'They died for a world that is past': the First World War remembered

We’re going to repeat that event in the sad belief that there is no less need for the words we read then to be heard again in 2018. Hopefully, we’d like to prompt thinking about the different voices and attitudes some people then and since have expressed towards the time of bloody devastation that was the First World War. This essay reprises some of the things I wrote then but illustrates them with different quotations from the works we’re going to present. 

Lewis Grassic Gibbon provides us with our title and theme. Towards the end of his novel Sunset Song, the minister remembering the four local men who died in the First World War says this: “They died for a world that is past, these men, but they did not die for this that we seem to inherit.”

I’ve often wondered at the meaning of that. It suggests that this world we inherit is up to us to make better, and if the people who died in that war died for something of value, perhaps for what they thought was best in their own lives, what they held most dear and wished to keep vital and alive for future generations, they could have no idea about what was coming after them. So our job, remembering them now, is to keep that edge in mind.

This “world we inherit” is ours to improve, if we can, for the sake of the dead, as well as for the unborn to come. So it’s worth pausing to consider some of the voices and energies in the words written down at the time, and since.

Ronald Stevenson’s piercingly lyrical “Better A’e Gowden Lyric” opens the evening. It recollects a few lines from a Hugh MacDiarmid poem to remind us all that there are other, better things than warfare and conflict: the virtues of the arts are as important in these times as ever.

More so, perhaps. “Lest we forget” is one of those phrases numbed by overuse. My sense of it is we should remember not only the dead, but the living and the unborn, and all the arts, especially music and poetry, the truths they embody, for can be killed off quicker than accurate reporting, by propaganda. And no war is merely historical.

Better a’e gowden lyric
Than the Castle’s soarin’ wa’
Better a’e gowden lyric
Than onythin’ else ava’

In other words, the beauty of song outweighs any authoritarian-hoarded military power. The gift of the lyric, of poetry, of music, is worth more than all the accumulation of capital, whether in violence endorsed and encouraged by the state or by religion or by any arbiter of human action. What human beings carry and recognise and are, as worth, is the only value that matters and lasts.

Or, as MacDiarmid says in another context, quoting from a poet of the Far East: “I have seen violence. 
I have seen violence. Give thy heart after letters.” Good advice.

In National Defence (1917), James Ramsay Macdonald wrote this: “The truth which I want to drive home is that the nation which trusts to the sword must perish by the sword, because it has committed itself to a system of defence which cannot defend but which must in the end destroy.”

The principal consequence of war is polarisation: us and them, women and men, strong and vulnerable. The experience of the Home Front is as vital as that of the trenches. Eunice G Murray argues the feminist question in her Warrior Women: Should Women Fight?: “When one reads of the fate that overtakes the civilian population, more especially the horrors that have taken place in Belgium, the burning of houses, the devastation of the land, the imprisonment of the male population, the ruthless orders given to women to retire to their own houses and leave the doors unlocked.

“When we realise what these things mean there can be but one hope, and that is that warfare is doomed, and that men as well as women, in the words of Adomnan, the Abbot of Iona, ‘will stop from things of that kind,’ and that reason, not might, will govern the world.”
“Have we come any closer at all to realising that ideal, or travelled further from it? Not in the last one hundred years but even in the last twelve months?”.

Patrick McGill, in his book The Great Push (1916), describes “A Night in Loos”: “Where am I? I asked myself. The night was quiet, for sounds that might make for riot were muffled by the mud. The limbers’ wheels were mud to the axles, the mules drew their legs slowly out of muck almost reaching their bellies.

“Motor ambulances, wheeled stretchers, ammunition wagons, gun carriages, limbers, water-carts, mules, horses and men going up dragged their sluggish way through the mud on one side of the road; mules, horses and men, water-carts, limbers, gun  carriages, ammunition wagons, wheeled stretchers and motor ambulances coming down moved slowly along the other side. […] For the driver of the cart that we followed, a problem had to be worked out.

