Charlie was the first to die, just four months after the war started. He reached enemy trenches on 19 December 1914, but no one could ever say what happened to him amid the mayhem and black, choking mud of the western front. His body was never found.
Ronnie was next, the following year; then Teddie, the baby of the family at 21, in March 1918. Seven days later, Bertie – the eldest at 36, with a wife and two young sons at home – was killed. All four brothers gone in little more than three years.
At the Anderson family home in Glasgow, Nora, their mother, never recovered. As with so many mothers, fathers, siblings and wives, the gaping wound of loss could not be healed.
A living link to those events a century ago will be provided on Sunday when Bertie Anderson’s great-grandson and two great-great-granddaughters honour the memory of the brothers – and millions of others who gave their lives – at an Armistice Day service at Glasgow cathedral, where a plaque is dedicated to the Anderson men.
“I grew up with this story of the four boys who went to war and never came back,” said Robin Scott-Elliot, Bertie’s great-grandson. “The impact of their loss filtered down through generations. As I watch my children grow up, and I think that Bertie never had that, I feel quite emotional.” Bertie – Lieutenant Colonel William Herbert Anderson – was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
The citation read: “His conduct in leading the charge was quite fearless and his most splendid example was the means of rallying and inspiring the men during a most critical hour.”
But, said Scott-Elliot, “he wasn’t a soldier, he was an accountant, an ordinary man. And then suddenly he was plunged into something beyond our comprehension.
“The point of Remembrance Day is to remember those individual soldiers, who all had their own stories and who had no choice about going to war. What happened to my family is just one illustration of loss across the country and beyond.”
A hundred years ago today, four years of horror finally came to an end when the armistice was announced at 11am. The centenary will be marked with prayers, salutes, wreaths, music and candles across the world. In a rolling global tribute over 24 hours, more than 2,500 pipers from New Zealand to Hawaii will play When the Battle’s O’er at 6am local time – about the time the armistice was signed in 1918.
“The youngest piper is nine and the oldest is, I think, 89,” said Stuart Letford of the National Piping Centre, which is coordinating the event. “Locations include back gardens, war memorials, cenotaphs, graveyards, hill tops and the middle of the ocean.”
At 11am in London, a gun will be fired by the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery to signal the start of a two-minute silence. It will end with buglers of the Royal Marines sounding the Last Post.
At the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the Prince of Wales, the prime minister, leaders of political parties, other members of the royal family, Commonwealth representatives, military officials and other dignitaries will lay wreaths.
For the first time, Germany is taking part in the commemoration. A wreath laid by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on behalf of the German people will join others at the base of the national memorial.
Soon after, a “people’s procession” of 10,000 members of the public, selected by ballot, will make its way from Buckingham Palace along the Mall and Whitehall, ending at St James’s Park. Among those marching and laying wreaths will be children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fought.
As the procession begins, artists on 32 beaches around the country will create giant images of first world war casualties in the sand at low tide. When the tide comes in, the sand portraits will gently wash away. Members of the public are invited to create their own sand portraits.
The Pages of the Sea project is the idea of film director Danny Boyle. “Beaches are truly public spaces, where nobody rules other than the tide. They seem the perfect place to gather and say a final goodbye and thank you to those whose lives were taken or affected by the first world war,” said Boyle.
A sand portrait of first world war poet Wilfred Owen will be traced in the sand at Folkestone beach in Kent.
A hundred years after his death in the final days of the war, Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, has written a new work, The Wound in Time, to be read by individuals, families and communities on beaches as part of the commemoration.
All over the country, church bells will ring, echoing the celebratory peals that marked the armistice. A campaign to find 1,400 new bellringers to symbolically match the number lost in the war has resulted in 2,400 recruits. At the ancient church of St Illtud’s in Llantwit Major, south Wales, the bells will ring in tribute to five men who died out of a bell-ringing team of seven or eight. As the day draws to a close, Beefeaters at the Tower of London will begin to light 10,000 torches, gradually filling the moat with flames. An hour later, the Queen will attend a memorial service at Westminster Abbey.
The day’s events will end with 1,200 buglers sounding the Last Post, 1,300 beacons being lit from Unst in the Shetland Islands to Cornwall, and 180 town criers reading a declaration for peace around the world.
Earlier, an alternative Remembrance event will take place in central London, in which wreaths of white poppies will be laid at a monument stone to conscientious objectors. “Our commemoration will recommit people to the message of ‘never again’ that came from the war to end all wars,” said Oliver Robertson of the First World War Peace Forum, which has organised the event.
“War is always a choice, and it’s a choice to shut down other means of resolving conflict.” In York, 93-year-old Barbara Weatherill, whose mother and father served in the war, will lay a wreath at the city’s armistice ceremony.
“I shall find it very emotional, humbling and uplifting,” said Weatherill, who served as a driver with the anti-aircraft command of the Royal Artillery in the second world war.
“I shall probably shed a few tears, but I won’t be the only one. I’ll be thinking about all those people who died, and feeling enormous gratitude for an immense debt that can never, ever be repaid.”
