Tynecot Cemetary, Flanders.
In Sunset Song Lewis Grassic Gibbon has a minister – himself an old soldier – address his congregation at the unveiling of the War Memorial:
And not just in Scotland either, but across an entire continent. No wonder we will, we do, remember. They’re all gone now but their successors from subsequent battles remain and so too does the memory and the importance of maintaining it. Not from boastfulness or pity but simply for what they did and what they endured. That’s enough and it’s a lot, too.“They went quiet and brave from the lands they loved, though seldom of that love might they speak, it was not in them to tell in words of the earth that moved and lived and abided, their life and enduring love. And who knows what memories of it were with them, the springs and winters of this land and the sounds and scents of it that had once been theirs, deep, and with a passion of their blood and spirit, those… who die[d] in France? With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves, these were… the last of the Old Scots folk.”
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