“There is only one aim in these notes, and that is to set before you the soldier, an not the man or boy as he was before he was a soldier, not the man as he appears to-day, but the man you never saw and never knew, who lived like an animal and died like an angel; and to point out that no one can afford to judge him or condemn him, and that every-one – including his fellow soldiers – owes him a debt which cannot really be repaid”. Between January and August 1920, Shetland Times reporter Robert M. Greig wrote a series of articles on his experiences on the Western Front in the First World War. These form a startling insight into a shell-torn, barbed wire world of terrible sacrifice and outstanding courage.
