Willie F. Ritchie's family worked on the estate at Bardrochat, Colmonell in Ayrshire, Scotland. The Ritchie family lived at Oaknowe, the gamekeeper's cottage. These poems were taken from an old autograph book discovered in a junk shop in Duns, Berwickshire in 1996.

Created on Remembrance Sunday 1999 by Richard A Jackson

By Willie F. Ritchie, 91st Highlanders

What might have been,

Ah what a world of meaning in those lines.

What vain regrets they now bring back of idle mispent times

When we who once had every chance in this, life's fairest scene.

Just think on what we are today, and what we might have been.

How many since the world began, these selfsame lines have said.

How many starting fair and bright, have come down low instead,

Of rising as they meant to do when all was young and green.

They echo still the same sad words, Ah me, what might have been.

Could we before us see our lives, as on them we look back,

How many spots would then be fair, that now are deepest black?

What pain and misery would be spared, what graves that now are green,

Would still remain untenanted?

Ah me, what might have been.