royal scots second battallion lothion regiment

[hastiealkas]

I had previously mentioned on another thread that I recently purchased, on e-Bay, the hand-written diary of a NCO of this regiment, covering the about three months that it was in Belgium before being rushed to East Prussia and then Russian Poland. I was quite interested, as it was part of my grand-father's army corps, and I got in a serious bidding war with a Belgian and had to pay quite a bit for it. It is 75 hand-written full pages written in a high-quality large-format notebook. Also contains, in the rear, a large address-book section, mostly Berlin addresses.

The text stopped abruptly at the time that his train rolled east thru or very near Berlin. Therefore, it seems likely that the train stopped at or near Berlin and he was able to give the diary (mostly filled) to someone to take to his family.

The text is medium-hard to translate, as it was written in a blend of Suetterlin and the older hand-writing system Kurrent, as usual, but with a lot of the latter, like my grand-father's script, and also features some of my g-f's peculiarities in script. As such, it is very unlikely that it was written by anyone born in the 20th Century; my g-f was a Prussian Artillery NCO in the early 1880's. I am suspicious of all sources. It makes absolutely no sense that this diary is a forgery.

I have only translated 4 1/3 pages, not completely (the transliteration from this blend of Suetterlin and a lot of Kurrent into Modern German is a lot harder than translating the German into English), about 90% of the transliteration is written down, only 10% of the translation to English, but I can easily understand what it says. It has, so far, enough happening to please anyone. They marched over the border into Belgium and turned north, marching near the Dutch border. The "Dutch" (of course Flemish) population greet them warmly. They are repeatedly fired on from houses, and they storm the houses and capture men of all age groups, young men and elderly. In one house they capture a priest and a 12 year old boy. They march on, there are burned villages, and lots of cattle and poultry wandering about (If farmers fled they would release their animals rather than have them starve in pens or stalls.) and here and there there are dead cattle scattered about. Then they come upon more Flemish, who greet them with water and fruit. Marching along, they come upon a dead German curassier (heavy cavalry), shot in the back, and hidden under straw near a bridge. They decide that the inhabitants of the nearby village must be responsible, so they plunder the town, taking "goods and chattel". The narrative is dated and a string of place-names are included, not written in the old hand-writing, but imperfectly in the new modern script, in the fashion that was just imposed by war-time Prussian military postal regulations. (Almost all mail and addresses written at this time from Prussian soldiers and units, is written in the new script; like this material, the new script is written much more awkwardly and erroroniously than the old script, although the new script is really much simpler than the complex old systems, which had, for example, the letter "s" written in three or four very different fashions, very different symbols, sometimes literally side by side in a word.)

That is as far as I have gone. Over 70 pages to go. If there is interest I will post periodically.

Bob Lembke