THE 92-year-old man walking past the yet-to-be-unveiled war memorial looked it over and said: "It's a great idea. The young ones today have no idea what we went through in our day."
Robert Brennan was called up for wartime service at 19. On D-Day in 1944 he piloted a minesweeper motorlaunch onto the Omaha beachhead.
He now lives close to the memorial garden in Neilston, East Renfrewshire, which has been created by a local committee, whose members have been raising funds since 2011.
The memorial wall lists the 217 men who have died on active service since the first world war. Most of them died between 1915 and 1918, including no fewer than 16 who are said to have died on a single day - September 25, 1915 - at the battle of Loos.
Matt Drennan, secretary of the Neilston War Memorial Association, said: "We've researched many of the Neilston men who died for their country.
"We came across a story about 12 lads from Neilston who met up in the front-line trenches at Loos and who, over a brew of tea, toasted the day when they would return home. Four of them died the next day."
A local newspaper at the time said it was "abundantly plain that the natives of the village have taken their full share of the price" of the battle for Hill 70 at Loos.
Elsewhere on the Western Front, Privates Thomas Fox and Herbert Johnston were helping stretcher-bearers carry a wounded comrade in no-man's land when a shell exploded close by, on June 20, 1915. Fox was killed instantly and Johnston lasted only a few more hours. When Fox's belongings were sent back to his parents, many of them bore the impact of the shell.
One soldier, Robert McLintock, was injured at Loos in September 1915 and was sent home to recuperate. He returned to the front in January 1916 but was killed in action in Belgium, aged just 22, in September 1917.
His parents had another son, James, but he was killed during the Second World War, at Anzio, in June 1944. He was 33.
Mr Drennan said the project still had to be completed. "Once we get the garden grounds done I think the whole thing will have cost us £80,000.
"We raised the money ourselves, including an anonymous donation of £10,000, and received no Heritage Lottery funding."
"Up until now, Neilston is one of the few places in the UK that did not have a civic war memorial to honour those who gave their lives in the service of their country.
"It has been a long time coming but we are delighted that it will finally be unveiled on November 7."
Jimmy Higgins, one of the local fundraisers, who at one point did a sponsored walk to Vimy Ridge, in northern France, said: "The memorial brings home the appalling cost paid by this one small village during the two wars.
"Had the country’s losses been on a par with Neilston’s, per head of population, some 2.5 million men would have been lost - and perhaps the war itself,” he said.
The spinner's cross on the memorial war was designed by artist Tom McKendrick.
Mr Drennan said the more research into the past that was done, the more names they came across. Up to six other Neilston men who died on active service are not named on the memorial. "We'll need to look at how we're going to include them on it," he said.
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