http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,29980,00.html
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 04 2000
As president of the World War I Veterans’ Association for the past five years, Robert Burns was one of the last survivors of the slaughters of the Western Front in 1914-18. Of these he retained a vivid memory, which was aided by a diary he kept at the time. Both of these the association was able to put to good use as the general public’s interest in the First World War rekindled in recent years.
As a private in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, Burns was already a battle-hardened veteran by the time his battalion lined up in its trenches in the opening hours of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. Of that terrible day, on which the British Army lost 57,470 killed and wounded, Burns recalled on a visit to the Picardy battlefields eighty years later: “It was four o’clock in the morning when we got the order to go over the top. A fierce bombardment from our side was supposed to have softened up the German lines, but it was quite clear early on that everything was not going to plan.
“Shells were exploding everywhere amongst us. It was sheer bloody murder. We got about 250 yards across no man’s land and we could see the Germans firing directly at us.
“I particularly remember talking above the din to a comrade near me during the advance. When he did not reply I looked round and he was gone. He had taken a direct hit and was no more.”
What the Camerons could not know was that the Germans had weathered the massive British artillery bombardment by retiring to deep bunkers. Emerging unscathed as the British infantry advanced, they mowed them down with impunity.
It was one of those unequal contests between steel and high explosive on the one hand, and human flesh on the other, of which the battlefields of 1914-18 bear such melancholy testimony. When the internecine struggle ended four months later, only 75 of the 800 soldiers in Burns’s 7th Battalion Cameron Highlanders remained. Half a million men had been killed or wounded on both sides.
Robert Burns was born at Gourock on the Clyde and educated locally before joining a Glasgow accountant’s office at five shillings a week. But he very quickly obtained qualifications in shorthand and typing which dramatically increased his pay.
When war broke out in August 1914, he and his siblings joined the colours, Burns being enlisted in the 7th Battalion Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. He was in France with the British Expeditionary Force by Christmas, and in September 1915 took part in the sprawling and sanguinary Battle of Loos.
He was to survive this and the Battle of the Somme in the following year, without sustaining so much as a scratch. But in December 1916 his luck ran out and he was severely wounded in the front line.
He was sent home to recuperate at Invergordon, where his shorthand and typing unexpectedly stood him in good stead. His skills recommended him to Colonel The Mackintosh of Mackintosh who was on the lookout for a confidential secreraty. On The Mackintosh’s advice he did not apply for a commission and was not returned to the Western Front when his wounds healed.
During the war Burns had kept a shorthand diary which, on the day of the Armistice, November 11, 1918, he put into an envelope. He was not to open it for another 67 years.
After the war Burns moved to England where he made a career in entertainment management. In 1924 he was ticket controller of the London Empire Exhibition and he was also involved in the management of the 1925 Paris World Exhibition. He also had a spell helping to manage the Bertram Mills Circus.
He retired in 1955 to Eastbourne, where he ran a hotel with his wife Florence. She died in 1963 and he sold the business, but a new interest awaited him. While on holiday in Madeira in the following year he came into contact with a French charity group and for the next 11 years he worked caring for homeless and otherwise destitute people in hostels in France, Belgium, the United States and Canada.
In final retirement he returned to live in Eastbourne, where, as a keen billiards player until only a few years ago, he was well known for his skill at the table in local halls. But a further useful interest awaited him with the foundation of World War I Veterans’ Association in 1988, the year in which he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the French Government.
He had already, in 1985, made a typescript version of his diary, entitled Once a Cameron Highlander, which he presented to the Imperial War Museum. From the early 1990s onwards he was active in the veterans’ association’s memorial visits to the battlefields of 1914-18. As these attracted a more general public and press interest, he became, with his excellent and articulate memory, one of the veterans’ best ambassadors.
With his fine physique he was a great support to other, frailer members of that diminishing band as they strove to make their yearly pilgrimages to the grim fields of Flanders, Artois and Picardy. Even at the age of a hundred and beyond, the presence in a room of his ramrod straight back was enough to make others brace up.
Burns made his own last journey to the Somme in July 1998, by which time he was living in a nursing home in Wokingham, Berkshire. To the end he enjoyed his cigars and his whisky, being a connoisseur of both. He is survived by his son.
Robert Burns, President of the World War I Veterans’ Association, was born on November 12, 1895. He died on October 29 aged 104.
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