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 david goldie

And all our joy is pain,

ThankGod upon the Downland

We’rechildrenonceagain.^43

In the year that he went up to Oxford, however, Mackintosh wrote ‘Mallaig Bay’, in
which the emphasis is markedly different. Now, the South Downs of childhood are
rejected for a more bracing and challenging landscape:

I am sickened of the south and the kindness of the downs,

And the weald that is a garden all the day.

And I’m weary for the islands and the Scuir that always frowns,

And the sun rising over Mallaig Bay.

I am sickened of the pleasant down and pleasant weald below,

And the meadows where the little breezes play,

And I’m weary for the rain-cloud over stormy Coolin’s brow,

And the wind blowing into Mallaig Bay.

I am sickened of the people that have ease in what they earn,

The happy folk who have forgot to pray,

And I’m weary for the faces that are sorrowful and stern,

And the boats coming into Mallaig Bay.^44

The Highland world portrayed here, then, becomes the signifier of a more strenuous
way to the truth. It is recognizably a turn from the picturesque to the sublime; from
a simple reassuring ideal of southern beauty to a more exquisite northern one in
which awe and fear and sorrow are intertwined.^45
When it came to war, then, Mackintosh’s choice of a Scottish regiment was per-
hapsunsurprising.Hewas,astheevidenceofhispoetryandthefactsofhis biography
suggest, still feeling his way tentatively towards a defining adult experience. In this
situation, the combination of Celticism and military struggle was, no doubt,
extremely alluring—as it was to many romantically inclined young Anglo-Scots
and Englishmen. Mackintosh would, tellingly, reveal a little of this sentiment later
in his poem ‘The Volunteer’:

I took my heart from the fire of love,

Molten and warm not yet shaped clear,

And tempered it to steel of proof

Upon the anvil-block of fear.^46

(^43) Mackintosh, ‘Return’, quoted in Colin Campbell and Rosalind Green,Can’t Shoot a Man with
a Cold: Lt. E. Alan Mackintosh MC 1893–1917, Poet of the Highland Division(Glendaruel: Argyll,
2004), 23. 44
45 Mackintosh, ‘Mallaig Bay’, inA Highland Regiment(London: John Lane, 1917), 59.
In this regard it is perhaps possible to see the allure of an austere, character-forming Scotland as
analogous to the contemporary British fascination with the polar extremities that is admirably outlined
in Francis Spufford,I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination(London: Faber, 1997).
(^46) Mackintosh, ‘The Volunteer’, inA Highland Regiment, 47.