Isn’t All This Bloody?

Birlinn pick this title for their newly-published anthology of writing from the First World War, edited by Trevor Royle. It’s a book that reaches out to grab you with casual truth from whatever page falls open, and surprises are close-packed. John Reith, later the founding father of the BBC, writes of a train journey from Scotland to London, with horses and men destined for shipping to the battlefield. One aged nag died in the night, and they hauled the carcass out at Newcastle and left it on the platform, despite protests that the London express was due in shortly and the nice passengers would be shocked. Sir Harry Lauder writes with raw reality about the death in battle of his only son. Eric Linklater, knocked out by a machine gun bullet, fumbled for a field dressing when he recovered consciousness but could not undo it, so stuck the whole thing over the wound, held in place by his tin hat. Saki (H.H.Munro) writes about the birds whose lives continued in battle conditions. ‘Affection for a particular tree has in one case induced a pair of magpies to build their bulky, domes nest in the battered remnants of a poplar of which so little remained standing the the nest look almost bigger than the tree …’ Charles Hamilton Sorley notes that a field gun ‘sounds like an old cow coughing’. Rebecca West visits a cordite factory where she is instructed to put on rubber shoes in case a friction spark should blow the place sky-high.

Every page of this marvellous book is filled with direct, utterly human reality. The voices, all of them dead now, are as alive as ever, and the comic, appalling pity of war comes over with a direct, simple impact. It is all bloody, indeed, but the reality of the thing must never be forgotten.

Isn’t All This Bloody? Edited by Trevor Royle. Birlinn Books, hardback, £14.99, ISBN 978-1-78027-224-5.