Source points must be related to the question , every time.

1. Source points must be related to the question, every time.

2. The author comments ‘our artillery were bombarding the German trenches, night and day, smashing up the barbed wire’. It was usual to have an artillery bombardment of several days before the commencement of a battle. In this case the Scots would have experienced not only the noise of the constant bombardment and the resulting lack of sleep, but also a sense of foreboding and anticipation before the beginning of the Battle of Loos.

3. The Battle of Loos was the first major battle of the war that many Scots were involved in. As the Scots went ‘over the top’ for the first time they would have experienced an initial fear and excitement, which quickly turned to horror. This is reflected in the source when the author mentions that for his battalion ‘it was over the top and best of luck. Men were laying about in their hundreds, some blown to pieces lying in mangled shell-holes.’

4. The source also illustrates that the Scots experienced heavy enemy fire and then had to quickly construct defences when it says ‘We were held up by machine gun fire and had to dig ourselves in with our entrenching tools.’

5. Lastly, the source illustrates the fact that the Scots experienced very high casualties at the Battle of Loos when it says ‘Only 50 returned out of the 500 that advanced’. Loos was known as ‘the Scottish battle’ because of the involvement of so many Scottish battalions and the resulting heavy losses.