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The Ninth (Scottish) Division was the senior division of the first of Kitchener’s New Armies, and came into being at the end of August 1914. This history has little to say about its training, but this period is very amusingly described in The First Hundred Thousand, a novel by Ian Hay, who was an officer in the division. It moved to France on 8 May 1915, the first new army division to go on active service and, at the beginning of July, took over a sector of the line around Festubert. Its first major battle was Loos, where it suffered 6,000 casualties The first half of 1916 was spent in the ‘Plugstreet’ Sector during which time Winston Churchill commanded the sixth Royal Scott Fusiliers. A major change occurred in May 1916 when one of the original Brigades was replaced by the South African Brigade, which had just arrived from Egypt and was to turn out to be one the finest Brigades in the BEF. For the first three weeks of July 1916 the division was on the Somme, and in the fierce fighting of that period suffered 7, 200 casualties. It was withdrawn from the battle and spent a month in the Vimy sector recovering and refitting before returning to the Somme in October where it made several unsuccessful attacks on the Butte de Warlencourt, suffering a further 3,100 casualties. From December 1916 to August 1917 the division was in the Arras sector taking part in the First and Third battles of the Scarpe before moving to Ypres in September at the height of Third Ypres, where a month’s fighting resulted in more than 5,000 casualties. By 1918 the division was one of the best in the BEF. It was awarded seven VCs, and total casualties amounted to over 54,600. This is a very fine history of the division service in France.
