War poetry

MACGILLIVRAY, Alan, ‘Land of Brave Men: Scottish Poetry of the First World War’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997 |

Most of the poems referenced here are to be found in the ASLS collection From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945, edited by David Goldie and Roderick Watson.

Tir nam Beann, nan Gaisgeach,
’s nan Gleann,
’S i Tir nan Gaisgeach a th’ann. – Iain Rothach.

(A hero’s land of hill and glen,
this is the Land of Brave Men. – John Munro.)

When one considers the whole vast range of possible literature that can be read enjoyably and studied profitably in secondary schools, it is both curious and saddening to see how the actual choices made are so restricted both in the range of writing and in the type of writer chosen. The range of experience delivered by proxy to our pupils is patchy and often determined more by what has been done in the past than by any considered decision of pupils’ present needs and tastes. Thus Shakespeare is almost always to be preferred to any modern drama; Jay Gatsby and Atticus Finch are the novel heroes for our place and time; and, most noticeably perhaps, the terrifying nature of war is to be mediated in verse to the young through the perceptions of a small group of public-school poets located in one area of one particular conflict within a period of four years. All that needs to be said about war is encapsulated in the verses of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

This may be one of the great unexamined assumptions of our time. It is probably not surprising, given the media success of the British war industry. Regularly they come round, the old black and white British war films, the British At War series, the Testaments of Youth and Remembrance Ceremonies. Truly they grow not old as we who view grow old, but live in perpetual youth, the John Millses and Richard Attenboroughs and Kenneth Mores, stiff upper lips and sticky wickets of our Dunkirk culture. Even in poetry, even for a teacher in England, the endless repetition of the battle litanies and war requiems must be wearying; those knock-kneed beggars under sacks, the scarlet majors at the base, the foreign fields that are forever Grantchester, these we have loved – the rough male kiss of blankets under an English heaven. Within that particular conflict – the Western Front in the First World War – and accepting that the poems referred to above have many fine qualities, the range of reference is nevertheless limited.

In this English war poetry, the background awareness of the world is that of the public schoolboy yearning for an ideal rural England of leisured ease and affluence. There is no awareness of English suburbia or urban streets as parts of the context of war, either as things to fight for or things to change in a better world to come. The working class, even the average middle class, has no respected voice in this poetry. In the genteel literature of the time, rougher accents and more awkward rhymes find no acceptance. Could it be otherwise? Those who wrote poetry had almost inevitably for the most part to be officer class, bringing their sense that the best way to express deep personal experience is through the classically-hallowed medium of verse; as they found in their Latin and Greek studies and their readings of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the volumes of the Georgian poets, so they will do likewise, both to work out their own anguish and to attempt to communicate with a similarly literary-trained readership. And some of them succeed superlatively well, breaking the conventional bounds of traditional metres and Romantic imagery to speak with new angry voices about the pity and horror of war, pouring a harsh vintage into the old mellow claret bottles.

Yet for readers outside their world, at an even further remove than the English middle-class and working-class readers, there is a growing discontent with this poetry, however fine its qualities. Scottish readers (and presumably Welsh and Irish also) have in the past accepted this Anglocentric view of the First World War as the natural one within the context of a set of reading expectations that deny the validity of other kinds of voice within the linguistic community of the British Isles. The notion that there might have been Scottish war poets who could speak more out of their own culture with more familiar voices is one that has only quite recently surfaced. With the more confident and aggressive feeling that we now have that the Scottish experience has its own equal validity and its own literary voice, we wish to look for Scottish war poets nearer home. The encouraging result of this quest is that there are indeed such poets to be found.

We must, of course, make the clear distinction between World War One and World War Two. In literary terms, the Second World War was a much more democratic and socially mixed set of experiences. The poetry that came out of it had much more to say to all of us, whatever social background or country of Britain it came from. And the Scottish poets, through a more fortunate publishing history and the high profile of the Scottish Renaissance movement in poetry and other genres, are clearly visible.

THE POETS

So who are the Scottish poets of the First World War? There are five names in particular that are worth noting particularly for their war poems; and there are a number of other writers known more widely, who have one or two poems on the war that are incidental to their main work. The particular ones to be focused on are, in alphabetical order only, W.D. Cocker, Roderick Watson Kerr, Joseph Lee, Ewart Alan MacKintosh and Charles Hamilton Sorley. The others are John Buchan, Violet Jacob, Hugh MacDiarmid and Neil Munro.

