david goldie
his peers, tends to use standard-English lyric forms for poems of intimacy—as in
themoving ‘To Sylvia’, ‘Farewell: To Sergeant H. Fraser and L.-Sergeant G. M’Kay’,
and ‘From Home’—while employing a more self-consciously Scottish idiom for
poems of exhortation and humour. This suggests that the ‘Scottish’ persona of
several of his poems is only one of several available to him; that it is a rhetorical
function as much as a pledge of identity.
It should be noted, though, that this is not necessarily a bad thing for Scottish
poetry. While it threatens any claims such a poetry might wish to make to
‘authenticity’—an arguably spurious contention in any case—it also opens up
its literary and cultural resources to the use of others. The general myth of the
Scottish soldier was a very productive one in the First World War. Many young
Englishmen as well as Scots were drawn to serve in Scottish regiments by the allure
of the Highland martial tradition, and British culture more generally was happy to
accept the Scottish regiments, not just as colourful additions to the war effort but as
central to—and perhaps even typical of—it. For young men of many backgrounds,
as one observer would put it, ‘the glamour of the kilt was irresistible’.^50 The son
of an Anglo-Scottish London publisher like John Murray might choose a Scottish
regiment, but so too did the son of the Englishman J. M. Dent. English publishers
pushed out histories of the Highland regiments for the general reader, while crusty
old literary campaigners like Sir William Watson acclaimed ‘the spirit perfervid
of the heroic Scot’ with its ‘ancient native prowess unforgot,|Valour undrooped,
and manhood undecayed’.^51 The makers of the pioneering documentary filmThe
Battle of the Somme(1916) actively sought out kilted soldiers, and its distributors
were keen that it be screened with bagpipe accompaniment.^52 The extent of this
lionization of the Highland regiments was so strong that it prompted one rather
jaded Englishman working in the Scottish book trade to complain to thePublishers’
Circularthat the English were tending to ‘make altogether too much fuss about the
kilted regiments’.^53 When British soldiers—and later the British population more
generally—needed a sentimental New Year song, they might turn to Burns’s ‘Auld
Lang Syne’. C. E. Montague would quote Burns approvingly inDisenchantment
(1922), taking a fragment from ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as the book’s epigraph, and
using Burns as one of his exemplars of the British virtues of uncomplicatedness,
tolerance, and good humour shown by the ordinary soldiers in the war.^54 Wilfred
Owen, similarly, found no difficulty in employing a Scottish perspective, as when
(^50) From a Cameron Highlander’s diary, quoted in Lieutenant-Colonel J. Stewart and John Buchan,
The Fifteenth (Scottish) Division 1914–1919 51 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1926), 3.
Sir William Watson, ‘To a Scottish Friend’ (1915), inSelected Poems of Sir William Watson
(London: Thornton Butterworth, 1928), 224.
(^52) See S. D. Badsey, ‘Battle of the Somme: British War Propaganda’,Historical Journal of Film, Radio
and Television, 3/2 (1983), 109.
(^53) Henry R. Brabrook, ‘If It’s Scotch It’s Scotch; If It’s English It’s—British’,Publishers’Circular,
29 July 1916, 89.
(^54) C. E. Montague,Disenchantment(London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), 6–12.