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 david goldie

And sometimes he bellows, ‘Hullo, John Bull!’

AndI hollers, ‘German swine!’

And sometimes we both lose our bloomin’ rag,

And blaze all along the line.^29

Just as Kipling had used dialect—especially cockney, Irish, and Scots—as a
rhetorical device to emphasize cross-cultural, cross-class imperial consensus, so
too Lee employs a range of dialect voices to similar ends, especially in his second
wartime collection,Work-A-Day Warriors. In this volume there are many more
poemsincockneythaninScots.Buttherearealso,inpoemssuchas‘War,Some
Reflections by Corporal Richard Crew of the Canadians’, ‘Saint Patrick’s Day in the
Mornin’: The Love Lilt of Corporal Patrick Mullohoy of the Connaught Rangers’,
‘The Australian’, and ‘Tik, Johnnie!’, a range of voices and subject-matters that all
seem designed to show the harmonic relations within and between the white and
brown races of the Imperial Army—an impression reinforced by Lee’s illustrations
for the volume.
What may be going on in this movement of Lee’s poetry from the influence of
Burns to that of Kipling is a realignment of allegiance. In moving his primary idiom
from demotic Scots to a range of demotic Englishes, Lee is registering a common
effect of war service among many poets: the broadening of sympathy beyond the
local and even the national. A poem which perhaps offers the clearest instance of
this is ‘Ancestry’, fromWork-A-Day Warriors—a poem that takes him a long way
from the Dundee ofTales o’ Our Town:

I am one with the ancient Roman,

pressing on the great phalanx;

I am one with the Spartan, the Trojan,

and the Grecian’s steel-clad ranks;

They with their Horse, Heaven-sent,

and I with my earth-born ‘tanks’;

As I move to attack, with my kit on my back,

And my bombs and my steel-tipped gun,

They and I are One!^30

This might be seen to anticipate the attempts of David Jones inIn Parenthesis(1937)
to place the experiences of the war in a meaningful, long historical perspective.^31
But whereas Jones would use this perspective to construct new myths of Welsh and
British nationhood, Lee appears to employ it in the opposite way. The ancestry that
Lee proclaims in this poem is grounded not in a common heritage but in a shared
experience: his proper subject is not the expression of the Scottish experience of
war so much as the expression of war itself.

(^29) Lee, ‘Tommy and Fritz’, ibid. 78. (^30) Lee, ‘Ancestry’, inWork-a-Day Warriors, 16–18.
(^31) See also David Jones, ‘Art in Relation to War’, inThe Dying Gaul(London: Faber, 1978), 123–66.