W.D. Cocker gained some reputation after the war as a journalist and writer of humorous verses in Scots, but the poems written out of his experiences with the Highland Light Infantry and the Royal Scots and as a prisoner of war, written in English, are worth inclusion in any anthology of war poetry. Roderick Watson Kerr, who also later became a journalist, fought with gallantry in the Royal Tank Corps and was well received as a war poet to be compared with Sassoon when he published a collection just after the war. Joseph Lee, journalist and artist, fought in the Black Watch and the Royal Rifle Corps and spent a year as a prisoner of war; he still managed to have two collections of poetry published during the war. Born and brought up in England, Ewart Alan MacKintosh served with the Seaforth Highlanders and was killed in action in 1917; his poems have been regarded as some of the finest of the war. Charles Hamilton Sorley was another Scot brought up in England; he served in the Suffolk Regiment and was killed in 1915 after only a few months of active service, with, however, some fine poems on which to base his reputation as a war poet. It was the war that gave these men their poetic voices and, apart from Cocker, their claim to be remembered as poets.

It is different for the others mentioned earlier. The names of John Buchan, Violet Jacob, Hugh MacDiarmid and Neil Munro are associated with so much else in literature that has made their considerable reputations; their writings of the war were not their most significant productions and could easily be overlooked. It is all the more important, therefore, that what they did produce in the stress of the war years should be remembered and given its proper place. Only MacDiarmid saw the war at first hand, as a medical orderly, and refused to publish most of what he wrote at the time. Both Buchan and Munro were older and medically unfit for service; however, Buchan acted as a special correspondent and observer in France before obtaining a government information post. Violet Jacob lost her only son killed on the Somme in 1916. The war touched them all closely, as it did nearly everybody at the time, and it is a false notion of the imperatives of poetic impulse to say that only active service can produce the war poet.

THE POEMS

Teachers will draw from these poems whatever points they think are relevant to their purposes. However, it may be useful to give a few comments on a selection by way of an introduction, since most of them may be new to readers of this article.

Two poems by W.D. Cocker – ‘Up the Line to Poelkapelle’ and ‘The Sniper’: the first deals with the encounter between living soldiers going up to the front line and a dozen dead lying ignored beside the road. The first stanza sets the situation; the second describes the traffic going past them uncaring and indifferent; the third suggests the reaction of the dead soldiers’ loved ones if they knew how they were being treated. The refrain to each stanza sets the words of the popular soldiers’ song ‘Tipperary’ against the reflection that nobody seems to care, except possibly God. ‘The Sniper’ deals with the shooting of a German soldier by a British sniper, and the discrepancy between the lack of feelings about death inflicted at a distance on an anonymous being and the strong emotions of those close to the death who see its effects and of those who are personally involved with the dead man. The poem widens out to suggest that there would be no difference in feeling if the situation were reversed.

Roderick Watson Kerr’s poems, ‘From the Line’, ‘The Corpse’ and ‘A Dead Man’, are grimly concerned with the appalling physical changes that war wreaks upon both the living and the dead. ‘From the Line’ has some similarities to Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ in its setting of the scene with men returning from the front line showing the dehumanising signs of battle and the rejection of the fine slogans of the war propagandists. ‘The Corpse’ and ‘A Dead Man’ both evoke the horrors of the unburied body left to rot in public view before being eventually decently interred: in ‘The Corpse’ the horror is suggested rather than described, but ‘A Dead Man’ is more explicit, contrasting the decayed remains with the complete human being so fitting to be loved and mourned.

In Joseph Lee’s poems, there is a noticeable variety of form and tone. ‘The Green Grass’ uses some of the techniques of the Scottish ballads to question the purpose of the war and the unending slaughter; ‘The Bullet’ is an epigram that makes the point that indirectly the bullet finds more than one target; and ‘German Prisoners’ is a sonnet in the Shakespearean form dealing with the basic brotherhood of supposed enemies.

Four poems by Ewart Alan MacKintosh may be the finest examples of Scottish First World War poetry. ‘Cha Till MacCruimen’ and ‘Before the Summer’ are based on the idea of a dual vision, of the present reality of young strong regiments marching to the music of the pipes towards the battle and the parallel or future vision of other soldiers, either of other wars or after the battle, suggesting the loss and defeat to come. MacKintosh is using elements of Gaelic culture – the pipes, the MacCrimmon pibroch lament, the idea of second sight revealing the future, the Celtic ideal of martial glory and the historic reality of Highland defeat as at Culloden – to examine the agony of the soldier who knows the true horror of the war and the fate awaiting the innocent regiments, who would rather die with them than survive to see them broken and dead. ‘In Memoriam Private D. Sutherland’ similarly reveals the almost paternal sense of loss felt by the platoon commander when his young charges die; addressed as a kind of letter to inform a father of his son’s death, the poem eloquently compares the situations of father and officer. ‘To a Private Soldier’ stands back slightly from the real agony of the trenches to sound both a note of bitterness and hatred for the makers of war, those who sent the young men to die needlessly and remain unpunished for what they have done. The poem, rather optimistically, suggests that they will be conscience-stricken while still alive and will undergo an eternal punishment hereafter.

