was there a scottish war literature? dealing with elevated or serious themes. While the great majority of the poems in
Taleso’ Our Townwere written in the dialect of Dundee, a minority—the ones that
dealt with serious historical ideas, such as ‘The Greys at Waterloo’ and ‘St Mary’s
Tower’, and lyrical poems of memory, like ‘Compensations’ and ‘David Macrae:
In Memoriam’—were written in the more orthodox register of Edwardian poetic
English. The poems ofBallads of BattleandWork-A-Day Warriors, in contrast,
are almost wholly in English, even when they deal with explicitly Scottish themes.
Where the presiding genius of the earlier collection was Burns, the background
voices that can be heard here are the more contemporary ones of British imperial
poetry. One influence, perhaps not surprisingly, given Lee’s nautical background,
is Henry Newbolt. Poems such as ‘1815–1915: One Hundred Years Ago To-day’,
‘A Ballad of Dead Loves’, and ‘Requiem’ (When the Last Post is blown,|And the
last volley fired,|When the last sod is thrown,|And the last Foe retired,|And
thy last bivouac is made under the ground—|Soldier, sleep sound!’^26 )trumpeta
Newbolt-like imperial theme and concern with martial history, while others such
as ‘The Sea’ and ‘When the Armada Sailed from Spain’ compare fairly directly with
the sentiments and style of the poems in Newbolt’sAdmirals All(1897).
Arguably, though, the major voice underlying Lee’s martial verse is that of
Rudyard Kipling. Again, this is hardly surprising, given the omnipresence of
Kipling’s influence on the British popular poetry of the time. When Lee writes
about the day-to-day life of the trenches, he lapses into the distinctive soldier’s argot
of Kipling’sBarrack-Room Balladsand the stories ofSoldiers Three.Poemslike‘The
Penitent’ that deal with the forgivable recidivist tendencies of the Tommy, or ‘Pick
and Spade’, ‘Carrying Party’, and ‘Stand-to!’ (‘I was just a-dreamin’ of ’Ome Sweet
’Ome,|A-top of a fevver bed’^27 ) offer the reader, in a characteristic Kiplingesque
mockney, a reassuringly familiar view of cheerful military stoicism in the face of
military routine. Others, like ‘Piou-Piou: The British Tommy Atkins to the French’
and ‘Tommy and Fritz’, sound a recognizable note of manly admiration for the
qualities of friend and foe alike. In ‘Piou-Piou’ the foreigner is, as in Kipling, an
object first of comedy and then of admiration:
Your trousies is a funny red,
Your tunic is a funny blue,
Your cap sets curious on your ’ead—
And yet, by Gawd, your ’eart sits true,
Piou-piou!^28‘Tommy and Fritz’ sounds a similarly Kiplingesque note in considering the merits
of the enemy:
He hides behind his sand-bag,
AndIstandbacko’mine;(^26) Lee, ‘Requiem’, ibid. 101. (^27) Lee, ‘Stand-to!’, ibid. 25. (^28) Lee, ‘Piou-Piou’, ibid. 84.