“The problem was this: how could he bring his mules and vehicles into Maroc and bring up a second load, then pilot his animals through mud and fire into Les Brebis before dawn; feed himself and his mules (when he got into safety), drink a glass or two of wine (if he had the money to pay for it), and wrap himself in his blanket and get to sleep in decent time for a good day’s rest. Thus would he finish his night of work 
if the gods were kind. But they were not.”

John Buchan’s brother was killed at Arras in 1917 and his name is among the names of the fallen on the walls of Glasgow University Chapel. This is from John’s elegy, “Alastair Buchan (1917)”:

You scarce had shed your boyhood’s years,
In every vein the blood ran young,
Your soul uncramped by ageing fears,
Your talks untold, your songs unsung.

Buchan’s is a noble lament, yet other voices must be heard too. Remembering also means we need to take account of voices with other priorities. Edwin Morgan, in his poem “On John Maclean” from the 1970s, quotes the words of the Lenin-appointed Bolshevik consul to Scotland (an excellent new biography has just appeared by Henry Bell): “I am not prepared to let Moscow dictate to Glasgow.”

DURING his trial for sedition in 1918, in Edinburgh, Maclean said this: “I have taken up unconstitutional action at this time because of the abnormal circumstances and because precedent has been given by the British government. I am a socialist and have been fighting and will fight for an absolute reconstruction of society for the benefit of all. I am proud of my conduct. I have squared my conduct with my intellect, and if everyone had done so this war would not have taken place.”

This is a man who did all he could for a socialist republic of Scotland, to end the constitutional horror of class, royalty and the creation of wealth for the few through the exploitation of the many, and to end the British Empire of the United Kingdom in the only way truly progressive: to take up once again the best of England, which only can be started, seriously, in the good neighbourly company of an independent Scotland.

In his poem, Morgan says: “it is the firmness/ of what he wanted and did not want/ that raises eyebrows” and notes Maclean wanted “to let them know that Scotland was not Britain” before acknowledging his defeat in a regime of establishment propaganda and force:

Well, nothing’s permanent. It’s true he lost –
a voice silenced in November fog. Party
is where he failed, for he believed in people,
not in partiinost’ that as everyone knows
delivers the goods. Does it? Of course.
And if they’re damaged in transit you make do?
You do – and don’t be so naïve about this world!
Maclean was not naïve, but
“We are out for life and all that life can give us”
was what he said, that’s what he said.

Hugh MacDiarmid was Christopher Murray Grieve before he was Hugh MacDiarmid and it was as CM Grieve that he published his first book, Annals of the Five Senses, just after the war, in 1923. He dedicated the book to John Buchan, “for the encouragement and help he has given to a young and unknown writer”. This is from that book:

“This was the very heart of the trench-crossed, shell-pitted, mine-caverned battle area. As far as the eye could see on each side of the road there was nothing but desolation. All had been cultivated ground, studded with villages, farm-houses, villas, and here and there a chateau. Pleasant woods had risen up in parts...

“Today a few stumps showed where the woods had been, a few heaps of bricks remained of the villages. Even the piles of bricks were few and far between: in most cases the last vestiges of habitations and of the materials whereof they had been composed had been utterly obliterated. [And] The same desolation had been spread from Riga to the Black Sea.
In the Caucasus, in Mesopotamia, on the Austro-Italian frontier, in Macedonia, the same picture of incomputable woe – an interminable series of swaying campaigns.”

MacDiarmid wrote of himself in these Annals: “He came back with an idée fixe – never again must men be made to suffer as in these years of war … ”. After the First World War he began his campaign for a regenerated Scotland which now, 100 years later, we are still trying to build. If it is to be useful, these are the understandings and intimations that a remembrance of what happened 100 years ago needs to help us keep in mind, for the sake of “this world that we seem to inherit”.

The Association for Scottish Literary Studies publishes Scottish War Poetry 1914-1945 (2017) by David Goldie and Roderick Watson, and a wide-ranging anthology, From the Line: Scottish War Poetry, edited by David Goldie and Roderick Watson (2014). Both are strongly recommended.