THE
PIPER
OF
LOOS

The story of Daniel Laidlaw, a seasoned Borderer whose courage found its voice in the skirl of the pipes on one of the darkest mornings of the First World War. At the Battle of Loos in 1915, as poison gas drifted back over British trenches and shaken men faltered on the brink of attack, Laidlaw climbed onto the parapet, stood in full view of the enemy, and marched up and down the line playing “Blue Bonnets Over the Border.” His music rallied the King’s Own Scottish Borderers to rise, advance through the gas, and charge the German positions—an act of defiant leadership that won him the Victoria Cross and made him forever known as “The Piper of Loos.”