In November, 1917, my maternal grandfather, then a soldier in the King's Royal Rifles, was severely wounded by shrapnel from a shell burst while he was repairing the barbed wire defences in front of the British trench. A couple of A & S Highlanders crawled out amid the shelling and brought him back to the safety of the trench before he could bleed to death. He always had a soft spot for the A & S Highlanders after that. It may have been one reason for his ready affection for my father, who joined the A & S Highlanders in 1940, a couple of years before he met my mother. I still have the A & S H Other Ranks leather sporran that was issued to my father in 1940. Alas, his kilt was lost when the family immigrated to Canada in the early 1950s.