roderick watson
of [his] preoccupation with [his] own private troubles’.^43 Nevertheless,MacLean
continued to work on the collection while he was recovering in hospital from the
wounds that sent him home from the War with shattered feet, helped by Douglas
Young, with whom he had kept in touch since his student days in Edinburgh.
(Young had introduced him to MacDiarmid then.) In hospital he began to remove
some of the lyrics of more personal complaint, to reveal the leaner and more
universalized sequence that was eventually published in 1943.
It was the clarity of the desert itself that led MacLean to write about his
experiences in his most direct and effective war poetry. In ‘Dol an Iar’/‘Going
Westward’ he goes ‘westwards in the Desert|with my shame on my shoulders,|that
I was made a laughing-stock|since I was as my people were’.^44 He reflects on the
far-flung nature of the conflict from the bombing of Glasgow and Prague, from
Guernica to Belsen; yet in a moment of insight akin to Henderson’s vision of the
common soldier’s lot, he recognizes that ‘there is no rancour in my heart|against
the hardy soldiers of the Enemy,|but the kinship that there is among|men in
prison on a tidal rock.’ Nevertheless, ‘this is the struggle not to be avoided,|the
sore extreme of human-kind’, and he will find renewed strength by calling on ‘the
big men of Braes’, and ‘the heroic Raasay MacLeods’ from the very ancestry that
hewasoncemadetofeelashamedof.Thepoemendsonarhetoricalquestion,
but not without an ambivalent note called up by the word ‘ruinous’: ‘the men
of my name—who were braver|when their ruinous pride was kindled?’ Indeed,
that same tradition of Highland pride is subtly called into question once again in
the poem ‘Curaidhean’/‘Heroes’ in which he remembers an English soldier who
died at his post: ‘A poor little chap with chubby cheeks|and knees grinding each
other,|pimply unattractive face—|garment of the bravest spirit.’ The poem ends:
Chunnaic mi gaisgeach mor ́ a Sasuinn, ́
fearachan bochd nach laigheadh suil air;`
cha b’ Alasdaira Gleanna Garadh— ́
is thug e gal beag air mo shuilean.`
I saw a great warrior of England,
apoormanikinonwhomnoeyewouldrest;
no Alasdair of Glen Garry;
and he took a little weeping to my eyes.^45There is no irony in this praise, except perhaps to reflect on the inadequacy of all
such vaunting, and on the vanity that lies behind the ‘big men’ and the colourful
heroes of battlefield legend. The poet’s understatement sees the anonymity of
modern war in a plainer light, for ‘Word came to him in the bullet shower|that
he should be a hero briskly,|and he was that while he lasted|butitwasn’tmuch
(^43) MacLean to Hugh MacDiarmid, 15 Mar. 1942, Edinburgh University Library, MS 2954.13.
(^44) MacLean, ‘Dol an Iar’/‘Going Westward’, inFrom Wood to Ridge, 205.
(^45) MacLean, ‘Curaidhean’/‘Heroes’, ibid. 210.