PRIVATE JAMES DUFF CAMPBELL
ROYAL SCOTS
28TH AUGUST 1916 AGE 24
BURIED: CATERPILLAR VALLEY CEMETERY, LONGUEVAL, FRANCE
This inscription comes from the first line of 'The Soldier's Dream' by Thomas Campbell, 1824-97. Private Campbell's mother chose it.
"Our bugles sang truce, for the night-cloud had lower'd,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpower'd,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die."
And what was the soldier's dream?
"Methought from the battlefield's dreadful array
Far, far I had roam'd on a desolate track:
'Twas Autumn, and sunshine arose on the way
To the home of my fathers, that welcomed me back."
Surrounded by the sights and sounds of his home and his loved ones, the soldier vows never to leave it again. But then he wakes up and realises that it was all just a dream.
"But sorrow return'd with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away."
James Campbell served with the 13th Battalion the Royal Scots, a New Army battalion. He was killed when the regiment was in the trenches near High Wood where their casualties, from German shelling, were in the region of 30 a day.