Private Donald McCreath (17647) served with the 12th Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry in World War 1. He was killed, age 20, on 25 September 1915 and is buried at The Loos Memorial in the Dud Corner Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France.
The date of 25 September was the launch of the Allied autumn offensive in a combined attack of British and French troops against the German line in Artois and Champagne. One of the major battles in that offensive was the Battle of Loos (25 September – 13 October 1915), fought by the British First Army under the command of General Douglas Haig in this Lens-La Bassée sector. The launch of the battle at first light on the morning of 25 September witnessed the first use by the British Army of chlorine gas as a cloud of poisonous gas on the battlefield. Earlier in that year the Germans had first tested chlorine gas against the French and British in April and May in the Ypres Salient.
Additional Information
Dud Corner Cemetery stands almost on the site of a German strong point, the Lens Road Redoubt, captured by the 15th (Scottish) Division on the first day of the battle.
The name “Dud Corner” is believed to be due to the large number of unexploded enemy shells found in the neighbourhood after the Armistice.
The Loos Memorial commemorates over 20,000 officers and men who have no known grave, who fell in the area from the River Lys to the old southern boundary of the First Army, east and west of Grenay, from the first day of the Battle of Loos to the end of the war.
On either side of the cemetery is a wall 15 feet high, to which are fixed tablets on which are carved the names of those commemorated. At the back are four small circular courts, open to the sky, in which the lines of tablets are continued, and between these courts are three semicircular walls or apses, two of which carry tablets, while on the centre apse is erected the Cross of Sacrifice.
The memorial was designed by Sir Herbert Baker with sculpture by Charles Wheeler. It was unveiled by Sir Nevil Macready on 4 August 1930.