‘death’s proletariat’ own love for the fishing communities of Loch Fyne. But the Scottish section stalled
afterbarely 200 lines, and the poem was laid aside until rediscovered and published
in 1982. Hay did write the epilogue, however, which is a bitter passage on ‘An Duine
agus an Cogadh’/‘Man and War’, in which he reflects that ‘A world apart is each son
of man,|a living world in himself is every person.’^57 And with a properly Highland
sense of genealogy he imagines that the chain of generations is alive in each of us,
so that the voice of a man long dead ‘will be heard,|when the grandson of the
grandson whom he never saw is speaking’. All men are ‘storehouses’ of such links,
containing gems and rubbish, ‘ancient heirlooms virtues and vices’. The poem’s
last lines are a howl of anguish at the scale of the loss when Mokhtˆar and Dougall
are united in the democracy of death:
Two complex priceless worlds
were blotted out forever before they had attained
the fullness of their being...
Murder of the dead, murder of the children
never begotten—the end of two worlds.Hay was haunted by the end of many more such worlds when he witnessed the
bombardment of Bizerta. As the main seaport of Tunis under French colonial rule,
this ancient city (founded by the Phoenicians around 1000bc) was strategically vital
to the retreating Germans who held it as their last access to the sea. After the Allied
break-out at El Alamein, Bizerta became a vital staging post towards the invasion of
Sicily, and the British and American forces directed all their effort against the city
in April and May 1943. On sentry duty, miles away, Hay saw the silent flickering
blaze that marked the work of the bombers and inspired one of the finest poems of
the conflict—not least because it marks the true nature and the true cost of ‘total
war’ from London to Berlin and Tokyo:
C’ainm nochd a th’orra,
na sraidean bochda anns an sgeith gach uinneag`
a lachsraichean ’s a deatach,
a sradagan is sgreadail a luchd thuinidh,
is taigh air thaigh ga reubadh,
am broinn a cheile am br` uchdadh toit’ a’ tuiteam?`
Is co a-nochd tha ’g atach`
am Bas a theachd gu grad ’nan cainntibh uile,`
no a’ spairn measg chlach is shailthean`
air bhainidh a’ gairm air cobhair, is nach cluinnear?`
Co—nochdaph` `aigheas
seann ch`ısabhaisteach na fala cumant?`
What is their name to night,
the poor streets where every window spews(^57) Hay, ‘Mochtar is Dughall’/‘Mokht ar and Dougall’, ibid. 159.ˆ