Three poems by Charles Hamilton Sorley are of similarly high quality. ‘All the Hills and Vales Along’ seems at first sight to catch a Rupert Brooke note of celebration and exultation at the war but it does not take more than a casual reading to reveal the note of irony undercutting the apparent lyricism. More seriously, the sonnets, ‘To Germany’ and ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead’ examine the themes of future friendship with the enemy and the eternal apartness of the dead.

By contrast with the soldier poets, the poems of the others mentioned earlier express a variety of notes, ranging from the swaggering falseness of Neil Munro’s ‘Hey, Jock, are you glad ye ’listed?’, which the experienced man of the trenches would have recoiled from, and the sentimental kail-yard vision of rural Scotland presented by John Buchan in ‘Home Thoughts From Abroad’, to Violet Jacob’s elegiac perceptions of how war affects a local community and the old mother or father left on a neglected croft (‘Jock, to the First Army’ and ‘The Field by the Lirk O’ the Hill’). Two poems to be especially mentioned are John Buchan’s ‘The Great Ones’ and Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘At the Cenotaph’, which put the whole business of the War in a wider perspective. Buchan echoes Thomas Hardy in his awareness that the war is an irrelevant diversion from the real business of life, symbolised by the unending seasonal work of the farmer. MacDiarmid cynically dismisses the War and the losses sustained in it as meaningless, since war does not change history in the least degree; civilisation depends on the artist rather than the politician and soldier. MacDiarmid restates this theme in ‘Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’, where he rejects any idea of idolising and idealising military courage as it is directly opposed to the preservation of civilised values (an understanding of MacDiarmid’s poem depends on a knowledge of the original ‘Epitaph’ by A.E. Housman).

THE CLASSROOM CONTEXTS

Within the range of these poems, there can be found an underlying unity which would allow a great number of possible selections and groupings for classroom use within the theme of War. There is also a wide diversity of tones and poetic forms that can contribute to a varied study of poetry using these as examples. Here are some suggestions for using the poems which might be useful as starting points for using the texts provided.

A natural way of looking at poems is in terms of the poet who wrote them. Cocker, Lee, MacKintosh and Sorley can each be read and studied as an individual poet of the war; additional poems by each of them will be found in the collection From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945. Thus the poets may emerge as individual writers with their own ways of looking at the experience they shared in common.
Short sequences of poems can be created out of the given material for study as units on their own. For instance, a possible sequence might be: ‘Hey, Jock are Ye Glad Ye ’listed’; ‘Up the Line to Poelkapelle’; ‘The Sniper’; ‘The Bullet’; ‘A Dead Man’; ‘In Memoriam Private D. Sutherland’; ‘Home Thoughts From Abroad’; ‘The Field in the Lirk O’ the Hill’. This sequence allows the consideration of changing attitudes to the war, the horror of death upon soldiers’ families, and the sense of waste. Other sequences can be chosen to highlight different themes visible in the poems.
Comparisons can be made between some of these poems and the better-known English poems of the War. For example, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ can be set alongside Watson Kerr’s ‘From the Line’; and MacKintosh’s ‘To a Private Soldier’ might be read along with one or two of Sassoon’s poems.
The pupils’ reading of other texts might be the springboard into some of these poems. A reading of Sunset Song will lead into the war poems in the context of the change brought about in Ewan Tavendale, or the loss of Chae and Long Rob. Similarly, a reading of the part of William McIlvanney’s Docherty, with the wounding of Mick Docherty and the political awareness the War created in him, will link up with certain poems.
Consideration of recent events in, for instance, the Balkans will allow treatment of some poems, along with other texts drawn from a wider range. The attitudes and experiences are not different in essence from those relating to more modern conflicts.
Some of the poems will provide suitable stimulus for the pupils’ own creative writing at a number of levels within the school.
A number of the poems will provide good exemplars of different poetic forms and structures, and types of Scots and English language, e.g., the sonnet form, verse stanzas in different patterns, Scots of different degrees of richness etc.

