into Aldershot shortly after the outbreak of War, the First Division of the New Army and the First complete unit of the First Hundred Thousand. The final page of an immortal record was written and turned upon the afternoon of Palm Sunday, 9th April 1922, on the Point du Jour, a hilltop just outside Arras, with the unveiling by one of its own illustrious leaders of a memorial commemorating the service of the Division upon the soil of France and Flanders.

It was a perfect spring afternoon, with a bright sun, and the old familiar larks in full song overhead, as the little company which had crossed from Dover the previous day began to gather at the point of assembly. All ranks were represented, and all ranks had travelled there in a single party, without distinctions of seniority or service, upon their common errand of commemoration.

The road out of Arras climbs and winds steadily for some three miles. Then comes a curve in the hill, and the Memorial is suddenly visible, standing up against the sky at the highest point on the road to Douai, dominating the valley of the Scarpe. It is in the form of a great cairn, and stands some twenty paces back from the road, on the north side, in a little half-acre of soil which, as General Furse most movingly reminded us, is now “for ever Scotland.” The plot has been left exactly as the War left it. For this was the left of the third and final objective of the attack allotted to the Division on 9th April 1917. The surrounding country has been reclaimed and tilled again, but the half-acre of the Ninth Division still remains a war zone in miniature. There are trenches; a dug-out; here and there you may discern rusty barbed wire and derelict ammunition. But there are mitigating features. Round the base of the cairn heather brought from Scotland has been planted; broom is growing on the top; gorse and whin-bush, too, have been planted round about. And these, one hopes, will abide and flourish long after the hand of time has smoothed away the last grim disfigurements of war from this “corner of a foreign field” to which they find themselves so strangely transplanted.

Here, then, on the road two hundred yards from the Memorial, our simple pageant was marshalled, and the procession moved off, headed by its pipers, to the appointed place. General Furse and General Tudor led the way with the officiating clergy. Next came the wreath-bearers, some twenty in all, each carrying a great laurel wreath decked with regimental colours. Behind, in fours, marched the main body, most of them in uniform and all wearing their medals. Last of all came mothers, wives, sisters, sons, and daughters, headed by a little company without whose presence the ceremony would have been incomplete indeed—certain women in black, carrying certain private and particular wreaths of their own.

By kind permission of] [“The Daily Mirror.”