‘death’s proletariat’ and women caught up in world events that would bring troops from Canada,
Australia,South Africa, India, and the remotest parts of the United Kingdom
to fight together side by side. Looking back to the poets of this time, Hamish
Henderson remembered that he, like them, ‘grew for war’. Henderson was four
years younger than Fraser—‘I was eighteen at the time of the Munich crisis, and
nineteen when war was declared’—and, looking back from 1987, he reckoned that
the Battle of El Alamein ‘was one of the major formative events of [his] life’:
The citizen army which was gradually built up in the Middle East to face Rommel was a
literate army, its soldiers the beneficiaries of the 1918 Education Act. In this it certainly
differed greatly from the set-up a quarter ofa century earlier which their fathers had
known. In the First World War the voice of the ordinary swaddy was the soldier’s folk-song,
documented in collections such as John Brophy and Eric Partridge’sThe Long Trail,and
although the Second World War also produced quite a copious folk-song, the striking new
thing was an amazing flowering of written poetry, some of it of quite a high standard. And
of this poetry, a good deal of the most interesting undoubtedly emerged from the historic
crossroads of the Middle East.^6
Henderson was to make a major contribution to this output and was himself
the anonymous author of songs and barrack-room ballads that satirized army life
from the perspective of the ‘ordinary swaddy’. In fact, in 1947 he edited a bawdy
collection of soldiers’ poems (including three of his own) asBallads of World
War II.^7 Nor was he alone in this endeavour, for a key anthology of army poetry
calledOasishad been published in Cairo in 1943. Henderson remembered that
the collection was produced by ‘three volunteer editors whose highest rank was
corporal’, and went on to observe that ‘Cairo saw an astonishing proliferation of
poetry magazines and booklets during the war; others wereCitadel,Orientations
andPersonal Landscape.’^8 The proliferation was indeed remarkable, for theOasis
editors had to choose from more than 3,000 poems submitted by 800 contributors.^9
Looking back on such work forty years later, one of those editors remembered ‘a
literate and aware generation’ and reflected on the ‘grass roots nature of World War
(^6) Hamish Henderson, ‘The Poetry of War in the Middle East, 1939–1945’, inAlias MacAlias:
Writings on Songs, Folk and Literature(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), 295.
(^7) See Henderson to Hugh MacDiarmid, n.d. [1947], inThe Armstrong Nose: Selected Letters of
Hamish Henderson, ed. Alec Finlay (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), 13.
(^8) Henderson, ‘Poetry of War in the Middle East, 1939–1945’, 295.
(^9) These three soldier-editors were Victor Selwyn, David Burk, and the South African poet Denis
Saunders. In 1976 Selwyn founded the Salamander Oasis Trust as a registered charity to publish and
archive poems and diaries from the Second World War. An advertisement for such material produced
the Poetry London editionReturn to Oasis(1980), which included material from the original wartime
volume. This anthology of known and unknown poets was so successful that it was followed byThe
Schools Oasis(1982) andFrom Oasis into Italy(1983), the Everyman DentPoems of the Second World
War(1985), andMore Poems of the Second World War(1989). Finally, a selection from all these
volumes appeared asThe Voice of War(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). Victor Selwyn, MBE, died
in 2005.