Finally, it would be wrong to claim that these poems are being studied because they are better as poems than the war poetry of other cultures and nations; they are here because they are particularly ours as members of the Scottish community and nation. They should not be studied in isolation, because war is an experience that transcends any one nation; equally, they should not be ignored, because they place their own individual gloss on the experience. We have a responsibility to see that the individual voices of the poets and their words assembled under the stress of monumental events are not forgotten and lost to their inheritors.

ROBB, David, ‘Sing til the warld we loo’d’: Alexander Scott’s War Poems’

10 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 35, 2007 |

During his lifetime, it was well known that not only was Alexander Scott (1920–89) a prominent Scottish poet, academic and cultural journalist, but also something of a war hero: ‘MC’ usually appeared after his name in any formal context. As I discovered recently while researching a critical biography of Scott, however, his war experiences were something he rarely talked about, except (sometimes) to close male family members and, even more rarely, to very close friends well into a drinking session. It was a reticence which appeared to have been carried over into his writing, prompting his erstwhile student Margery Palmer McCulloch, for example, to ask at an ASLS annual conference in 1998, ‘Where are Alex Scott’s war poems?’ On the face of it, it is indeed strange that such a committed poet as Scott had apparently little or no verse to show arising out of one of the most intensely lived phases of his life. The much-anthologised ‘Coronach’, of course, is a notable exception.

The matter had been raised earlier by Alan Bold in an article in Chapman in 1979, which elicited, in a characteristically testy letter from Scott, at least part of the explanation for this apparent puzzle.

The reason why I have written so little about the war since it ended is that I wrote and published innumerable poems, articles and stories about it while it was still going on. However, none of this work has been collected, and your unawareness even of its existence has led you far astray.

Despite the hint of blame here, Bold’s ignorance was pardonable. Only if one investigates (in the University of Aberdeen) the locally-based periodical North-East Review (1940–6), which is not to be found in any other library, and also the manuscript notebooks in which Scott systematically recorded his poems (deposited by his family in the National Library only recently), can one discover how true his assertion to Bold actually was. His wartime writing of all kinds – poems, short stories, articles, book reviews, letters – was indeed copious, and much of it directly described his army experiences. There are many poems reflecting his two and a half years in uniform before he saw actual fighting, and even while on active service in north-west Europe after D-Day he wrote when he could and sent his material to his wife for passing on to the periodical editors. Thirteen poems seem to have been written during interludes in the fighting after he landed in France on the afternoon of 6 June 1944. He was wounded during the battle of the Falaise Gap in mid-August and invalided home (where he wrote five more poems), returning to his unit in December in time to participate in the counter-attack against the German offensive in the Ardennes. He won the Military Cross for his actions during the first days of the Battle of the Reichswald in February 1945 and participated in the Rhine crossing, at Rees, in March. 5/7^th Gordons finished their war at Bremerhaven, becoming thereafter part of the army of occupation. Scott, however, was granted early release from the army and returned to undergraduate life in Aberdeen in December 1945.

Why did he not reprint any of this large body of material? His letter to Bold does not imply that he despised it; indeed, it was one of his characteristics throughout his life that he cherished much that he had produced, even when he knew that it was not publishable. Thus, in one academic CV from the 1970s he even listed his first-ever publication, a short story he had written at the age of fourteen and which had been published in The Hotspur (this, too, was kept among his papers throughout his life, and the comic is now with the rest of Scott’s material in the National Library). The bulk of this wartime material, however, is essentially journalism, with no long-term claim on a readership – Scott produced literary and general cultural journalism throughout his life, temperamentally engaged as he usually was with the here-and-now. The result was the paradox that such a driven writer, who was so prickly in justification of everything which came from his pen, left comparatively little, either poetry or prose, which seems addressed to posterity. In the war, Scott’s sense of battle was that it was something which had to be fought, endured and (with luck) survived on the way to a better future. In his numerous literary and academic campaigns in later life, it was as if he took the same view: he was fighting for a cause (essentially, the dominance and then survival of MacDiarmid’s Renaissance prescription for Scottish writing) which made constant demands on his creative energies. Hence his copious journalism, and hence (at least to some extent) the comparative paucity of a purely academic, or poetic, long-term output. And as he discovered in 1944–5, when you complete one battle, you just have to move on to the next – but despite the waste of energy this implies (and, in war, the waste of lives) the process can be viewed as supremely important, nevertheless, if you are striving for a cause. Scott’s journalism may now be of purely historical interest, but he wrote it then with immense commitment.

