A Village At War: Earlston 1914 - 1918

This simple inscription on the war memorial in the village of Earlston, in the Scottish Borders, serves as the inspiration for A Village at War: Earlston 1914-18.
The narrative provides a wonderful insight into Scottish life at a very particular moment in time, as viewed through the eyes of one small place and its inhabitants over the course of the First World War.
The author has painstakingly researched all forty-eight names on the Earlston war memorial, and discovered who they were, what they did before the outbreak of war, and what their connection was to the village of Earlston.
The result is a wonderfully evocative social history of life in an agricultural community at the start of the twentieth century, describing traditions and practices that were about to disappear with the mechanization brought about by the conflict.
Local press reports and other regional sources recall what was happening in the wider community as the war in Europe intensified, detailing fundraising efforts, recruitment drives, and accounts of the various battles, which would take their toll on Earlston's servicemen. Extracts from battalion war diaries reveal the stark reality of life on the front line. Photographs put faces to some of the names on the memorial.
Gradually, as the chronology of the book follows the years of the war, the narrative records the individual stories of those forty-eight men listed on the memorial: their regiments, their ranks, where they served ... and how they died.
A Village at War is a fitting elegy not only for those that did not return, but also for a bygone way of life. As well as being a fascinating historical account, the book is a fitting tribute to a previous generation. Earlston serves as a microcosm of all the villages in Great Britain that lost men during the years of the First World War, whose names are immortalized on similar memorials throughout the country.
Exactly 100 years after Earlston's war memorial first remembered its war dead, A Village at War brings them to life in a beautifully evocative book of remembrance that will appeal to anyone interested in the history of that period.