Highland Soldiers: The Story of a Mountain Regiment

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Highland Soldiers should not be mistaken for a regimental history.
Regimental histories are generally written by either ex-soldiers or
professional historians. William C. Taylor is neither. Taylor has,
however, written four books about people or places in western Canada; he
became interested in the Lovat Scouts because, during World War II, the
Scouts trained for alpine warfare in the Canadian Rockies.

To help flesh out this unique but rather uneventful episode, Taylor has
added two things: (i) a brief history of the Lovat Scouts from their
inception during the Boer War to their current hibernation as a platoon
of some faceless highland formation; and (ii) excerpts from the memoirs
of Sydney Scroggie, an unruly young lieutenant who was sent to the
Scouts because of his love of rock-climbing.

Also in contrast to standard regimental histories, Taylor expresses
some very honest antiwar sentiments. When the Lovat Scouts finally
entered battle, in the last year of the war, patriotism had long given
way to a grim sense of duty. Lt. Scroggie himself is torn between the
desire to live up to his father’s heroic World War I record and his
fear of becoming the last Lovat casualty of World War II. A professional
military historian would likely have expunged the young Scot’s doubts
about himself and his regiment’s contribution to the war effort, but
Taylor writes from a different perspective. As a doctor, Taylor
understands the personal triumph of Lt. Scroggie, who does indeed become
a casualty in the last week of the war. But whatever his performance on
the battlefield, Scroggie displayed uncommon valor in struggling back
from a senseless wound that left him blind, crippled, and disfigured for
the rest of his life.

Taylor’s prose is often marred by personal opinion, and the text
suffers from a lack of academic polish; nevertheless, Highland Soldiers
is a valuable contribution to the World War II literature.