After the attack I was appointed burial officer and was told just to get on with the job of burying the dead… In a Highland Regiment, there were many men from the same family, village or town. I mean some of them obviously were just crying, and it was quite natural. If your brother was picked up on a battlefield like that, well, you’ve only got to imagine what you would feel like, and that’s exactly what they felt like. We took the dead on stretchers back to Mailly Maillet Wood and dug a long trench and put the dead in there, wrapped in an army blanket, neatly packed in like sardines. They fell side by side and they were buried side by side. We covered them up and we gave them a proper funeral with reversed arms: all the ceremonial of a proper funeral, blowing the Last Post and the pipes playing ‘Flowers in the Forest’. I think there were about 80; it might have been less << less