A Soldier's Candid Opinion

Doiran Cemetery, Greece
photo from Researching the Lives and Service Records of FWW Soldiers

 “His major wrote that he was a brave and resolute soldier,” states the Roll of Honour entry for William Fox Ritchie. Serjeant Ritchie died less than two months before First World War ended, killed in Greece (then known as Macedonia) in a British attack on the Bulgarian lines on Sept. 12, 1918. He was thirty-one years old. 

Ritchie enlisted in the British Army with the 1st Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in April 1909, just shy of his twenty-second birthday. He served for six years in Malta and India prior to the war, arriving on the Western Front in December of 1914. Early in 1915, while in the fighting line near Ypres, he “was one of five who had to be dragged out of the trench, and was the only one of that number who was able to speak, the others being utterly exhausted and practically paralysed from the hips down.”† The Wigton Free Press reported that the men had been “standing for nineteen hours, waist-deep in water, in the trenches, and had to be dug out.” Suffering from severe frost-bite, Ritchie was hospitalised in France, then transferred to England, and finally sent home to recover in Scotland with his parents, who were living in Colmonell on the estate of local landowner where his father worked as gamekeeper and forester. 

While home recovering from his injuries, Ritchie wrote a poem that was copied into one of the estate’s guest books: 

A Candid Opinion*

Do we want to go back to the trenches?
To get biscuits and bully to eat,
To get caught by a sniper’s chance bullet
Or crippled with frost bitten feet?
There are some say they’re anxious to get back,
There are others who say they are not.
It is not that they care for the danger
Or are frightened that they will get shot.
It’s the awful conditions you live in,
Midst the rain and the mud and the dirt,
Where you’d give a month’s pay for a square meal,
And twice that amount for a shirt.
No, I’m not at all anxious to get back,
But I’ll have to go that’s understood.
So I’m willing and ready to go there,
And if needs be to stop there for good.
    —William Fox Ritchie (dated April 23, 1915)

Ritchie did not come home from the war. After recovering from frostbite, he earned the qualification to serve as a Musketry Instructor, but instead,“volunteering for active service, he was transferred to the 12th Battn. of his regiment.” From July of 1917, his unit fought with the British Salonika Army, and Ritchie was “killed in action at the Grande Couronne, Salonika, 12 Sept. 1918.... He was recommended by his Commanding Officer (who was subsequently killed) for the Croix de Guerre.”††

Few know of the Salonika campaign, and fewer still visit its battlefields and cemeteries. William Fox Ritchie is buried in the Doiran Cemetery in Greece. The inscription his father chose for his son’s grave—  “UNTIL THE DAY BREAK AND THE SHADOWS FLEE AWAY"—comes from a hymn published in 1918. The last two verses must have provided poignant comfort to William’s grieving parents: 

Many of His waiting ones in Him now sleep,
Till the night be over, earth their dust will keep;
But at day break, they from out their graves shall rise,
And with all His people meet Him in the skies.

He is waiting patiently for that bright day,
When the earthborn shadows will have fled away;
When He will receive us to Himself at last—
No more separation, sin and sorrow past.
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† 26 March 1915, Carrick Herald, “Colmonell and the War.”
* I have edited minor errors in punctuation; the original text can be seen in the photo accompanying this blog.
†† From the “Roll of Honour” sent to me by Ritchie and Lorna Conaghan of the Girvan and District Great War Project. They have spent countless hours researching men listed on war memorials in Colmonell, Ayrshire, and the surrounding area, and I am grateful to them for generously sharing this poem and its history with me. Any errors or inaccuracies are mine.