A biography of the author's uncle, Ernest Reid, who died in 1917, an officer in the Black Watch, of wounds sustained in the Battle of Arras. Born and raised in Paisley, educated at Paisley Grammar School, then Glasgow University, he intended to become a lawyer before he volunteered for war service. The author puts Ernest's life into its moral as well as its historical context, the climate in which he grew up, and the influences which formed him and his generation, the generation which supplied the subalterns of the Great War. As a result, although the book remains primarily a biography of its subject, it also explored the spirit in which Britain, still essentially Victorian, went to war in 1914.