was there a scottish war literature? The Scottish poetry written for more overtly propagandistic purposes shares
manyof the emphases of Lee’s work. Several Scottish writers operated in the
characteristic semi-official capacity favoured by the War Propaganda Bureau at
Wellington House, and later the Ministry of Information, in support of the war
effort. Among them were John Buchan and R. W. Campbell—both independent
writers, best known as popular novelists, who also happened to be employed by the
British military establishment. Campbell’s series ofSpud Tamsonbooks sold well
during the war, and offered a reassuring portrait of Roman Catholic integration
within the Scottish regiments, as well as Scottish integration into the larger British
effort.^32 Buchan was the author of the huge and much acclaimed serialNelson’s
History of the War(1915–19), as well as the creator of the Scots-South African
agent Richard Hannay, hero ofThe Thirty-Nine Steps(1915),Greenmantle(1916),
andMr Standfast(1919). Both were also active, popularizing poets. Campbell, in
particular, followed Lee in celebrating Scots wartime achievement in the mode of
Kipling and British Imperial poetry. His ‘Abdul the Sniper’, ‘Our Football Fools’,
and ‘The Lowland Fuzzies’, for example, all trade in immediately recognizable
Kipling tropes. Campbell is even willing, in ‘The Border Breed’, to call on his master
directly, invoking ‘the style of Kipling, the touch that Tennyson made,|To write of
the Border gallants who served in a Scots Brigade’.^33
While Campbell preferred, like most Scottish popular poets, to employ standard
English in preference to dialect Scots, Buchan was inclined to experiment in the
dialect of his childhood in the Scottish Borders. The influence of Kipling was very
strong in his fiction, but Buchan was more self-conscious about the construction
of a poetry that drew on the Scottish ballad tradition from which writers like
Lee had begun to move away.^34 Buchan was in some ways a typicalemigr ́ e ́
Scot—as he makes clear in his autobiography, his passion for Scottish culture had
developed fully only after he had left the country.^35 But once developed, that passion
manifested itself—as it had in the cases of his exemplars Burns and Scott—in the
collection and writing of traditional Scots dialect poetry. HisThe Northern Muse: An
Anthology of Scots Vernacular Poetry(1924) would give an important impetus to the
post-war Scottish literary renaissance, kick-started in 1920 with the publication of
the first series of Hugh MacDiarmid’s anthology,Northern Numbers.ButBuchan’s
dialect poetry of the war, published inPoems, Scots and English(1917), remains
tied to the pious, rural Scotland of sentimental Victorian poetry. Whereas the
narrative prose voice of both his historical fiction and his ‘shocker’ popular fiction
is immaculately urbane, even cosmopolitan, his vernacular poetic voice is more
(^32) See R. W. Campbell,Private Spud Tamson(Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1915) and
Sergeant Spud Tamson, VC(London: Hutchinson, 1918).
(^33) R. W. Campbell, ‘The Border Breed’, inThe Making of Micky McGhee: And Other Stories in Verse
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1916), 53. 34
35 Kipling was, of course, influenced in his own popular poetry by the Scots Border ballads.
See John Buchan,Memory Hold-the-Door(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), 80–1.