WW1 victory came at a heavy cost to Scotland – in more ways than one

But it is an estimate that has changed often since 1918. Soon after the Armistice, the number of Scotland’s dead was given out by Whitehall as 70,000 – a straight 10% of the overall total of 700,000, exactly in line with the share of the UK population then living north of the Border.

READ MORE: First World War roll of honour book marks heroism of Scottish community

From this side of it there arose doubting voices to say the figure could not be a true one, although the only evidence people had at first was the sense of devastation the nation suffered as it turned away from the battlefields where much of its youthful vigour had drained into the blood-soaked soil.

These were not, however, the voices of pacifists, though there had been a few of those when the war broke out, including one or two with names that gained some later renown: John Maclean (pictured below), Jimmy Maxton, Tom Johnston. We may note that, after conscription came in, conscientious objection was their right (unlike in some combatant countries) and not necessarily held against them in post-war life. But pacifists were anyway a small minority.

The vast majority of Scots never wavered in their patriotic fervour through the four years of slaughter, and were proud beyond measure of the human and material contribution their nation made to victory. All they wanted was for its full sacrifice to be duly acknowledged, because this was also a collective sacrifice. The Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle, designed by Robert Lorimer and unveiled in 1926, demonstrates how that was the aspect being stressed at the time by the people who had lived through it all.

READ MORE: Events across Scotland mark centenary of Armistice Day by honouring war dead

Inside, this is a wonderful but not a grandiose or vainglorious structure. The representative figures depicted on it are ordinary men and women, such as you might go out and meet on the capital’s streets below. They are like us except they died for us, “yet their name liveth for ever more”.

Despite the proven devotion to the Allies’ common cause, by 1918 the UK authorities might have felt just a little wary of a risk that Scottish sentiment might take some course of its own. The year when peace came was also another springtime of nations. Previously submerged peoples rose again to freedom, and global imperialism staggered. Four empires collapsed: the German, the Austrian, the Russian and the Turkish.

The British empire, though now vindicated by victory, had still suffered a blow to its bosom with the Easter Rising in Dublin two years before. In fact the UK was in the end to lose a greater proportion of its territory than Germany did, because the seceding 26 counties of Ireland had occupied more space in the pre-war Union than Alsace-Lorraine and the Polish Corridor had in the Kaiserreich of Wilhelm II. Since it was felt better to avoid any risk that the Scots might come to think their valour and loyalty had somehow gone for nothing, the authorities in London preferred to gloss over their sacrifice.

The question did arise of defining a Scot. By birth? By blood? If the latter, how many grandparents were needed to qualify? There had been 16 Canadian-Scottish infantry regiments in the war, composed partly of recent migrants, partly also of soldiers whose ancestors might have crossed the ocean a century or more ago. Did these belong among Scotland’s war dead? People felt inclined to be generous with the definition, and eventually the roll of honour kept at the memorial rose to include 147,000 names. In recent years, Lt Col Roger Binks has taken on the heroic task of pruning it of errors or repetitions, so that now it has come down to just under 135,000. The total will continue to be corrected.

READ MORE: Letters: There was no glory in the Great War, only horror

It may not sound like so many compared to the two million Germans who were killed, or the 1.8m Russians or 1.4m French. But Scotland was a small country which could ill afford such a scale of loss, and in fact its rate of casualties exceeded that of any other Allied nation. Although it lay far from the theatres of conflict, its death toll was proportionately higher than the losses of Serbia and Turkey, countries which had been conquered and over-run.

One big reason lay in the mind of the UK commander-in-chief, General Douglas Haig, a son of Edinburgh who beyond all measure admired his own Scottish regiments and believed that, with their bravado and tenacity, they could win the war for him. God would help a bit too, but of course he was on Scotland’s side anyway.

Haig had no taste for the trench warfare which followed after the opening German onslaught came to a halt. His ideal was a war of movement, in which he felt convinced he would come off the better. But for that the best and bravest of his troops had to break through on the Western Front. That meant the Scots. Here was why, in his relentless assaults, he so often sent them over the top first. Not that they feared to go: they, too, believed they could win the war. So, in high patriotic spirit, with no disaffection from the Union, Scotland fought a tragic and wasteful war to the end.

A huge crowd gathered outside the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England in London after the announcement of the Armistice

A century later we can count the true cost with more detachment. Of the UK total of dead, not 10% but 14% were Scots. The sacrifice was disproportionate to the nation’s size. The sacrifice may have been made willingly, but it was still a terrible price to pay for a victory that did not appear to bring any great benefit to Scotland, apart from the bald fact of belonging to a vindicated empire.

This was not, in the event, to be much consolation because the peace also turned out to be tragic and wasteful, if in a different way. The soldiers who survived came back to a homeland bled of its Victorian vigour. There was no return to the halcyon days when Scotland had been an industrial world-beater, only to an endless series of economic crises rendering the nation comparable with those in Europe that, under the same stresses and strains, suffered collapse and revolution.

READ MORE: On Remembrance Sunday my thoughts are with all victims of wars

Yet despite what a few hoped at the time and fewer still argue even now, there was no revolutionary potential in post-war Scotland. Its fate was more humdrum and depressing. Production shrank and famous companies vanished into takeover or liquidation. Proud entrepreneurs and craftsmen either took their talents and skills round the globe or swelled the shuffling, hopeless ranks of the unemployed at home. For the first time since the Union, the nation began to insulate itself from economic progress. It did not want to beat the world any more, asking only for subsidies from London.

All western nations, except the neutrals, suffered profound effects from the First World War. But for Scots, though little attention was paid beyond our borders, the effects seem to me to have been among the most profound of all.

The nation underwent a catharsis, a tragic purification. The Scotland constructed since the Union of 1707, a workshop of the world built on the democratic intellect, by 1918 stood revealed as an illusion. Now its prosperity was gone, with its culture soon succumbing to bureaucratic centralism.

Still, the flame had not burned so low that it could not be given a breath of life by a few dedicated patriots. By them and by gradually growing circles of their countrymen, the nation was slowly and painfully saved from lingering death in the course of the 20th century. In the 21st century, we will see what happens next.