Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1915, Lieutenant Robert Stirling, 1st Battalion, Princess Louise’s (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders), was killed in action on the Western Front, near Sint-Elooi, a village three miles south of Ypres. He was shot as he went to the aid of one of his men who lay wounded.
The eldest son of a Royal Navy Lieutenant-Commander, he was educated at the Loretto School in Musselburgh, East Lothian, the oldest of the Scottish boarding schools. Gazetted to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in 1912, he join the 1st Batallion in Malta. In June of 1914 he was promoted to Lieutenant while his Battalion was in India. After the outbreak of the Great War they were returned to active service, arriving in France in December of 1914. According to a military researcher, Lieutenant Stirling was related to Colonel Sir David Stirling, the founder of the S.A.S..
He is buried in the Dickebusch New Military Cemetery, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium, with the inscription “until the day dawns.”
Robert, from Linlithgow, was 22 years old.