His poetry, however, always written in an entirely different spirit, was another matter, so that the question – why did he subsequently withhold his wartime verse? – is even more urgent. The answer is that he knew perfectly well that it was not good enough. The war years were crucial to Scott’s development in various ways, not least because this was the period in which he was transformed, as a poet, from a schoolboy Romantic to an adult Modern. During the war, he first became aware of what was happening in contemporary verse, both in its global and domestic Scottish aspects. The example of Eliot and his successors of the 1930s helped Scott break free from the preciousness of his adolescent style and enabled him to find his own harder, sardonic, more brittle voice. And as the war progressed, he discovered MacDiarmid and Soutar so that, after an initial hesitation, his search for his own modern practice brought him to commitment to the Scottish Renaissance and to the use of Scots. His sudden search for a modern poetic voice coincided with the psychological pressures of a war situation, with all its forcing of maturity on the young, and all its imperatives to live life while one can. He knew, however, that one does not really mature as a poet overnight and also that active service is not necessarily the ideal environment to nurture a poetic transformation. As he wrote to his young wife in April 1945:

Not that I have very many illusions about my poetry. Since I joined the Army it has not progressed; I have not had the leisure for the necessary study. Much of what I write now is careless, slack, muddled and wordy. It could not be otherwise.

Nevertheless, the crucial literary commitments were made at this time, his transition from latter-day Romantic to hard-bitten maker simultaneously impelled and retarded by the realities and exigencies of the moment. Looking back from June 1954, when he composed ‘Words for the Warld’, he saw his younger self scrabbling to find guidance in a maze of literary inspirations,

Til the warld itself gaed grab at the scruff o my life,
Shuke me intil a shennachie, skailed frae my ain
New-opened makar’s mou the wale o words.

Even before the war started, while he was a schoolboy, he was writing poems which reflected the sense of coming conflict, and which he referred to, in his autobiography written while an undergraduate, as his ‘war poems’. For example, on 1 September 1939 (the day Germany invaded Poland), he wrote ‘In the Shadow of War’ which begins

I doubt now if these words will ever be read
That I write in the fitful flame of a flickering candle,
With shadows strange on the ceiling and under my eyes,
This first night of September. This may be
The latest night of peace man ever will know.
This morning the Cross of Peace was shattered in twain,
And hell is loose across the world …

For months before this, however, he had been writing poems full of a generalised foreboding, replete with a sense of mortality.

So short a space we laugh and weep,
So short a time we cry and smile,
We love and hate a little while,
Are young, and love: grow old – and sleep …

And when he wrote (Keats-like) about his first readings of Homer, and of Euripides, it had apparently been the battle scenes which had filled his imagination.

Once the war started, however, his student verse was less preoccupied with the war than one might have expected: many of the poems are love poems, in fact, reflecting, no doubt, his actual emotional life. Imagery of war, and explicit references to the conflict, inevitably crop up, of course, and when he entered upon army life in December 1941 the poems express his feelings and observations almost as a diary would, as in ‘On Manoeuvres: Night Guard-Duty.’

For others, fortunate, this night of sweat
Has closed in sleep’s too brief oblivion,
But I must guard the darkness, must await
My slow relief

From D-Day onwards, though, he was in a different world, one where (in the words of the title of the first poem he wrote in Normandy) ‘There’s No Time Now.’ He found time to write eighteen poems, however, though what marks them above all is the near-complete avoidance of descriptions of combat. Poem after poem, written in the lulls between actions, evoke the thoughts and observations arising in those oases of peacefulness, their writing perhaps a way of inhabiting those havens ever more intensely. Thus, his second Normandy poem is ‘The Sleepers’, describing the sleeping soldiers for whom night is precious respite. In ‘Sentries’ he not only describes sentry duty but envisages the entire British army acting as a guard so that people back home can sleep soundly. In some ways, these poems are like letters home – moments of escape and of reconnection with the world left behind (and, with luck, to be returned to), rather than moments of engagement with present horror.

Remember us, for we remember you,
And carry you like treasure in our hearts,
Tokens of all the golden love we knew
Before the war upset our apple-carts
And tumbled us out to lie in the mud and rain
Till thunder passes and time is clear again.

