‘B’ Battery 69th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery

Service Number: 109073

Date of Death: 3 October 1918

Age at Death: 27

Family: Husband of the late Catherine Hotchkies and youngest son of the late James and Catherine Huskie, Carronshore; brother of James Huskie (see entry) and of George Huskie

In Peter Hart’s view, “the operations [in Mesopotamia] had achieved their original declared objectives in the first few days of the campaign in November 1914; everything else had been vainglorious nonsense. Mesopotamia was a tragedy from start to finish fought in circumstances of exceptional difficulty.” The Great War, 1914- 1918, Peter Hart, 2013, page 294

Prior to his enlistment in November 1915, David Huskie was an electric coal-cutting machineman. He was drafted to India in 1917 and from there to Mesopotamia. His Battery, part of 4th Brigade, belonged to the 7th (Meerut) Division, which had been fighting in that country since May 1916. In 1917 Baghdad was captured and the Turkish forces driven back, a process continued in 1918 without a decisive victory being gained – the serious fighting in Mesopotamia had actually ended in November 1917.

David Huskie died in Mesopotamia the day before his 28th birthday. He was a victim of the appalling conditions that the British soldiers fought in. Apart from the extremes of temperature that had to be coped with, the flies, mosquitoes and other vermin caused high levels of illness and death, exacerbated by the unsatisfactory medical arrangements provided for British forces. Tehran War Cemetery, Iran IV. A. 7.

It is also possible that David may have fallen victim to what was called the Spanish ‘Flu because of the disease being recognised first in Spain which was a neutral nation.