was there a scottish war literature? Waterloo. Similarly, ‘The Red Cross Heroines’ by ‘A. P. of Dundee’ (‘The Praise
ofTommy Atkins is singing in the air,|The plaudits of the Red Cross nurse are
ringing everywhere’) has the stilted quality of much Edwardian popular poetry.
‘Tae Scotsmen’ by ‘G. M. C. of Cowdenbeath’ sets out to strike a national tone in
its use of the vernacular, but it too cannot escape the content and form of what F. S.
Flint would describe as the ‘tumpty-tum of hurdy-gurdy verses’ that characterized
British Edwardian popular poetry:^20
Ay, here the Scotsman’s made it plain
That the Kaiser’s men can never drain
Or sap the blood o’ freedom’s vein
Frae plucky Scotty.This tendency for popular vernacular poetry to echo, or even give itself over
wholesale to, the dominant style of English martial poetry can be seen in the work
of thePeople’s Journal’s most celebrated poet, Joseph Lee.^21 Lee’s formation was
quite different from the poets discussed so far. Dundee-born, he had left school
aged 14 and had pursued an adventurous and chequered career—not unlike that of
W. H. Davies, Patrick MacGill, or Robert Service—which included several voyages
as a casual seaman and a year as a cowpuncher in Canada. By the time war broke
out, he had settled into a career in popular journalism and was a news editor at
thePeople’s Journal. In spite of this senior position and his age (38 years), Lee
enlisted in the ranks of the local regiment, the Black Watch. He served in France
and Flanders with its 4th Battalion before, in 1917, accepting a commission and
serving with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Lee had, in 1910, published a collection,
Poems: Tales o’ Our Town,that was characterized by a humorous, boisterously
democratic tone plainly modelled on Burns and the ballads. During the war he
continued to write poems for the Dundee papers, and published two collections,
Ballads of Battle(1916) andWork-A-Day Warriors(1917). These contain a number
of moving lyrics alongside many humorous observations of trench life, in which
can be seen a number of continuities with his earlier poetry. What are more
interesting, however, are the differences that appear as a consequence of his war
experience. For one thing, his poems become shorter and less expansive. This may
be due simply to the demands on his time made by war, but it might also be
seen as characteristic of a wider contemporary British movement from Edwardian
orotundity to Imagistic concision. The poems ofTales o’ Our Townhad often taken
a loose narrative or comic form, dealing in a free-wheeling way with historical
incident or folk observation. They were often entertaining and skilfully wrought, as
in the humorous satire on Dundee politics of ‘The Waukrife Wyverns’:
(^20) F. S. Flint, ‘The Appreciation of Poetry’ (1940), quoted in J. B. Harmer,Victory in Limbo: Imagism
1908–1917(London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 17.
(^21) For a useful account of Lee’s career, and his great popularity, see Bob Burrows,Fighter Writer:
The Eventful Life of Sergeant Joe Lee, Scotland’s Forgotten War Poet(Derby: Breedon Books, 2004).