Tragedy and comedy of the tartan in the trenches
Friday, 31 August 2007
John Lloyd
THE FLOWERS OF
THE FOREST:
Scotland and the
Great War
by Trevor Royle
Birlinn $50/£25, 320 pages
On the penultimate page of his fine and unsentimental account of Scotland's contribution to, and effects from, the war of 1914-18, Trevor Royle writes: "In the majority of the letters and diaries written by the young men who marched off to war, the reader has to search long and hard to find comments which express any kind of nationalist sentiment ... they fought for their country, the United Kingdom, and for the king who ruled it."
It is as well that the revelation was saved for the end, for placed at the beginning it might have prompted a question as to the point of his careful account, The Flowers of the Forest. These were Scots soldiers who fought and died for the same reasons and in much the same way as their English, Welsh and Irish counterparts.
But the Scots, often concerned to mark their differences from each other (highlanders against lowlanders, Glaswegians against Edinburghers, bourgeois students against recruits from the Glasgow slums), did express a national sentiment distinct from that of the English. Much of this was due to the reputation of the reckless Highland regiments. When Scots, still in kilts, took part in the football games that sprang up between the trenches on the first Christmas, the Germans were curious to see if the no underwear reputation was true and were shown that it was. But the "kilted ladies from Hell" were also, as that other journalist-cum-military-historian, John Keegan, has remarked, more "bloody minded" than their British comrades.
They were thrown into many of the war's killing fields. They won a little more than their proportionate share of Victoria Crosses. They suffered probably a little more than their share of casualties. And they had a few more than their share of conscientious objectors, produced by a more active nonconformism that included pacifism, and a more militant socialism that refused to take part in imperialist-capitalist wars.
These men did not see this hideous struggle through our eyes. They were concerned to be stalwart. One officer, writing of his regiment after a fierce battle, said it had recovered its "devil-may-care" attitude: this was not an upper-class twit's bravado, but a perky stoicism that found echoes, at least early on, in all ranks. It produced a kind of gallows - or machine gun humour: "God a' Michty," a sergeant was heard exhorting his troops to go over the top, "Ye canna a' be killed!"
Few greater contrasts between contemporary and future reputations are offered than that of the army's commander-in-chief, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, a scion of the whisky family. Some of his later unpopularity stemmed from the assassination of his reputation in the memoirs of David Lloyd George, prime minister in the later war years, who wished to have him removed. Popular with his troops, Haig later became, as Royle writes, "a shorthand description for the entire general staff - red-tabbed aristocratic blimps who never visited the front lines".
Royle comes down on his side, writing that, as Haig's often anguished diary shows, he was no callous butcher; he was frequently in the trenches; most importantly, by the time he became commander-in-chief in 1915 the shape of the trench-based war of attrition was already set and he had to fight the war as he found it. Ultimately, he wore the Germans down to a quite sudden defeat in November 1918: in that wearing down, perhaps 100,000 of his fellow Scots perished.
It is a tale to which the wild and mournful skirl of the bagpipes would lend itself. So used are we to seeing the affair as a vast tragedy that we can see little else. Royle has the narrative skill to let us glimpse it as it was endured by those caught in its coils.
..............................
FT Syndication Service
THE FLOWERS OF
THE FOREST:
Scotland and the
Great War
by Trevor Royle
Birlinn $50/£25, 320 pages
On the penultimate page of his fine and unsentimental account of Scotland's contribution to, and effects from, the war of 1914-18, Trevor Royle writes: "In the majority of the letters and diaries written by the young men who marched off to war, the reader has to search long and hard to find comments which express any kind of nationalist sentiment ... they fought for their country, the United Kingdom, and for the king who ruled it."
It is as well that the revelation was saved for the end, for placed at the beginning it might have prompted a question as to the point of his careful account, The Flowers of the Forest. These were Scots soldiers who fought and died for the same reasons and in much the same way as their English, Welsh and Irish counterparts.
But the Scots, often concerned to mark their differences from each other (highlanders against lowlanders, Glaswegians against Edinburghers, bourgeois students against recruits from the Glasgow slums), did express a national sentiment distinct from that of the English. Much of this was due to the reputation of the reckless Highland regiments. When Scots, still in kilts, took part in the football games that sprang up between the trenches on the first Christmas, the Germans were curious to see if the no underwear reputation was true and were shown that it was. But the "kilted ladies from Hell" were also, as that other journalist-cum-military-historian, John Keegan, has remarked, more "bloody minded" than their British comrades.
They were thrown into many of the war's killing fields. They won a little more than their proportionate share of Victoria Crosses. They suffered probably a little more than their share of casualties. And they had a few more than their share of conscientious objectors, produced by a more active nonconformism that included pacifism, and a more militant socialism that refused to take part in imperialist-capitalist wars.
These men did not see this hideous struggle through our eyes. They were concerned to be stalwart. One officer, writing of his regiment after a fierce battle, said it had recovered its "devil-may-care" attitude: this was not an upper-class twit's bravado, but a perky stoicism that found echoes, at least early on, in all ranks. It produced a kind of gallows - or machine gun humour: "God a' Michty," a sergeant was heard exhorting his troops to go over the top, "Ye canna a' be killed!"
Few greater contrasts between contemporary and future reputations are offered than that of the army's commander-in-chief, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, a scion of the whisky family. Some of his later unpopularity stemmed from the assassination of his reputation in the memoirs of David Lloyd George, prime minister in the later war years, who wished to have him removed. Popular with his troops, Haig later became, as Royle writes, "a shorthand description for the entire general staff - red-tabbed aristocratic blimps who never visited the front lines".
Royle comes down on his side, writing that, as Haig's often anguished diary shows, he was no callous butcher; he was frequently in the trenches; most importantly, by the time he became commander-in-chief in 1915 the shape of the trench-based war of attrition was already set and he had to fight the war as he found it. Ultimately, he wore the Germans down to a quite sudden defeat in November 1918: in that wearing down, perhaps 100,000 of his fellow Scots perished.
It is a tale to which the wild and mournful skirl of the bagpipes would lend itself. So used are we to seeing the affair as a vast tragedy that we can see little else. Royle has the narrative skill to let us glimpse it as it was endured by those caught in its coils.
..............................
FT Syndication Service