World War I & the Scottish Past

DESPITE the kilted Scots corporal on the book's cover, the subtitle is far more accurate than the allusion in the title to the war of 1914–1918. But for a few sentences here and there, the reader must turn more than half the 255 pages to get beyond the landmark events of independent Scotland—the disaster at Flodden in 1513 and the victory over the English at Bannockburn two centuries earlier in 1314. The essays collected by Gill Plain are from a June 2014 "colloquium" at the University of St. Andrews marking the 700^th anniversary of Bannockburn and the centenary of World War I.

Fought when the Scots crossed the River Tweed into Northumberland and were defeated by the English, with French assistance, Flodden cost James IV his life and about 17,000 of his troops. It also decimated much of the Scottish nobility. Flodden erased the triumph of Bannockburn, which the Scots regularly attempted to resurrect to rekindle national pride.

Bannockburn had delivered the Scots kingdom from English encroachment until the union of the two after Elizabeth in 1603 under James I, who until then was James VI of Scotland. Yet the emblematic victory seems little recalled in memorials to the greater war 600 years after Bannockburn. "Across Europe, as in Scotland," Carol Symes writes, "the overwhelming majority of memorials to honor the dead of the Great War and to mark its battles drew on medieval (Celtic, Romanesque, or Gothic) architectural motifs, imagery, or narratives." Nostalgia for emerging Scotland is lacking, unless 1314 is considered as late medieval, yet that aspect of memorializing has usually been marked by external Crusader imagery.

As for an imaginative link to the past, David Goldie writes that despair and death, which were overwhelming from 1914 into 1918, evoked defeat rather than the more distant victory: "If the Scots went into the First World War with the example of Bannockburn at the forefront of their minds, they left it with a memory of Flodden—symbolized particularly in the song 'The Flowers of the Forest,' the lament for the battle [written 300 years later] that had been popularized in Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803)." Goldie further quotes H. V. Morton, a war veteran, in his In Search of Scotland (1933), as recalling Flodden as "still a pain in the heart of Scotland" and the lament of "The Flowers of the Forest" as "a living sorrow." But no contributor to the volume quotes a line from its legacy of Flodden: "The Flowers of the Forest, that foucht aye the foremost, / The prime o' our land are cauld in the clay." This poetic lament in fact turned up earlier—2007—as the title of a book by Trevor Royle largely on Scotland as the wartime workshop of the Empire.

Possibly the most valuable contribution in the present book is Peter Mackay's chapter on Scottish Gaelic poetry about the war, extracted in the original language and in translation. Most striking, however, is the verse of Ewart Alan Mackintosh, a Brighton-born Scot who taught himself Gaelic but wrote mostly in English. He closes one poem poignantly:

Hold me close until I die.Lift me up, it's better so; If, before I go, I cry,It isn't I'm afraid to go.…

Mackay deplores a tip over into sentimentality, but the lines convey a reality, very likely, of thousands of such moments. Mackintosh also summons up "an older war" in men marching

With feet that made no mark.The grey old ghosts of the ancient fightersCome back again from the dark.

After 1918 the many dead in Flanders and France were more to be remembered, as was Flodden, than the returnees who evoked ancient Bannockburn. Yet during the war the victory in remote 1314 was often recalled in Scottish newspapers to stiffen the national...