JULY 1, 1916.

The start of the epic, bloody Battle of the Somme.

The teeming British divisions were made up of regiments such as the Highland Light Infantry -and among the many HLI battalions, in turn, were three Glasgow service battalions.

The 15th was made up of tramway employees. The 16th consisted of former officers of the Boys' Brigade. The 17th had been put together by the Chamber of Commerce.

They had all gone overseas with the 32nd Division in November 1915; the 15th with the 14th infantry brigade, and the other two with the 97th infantry brigade.

In the words of Lt Col LB Oatts, in volume three of Proud Heritage, his history of the HLI, the men in the service battalions "would have been quite happy driving trams, totting up ledgers, keeping shops and delivering coal until pensioned off; their only excitement caused by the arrival of a baby or a trip down the Clyde."

Now, here they were, ready to give their lives for their country.

The British target was a 15-mile front between Serre, north of the Ancre, and Curlu, north of the Somme.

The Germans had taken the French town of Thiepval and turned it into a fortress. The British softened them up with a huge week-long bombardment that wiped Thiepval off the map.

Then the troops moved in.

There was a tremendous battle. The 16th HLI quickly lost 19 officers and 492 soldiers - out of a total of 800.

The 17th suffered heavy casualties too - 22 officers and 447 soldiers - but they persisted bravely and reached the first German line, the Leipzig Redoubt, and held it.

No less a person than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would praise the 17th.

"In the desperate circumstances," wrote the creator of Sherlock Holmes, "it might well be considered a remarkable result that a stretch of the Leipzig Redoubt should be won and permanently held by the Highlanders, especially by the 17th HLI."

British casualty figures that day were utterly harrowing. There were 60,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead.

Finally, it was the turn of the 15th, the Tramways men. They had assembled in the trenches at Authuille wood before dawn on July 3.

By now, says Oatts, the redoubt was a "pulverised mass of rubble, covered by dead bodies."

The 15th had suffered the strain of waiting for two days on the edge of the field of battle, not knowing when they would be called forward - and knowing the dreadful fate that had awaited the men from the other Glasgow regiments.

When the order came, they advanced "with bombs and bayonets" towards the enemy. A Lewis gun was mounted on a parapet. The gunner was killed. Six other men took his place. They, too, were killed.

At the day's end, the 15th had lost 13 officers and 272 rank-and-file men.

After Thiepval, Oatts writes, the 15th were organised into two companies, like most other battalions in the division. But the 16th and 17th could barely raise two companies between them, such was their losses.

The fighting on the Western Front continued for weeks, with the three service battalions seeing repeated action.

By October, the battlefront "has dissolved into a vast sea of mud and slime ... the Glasgow Highlanders were up to their knees in mud and cold, wet and exhausted, with many suffering from trench feet."

The Battle of the Ancre began on November 13.

The German-held villages of Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt had been taken by the Allied forces but the Germans still held out on parts of the Redan Ridge.

The 17th HLI arrived an hour before the assault, practically deadbeat. At 6.10am on November 18, they advanced with the 16th.

But the whole of the 17th, and the right flank of the 16th, was cut down by machine-gun fire.

The survivors of the 16th found themselves in the Frankfurt trench, surrounded by Germans. They held out for eight days, without food and water at the end. They even ignored a flag of truce that the Germans sent in.

THE 16th received 33 commendations for their bravery.

Winter set in on the Western Front, but the fighting was far from over.

As Oatts relates, the service battalions en-gaged the enemy between February and April, 1917.

The 17th HLI was involved in action in and around the village of Savy, on April 1. Still their casualties mounted: 32 soldiers died.

The 16th battalion marched into the newly-liberated village of Nesle, with their pipers playing Scotland the Brave. There, they met the French President, Raymond Poincare - who after the war would be elected rector of Glasgow University.

The 16th was involved in the capture of the village of Fayet, and the 15th, 16th and 17th were involved in the fighting for the key bridgehead of Nieuport, on July 10.

On April 2, 1918, the 15th captured the village of Ayette after vicious hand-to-hand fighting with the Germans.

But by this time the 17th had been disbanded and its members trans-ferred to other battalions. There were only about 50 of its members left out of all those who had paraded back home in George Square four years earlier.

As for the 16th - it became a Divisional Pioneer battalion, a great honour.

The armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. Of the thousands who died in France, many were quiet heroes from Glasgow's three service battalions.