A century on and we honour Blackadder, not our Great War giants

ONE hundred years ago today, James McCandlish left British trenches east of Ypres, Belgium, and sneaked into No Man’s Land. Set-piece ‘over the top’ assaults with thousands of soldiers were a relative rarity in the Great War. Instead, combat often involved smaller parties such as that night patrol featuring 28-year-old McCandlish. He had been a ploughboy outside Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, but was by that last year of the war a veteran of countless actions with The Cameronians (Scottish Rifles). He would never see home or his wife and three children again, for the Germans lobbed a mortar round that killed him and two comrades. The chaplain wrote to his widow: ‘You will be relieved to hear his death was instantaneous…’ but I bet he said that to all the relatives. Who knows what agony that mortar inflicted? Today James, my wife’s greatgrandfather, lies in the Hooge Crater Cemetery near where he fell and school trips have allowed my children to pay our respects graveside. Better teaching is feeding an upsurge in interest in the First World War. Finally the ‘lions led by donkeys’ waffle is making way for proper appraisal of what these brave men did and why. The finest tribute to Private McCandlish and millions like him is to stop thinking of Blackadder Goes Forth, where every officer is a braying toff, as a documentary. And we need to challenge politicians who hate that the men marched under the Union flag and who claim they were duped by an indifferent British state.