And home these poems went in a small but steady flow. Scott’s continued involvement in the North-East Review was doubtless a major psychological aid in the midst of stress. In a revealing late poem from this group, ‘One More River to Cross’, he writes in the penultimate line, ‘Here I must build a song against my own terror.’ It was a terrifying moment, certainly: this poem is dated 16 March 1945, two days after the rehearsal for the crossing of the Rhine – that immense defensive barrier, more psychological than physical considering the river’s place in Germany’s self-perception – and one week before the actual crossing in which the 51^st Highland Division would play a leading part. The poem describes the journey across Europe he has already made, but instead of the battle-torn landscapes of reality he depicts an empty, eerie dreamscape which he is crossing alone. The campaign is transformed into a literary, rather than literal, journey, Scott focussing on his own inner life rather than on the outward reality with which he was contending.

And this was symptomatic of his whole approach to writing during the war. The two worlds of Scott the soldier and Scott the poet were kept essentially apart. While he was fighting, only in one poem – ‘How Strange It Is’ – and only in one stanza does he fleetingly describe combat:

How strange it is:
All that was strange become so strangely now familiar,
The landscape grey and desolate as the moon,
Littered with ruins,
Shells of houses, husks of trees, the dead
Huddling the earth their grave like broken dolls,
Machineguns chattering shrill hysterical laughter
Over the heaps of rubble and fields the mortars plough,
Horizons plumed with slow funereal smoke
Like the heads of horses dragging a hearse to the tomb,
And through the smoke and under the hammer of guns
Men running and men falling and men still running
Forward forward forward since to hang back is shame.

For Scott, the war and his poetic destiny were mutually opposed, the former merely getting in the way of (and threatening the premature thwarting of) the latter. True war poets have found in the subject matter a means of tapping their deepest creativity, but this was never Scott’s way. Poetry belonged to ‘home’ – his writing while dodging the bullets was merely a way of keeping his hand in, and of staying sane. That sense of an immense boundary, between the familiarity of home, and this dangerous region where everything is strange, is perhaps to be felt in his first mature poem in Scots, ‘Untrue Thomas’, apparently written as, newly recovered from wounds, he rejoined his unit in Belgium in December 1944. At first glance an exercise in the use of Scots and the utilisation of material from the Scottish tradition, the poem can also be read, it seems to me, as an ironic exploration of the unbridgeable imaginative gap between the ‘home front’ and those who must return to the land ‘whaur yirth’s a wonder, / It never needs the graip or plou’ and where ‘the chiels retire afore they’re twenty’.

And what of the period of his post-war poetic maturity? He looked back seldom, and tried to recapture the experience of battle even more seldom. Earlier in the exchange with Alan Bold, he declared (19 February, 1979), ‘My poems about the war are “Coronach”, “The Sodgers”, “The White Devil”, “Twa Images”, “Front Line” and “Rice Price”, all written since ’45.’ Soon after this, in July 1979, he wrote a brief poem describing D-Day, ‘Paradise Attempted’; it is not notably successful and he printed it only once, in Akros (April 1981). Its references to sea-born Aphrodite and to Milton’s goal of justifying the ways of God to men are insufficiently worked out. Yet there is a sense of painful paradox in the poem, embodied in the goddess associated both with love and war: her dualism focuses the proclivities of mankind for both loving and killing.

Half-drowned, half-dead,
To kill to live, to live by killing,
To cry in the blinding blood,
To blindly cry and
Sing.

The hints of autobiography here are not obvious, but Scott may well be recalling his own near-drowning as he stepped off the landing-craft, and also the later slaying of his second-in-command with a bullet to the head, a wound which did not kill instantly. Reference to himself emerges more obviously towards the end of the poem:

We killed men,
They killed us,
All of us loving the world,
All Aphrodite,
All dead
Except this killer who killed to create and
Sing.

The poems he listed to Bold do indeed all refer to the war, and the slaying of his comrade is surely the source of the wartime image in ‘Twa Images’, one of the few other poems in which he actually describes combat. Yet even here, and in all the other poems he mentions, his real concern is with the present contents of his mind, and his attempts to come to terms with what he remembers. Even ‘The White Devil’, with its account of the solitary wounded soldier hoping for rescue before he succumbs, is not really an attempt to recreate wartime experience: it is a fiction drawing, no doubt, on his recollections of his own wounding (not that he had been left to languish, but the fierceness of the fight had caused a substantial delay in the evacuation of the wounded) and also of the bitter winter of the Ardennes offensive. Yet his real concern in this poem is the constant one which underlies all his later ‘war poems’, even ‘Coronach’: his present need to reconcile the vastly different sides of his own personality and experience – Scott the warrior and Scott the poet. The difficulty this complex and dynamic man had in integrating the different aspects of his being marked his life from start to finish.

War poetry

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