The Thursday Post: A Foughten Field

Reeve 039799 by Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health, under a Creative Commons licence

One hundred years ago, on the 25th September 1915, British troops struggled over the top and faced the German lines in the first engagement of the Battle of Loos. It was the most Scottish of all the great battles of the First World War; most of the battalions involved were Scots, some 30,000 Scottish soldiers were involved altogether, and there wasn’t a corner of Scotland left untouched by loss.

The story of Piper Laidlaw, urging the troops on with his bagpipes on that first morning is famous; perhaps less well-known is the involvement of several of Scotland’s poets. Neil Munro’s son was killed; Bagpipe Ballads is the name he gave to the series of poems he wrote then, in which the sad realities of war, as well as its humour, reflect the pipe music themes of the Highland culture he knew so well.

Come awa’, Jock, and cock your bonnet,
        Swing your kilt as best ye can;
Auld Dumbarton's Drums are dirlin',
        Come awa’, Jock, and kill your man!

The stirring rhythm of Munro’s ‘Hey, Jock, Are Ye Glad Ye ‘Listed?’ seems to reflect the heady enthusiasm of the early days of the war, a year before, but it is recorded that levels of morale were still high before and during Loos; divisions of Kitchener’s New Army joined Regular Army troops for the first time, keen to put into practice all that they had learned during their year of training. Ian Hay – the pen name of John Hay Beith – was one of the ‘First Hundred Thousand’, which epithet he took for the title of the collection of good-humoured articles on life at the front, written by him as ‘Junior Sub’. He also wrote the poem ‘K(1)’:

We do not deem ourselves A1,
We have no past: we cut no dash:
Nor hope, when launched against the Hun,
To raise a more than moderate splash.

But yesterday, we said farewell
To plough; to pit; to dock; to mill.
For glory? Drop it! Why? Oh, well –
To have a slap at Kaiser Bill.

(And have a slap at the Kaiser he did, during those weeks, and was awarded an MC for bravery.)

As Hay put it, Scotland’s loss at Loos was personal. Every village, every town, could claim a name on the casualty lists, but Dundee suffered most of all, as six battalions of the Black Watch – Dundee’s local regiment – were deployed. Sergeant Joe Lee, one of the ‘Fighter Writers’ in the 1/4th Black Watch, survived Loos and the rest of the war, and was one of Scotland’s best-known and loved war poets and artists, sending back to Dundee poems and sketches describing  the soldiers’ life with much empathy, and in living detail. Though he was often humorous and Kipling-esque, his more serious poems confront death:

‘I mind o’ a field, a foughten field,
           Where the bluid ran routh and red  
           Now I am dead.’

  ‘I mind o’ a field, a stricken field,
          And a waeful wound that bled –
           Now I am dead.’

They turned them on their backs again,
           As when their souls had sped,
           And nothing further said.

      ………………………………….

The dead spake together last night,
           And each to the other said,
           ‘Why are we dead?’

(from ‘The Green Grass’)

On the last real day of the battle, 13th October, the most promising poet of the war – the most promising of his generation – was killed. Charles Hamilton Sorley was only just 20 but had already written vivid and perceptive letters about the war, and poems of a startling originality. The following was found in his kit after his death:

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, 'They are dead.' Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.'
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Lizzie MacGregor

Beneath Troubled Skies: poems of Scotland at war 1914–1918, edited by Lizzie MacGregor is published by Polygon on 11 November.