PHILIP Gibbs crops up in a number of books about the Great War. Jeremy Paxman, in his book on the conflict, describes him as “the best-known of the British war correspondents.” Robert Kershaw, in his recent volume on the Somme, quotes frequently from Gibbs’ front-line dispatches. His output during the war has been described as prodigious.

One day towards the end of May 1917, Gibbs interviewed Walter JJ Coats, an officer with the 9th Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Highlanders) who had survived the trenches and was now an acting Brigade Major. If the journalist was hoping for some revealing observations about the war, he was disappointed.

Coats “did not like” him, he told his father in a letter home. “He tried to get out of me what my views were on the war in general, but I am afraid he didn’t get much information. I find the war in particular gives me quite enough to think about.”

This brisk, no-nonsense approach sums up Coats rather well; it abounds in this quietly fascinating book, which blends his letters to his family with entries in his war diary, written immediately after the conflict.

In these pages there is none of the articulate despair or anger familiar from other accounts, or from poems. As Alexander McCall Smith says in his foreword: “He could have told his correspondents – and his diary – so much more about the discomfort, the tragedy, the terror. He does not. He simply gets on with the business of living through a nightmare that had to be lived through …”

The 9th HLI was one of the first territorial battalions to find itself on the Western Front. We follow Coats, a young, Fettes-educated trainee lawyer in civilian life, from mobilisation to training in Dunfermline then finally to the day, in early November 1914, when he finds himself in France.

In all, he would spend four years and seven months in France before finally being demobilised on May 24, 1919. Along the way he won the Military Cross, the 1914 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, and ended the war as a Deputy Assistant Adjutant General.

But he had had several close shaves, too, notably at High Wood, during the Battle of the Somme, when, as he subsequently wrote in his war diary, a shell from a field gun “landed at my feet and ricocheted away without bursting. If I had been a step further forward I would have had my leg taken off and if the shell had burst I would have been blown to pieces.”

In his years in France he saw close friends and colleagues being killed; he endured the mud and the misery of trench life, and he also had uncomfortable experiences with German snipers.

Yet in his letters home he does not dwell on such facts or indulge in the merest trace of self-pity. That does not seem to have been his way. His letters to his family emphasise, as regularly as clockwork, that he is “flourishing”, or that he and his colleagues are (it becomes such a refrain that it is no surprise to see it form the book’s title).

In one striking letter, in November 1914, he even acknowledges: “My feelings before going into the trenches are the same as before going to a dance.”

He sends birthday and season’s greetings, talks about the weather (sometimes “beastly”, sometimes glorious) and asks his family to send him things: his Gillette safety razor, Nairn’s oatcakes, “some chocolate and sweets, also cigars as I have not had any for a long time.”

There are pen-pictures of his army colleagues, and the retelling of funny little incidents that helped make life bearable. Sometimes there are lines that bring you up short: “The country round here would be quite pretty if it wasn’t for the war. As it is, it is ugly and likely to be so for some time to come,” he writes from his position on High Wood, in July 1916. The Highlanders were almost wiped out at High Wood.

Strict censorship meant that he was limited as to what he could tell his family, of course, but you also get the sense of a decent man, doing his duty for his country, and unwilling to give them any cause for worry.

On April 19, 1918, the eve of his 27th birthday, in the midst of the horrors of Passchendaele, he does however concede: “There have been moments during the last week or so when I had grave doubts as to whether I should see tomorrow”. This was perhaps a reference to another brush with German snipers.

His diary is comprehensive and more explicit than the letters, but again in a matter-of-fact way.

Alongside the photographs in this compelling book are illustrations not just of Christmas cards sent from the front, but the programme for a horse show, too, and a Glasgow Highlanders concert programme. One message signed by Coats, as an acting Brigade Major, also bears his muddy fingerprints.

After being demobilised Coats returned home and joined the family law firm, rising to become senior partner in 1949. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard in Glasgow.

According to the epilogue here, he never married, and lived a fairly reclusive lifestyle, though he was much loved by his nephews and nieces. “It seems clear, though, that he carried the memories and the effects of the war for the remainder of his life,” we read. Walter Coats died in Glasgow on August 25, 1969, the same day as his brother, Jim, in Devon.