roderick watson
without asking us
whichwas better or worse.^47MacLean’s ironic reference to ‘Election’ takes the poet back to his early upbringing
in the Free Church, with its Calvinist emphasis on the ‘elect’ as those who are
already saved—a doctrine he resisted even as a boy. In a letter to Douglas Young
in 1941, he recalled his sense of injustice at a faith in which so many are born to be
inevitably damned, and he reflected that ‘perhaps my obsession with the ‘‘cause’’ of
the unhappy, the unsuccessful, the oppressed comes ultimately from this’.^48
In the barrenness of the desert MacLean, like Henderson, can indeed confront
larger causes than those of the immediate conflict. Nor was he alone in this wider
sense of human life and social injustice, for it is also the characteristic position of his
fellow Gael, George Campbell Hay. If MacLean and Henderson have compassion
for the German dead, Hay was to be terribly haunted by the sufferings of the native
Arab population, caught up in another culture’s war and openly despised by both
sides. In fact, Hay’s hatred of what he saw as English racism and imperialism and his
strong Scottish nationalist sympathies had led him to appeal against conscription
as a conscientious objector, and when his appeal failed, he took to the hills of his
native Argyll to escape arrest.
Hay was not alone among Scots writers in resisting the War, although each had
his own and different reasons. The novelist Robin Jenkins and the poets George
Bruce and Norman MacCaig expressed profoundly held moral objections to the
taking of life and were accepted as conscientious objectors—although MacCaig
had to serve a short prison sentence for refusing to take civilian work that directly
supported the military effort. Edwin Morgan had felt the same, before accepting
service in the Royal Army Medical Corps. On the other hand, Douglas Young
refused conscription in order to raise a legal argument about the sovereignty of
Scotland and the precise status of the 1707 Treaty of Union. He made his political
point but—not surprisingly—lost the case and served a term in jail.^49
The reluctance of what Fraser saw as his ‘unlucky generation’ to give way to
expressions of patriotic fervour is hardly surprising after the horror of the Great War
and the economic and spiritual depressions that followed it. C. Day Lewis caught
the spirit of the times (at least in his circle) with his poem about defending ‘the bad
against the worse’ when asked to speak for freedom by a capitalist establishment
notable only for its folly and greed.^50 Socialist disaffection was even more marked
in Scotland, where the post-war decline of heavy industry, urban decay, and mass
unemployment had reached truly crisis levels in the 1930s. Following from John
(^47) MacLean, ‘Latha Foghair’/‘An Autumn Day’, ibid. 215.
(^48) MacLean, quoted inD`ain do Eimhir, 141.
(^49) For his own account of this affair, see Douglas Young,Chasing an Ancient Greek(London: Hollis
and Carter, 1950), ch. 10, esp. pp. 56–66.
(^50) C. Day Lewis, ‘Where are the War Poets?’, inCollected Poems of C. Day Lewis(London: Jonathan
Cape with Hogarth Press, 1954), 228.