{"id":852,"date":"2015-12-18T12:11:29","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T12:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/untoldstories\/?p=852"},"modified":"2015-12-18T12:16:13","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T12:16:13","slug":"macdiarmid-in-thistleonica-a-poem-from-a-forgotten-front","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/untoldstories\/2015\/12\/18\/macdiarmid-in-thistleonica-a-poem-from-a-forgotten-front\/","title":{"rendered":"MacDiarmid in ‘Thistleonica’: A Poem from a Forgotten Front"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"MacDiarmid

MacDiarmid (left) with fellow officers (Gen. 2236\/3\/11)<\/p><\/div>\n

The Papers of Andrew Graham Grieve<\/strong> (Gen. 2236) include a poem from a forgotten front of the First World War written by his older brother Christopher Murray Grieve, later to achieve fame as Hugh MacDiarmid<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Grieve\/MacDiarmid had initially opposed the war as a capitalist adventure\u00a0running counter\u00a0to the interests of the working classes. The death of school-friend John Bogue Nisbet at the Battle of Loos caused a change of heart, however, and he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps in July 1915. Following training in England, he was posted as \u2018Sergeant-Caterer of the Officer\u2019s Mess\u2019 to the 42nd General Hospital in Thessaloniki, Greece (then more widely known as Salonika), where an Allied expeditionary force had established a base for operations against pro-German Bulgaria. Arriving in summer 1916, MacDiarmid joined a Scottish contingent so great that wags\u00a0nicknamed the city ‘Thistleonica’.<\/p>\n

Writing to his mentor and former teacher George Ogilvie, MacDiarmid described the posting as a \u2018cushie job\u2019,\u00a0giving a\u00a0vivid account of his duties in a letter dated 20 August 1916:<\/p>\n

The Sergeant-Caterer of the Officers\u2019 Mess (that\u2019s my new post in our little military world here) has to go \u2018on deck\u2019 at dinner \u2013 dinner commencing at 7.30 p.m. and running to some five courses \u2013 freshly-shaven, boots and buttons mirror-bright, properly dressed with belt and all. He does nothing, of course, save supervision. A spot of tarnish on a knife or fork \u2013 lack-lustre of a wine glass \u2013 uneven flaming of one of the hanging lamps \u2013 slackness on the part of the waiters \u2013 slow, slovenly, or uneven dishing-up on the part of the cooks \u2013 what an eye one develops for detail on such a job! [\u2026] and later when the Mess has come to the walnuts and almonds and the wine-steward is busy supplying Vin Blanc, Vin Russe, or Vin Muscat de Samos […] the Sergeant-Caterer and his staff dine too. (What an awful war, to be sure!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The same blithe spirit is reflected in \u2018A Salonikan Storm Song\u2019, a poem signed \u2018C.M.G., Salonika, 1st September 1916\u2019 and sent to brother Andrew. A humorous depiction of the effects of a summer storm on a field hospital, it concludes:<\/p>\n

Sing ho, for life in a tented field
\nOn a night of storm and stress
\nWhere chaos prevails and everything is
\nIn the very deuce of a mess
\nAnd soaked and muddy and blown about
\nWe still can laugh and sing
\nWhile the rain comes down in bucketfuls
\nAnd the wild fire has its fling!\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"MS

MS of ‘A Salonikan Storm Song’ (Gen. 2236\/7)<\/p><\/div>\n

While hardly the kind of verse we now associate with the First World War (let alone with MacDiarmid!), the bravado of \u2018Salonikan Storm Song\u2019 is, in fact, typical of the military poetry published during the war itself. It seems likely that this poem formed part of a collection that MacDiarmid submitted to Erskine MacDonald\u2019s \u2018Solder Poets\u2019 series under the projected title A Voice from Macedonia<\/em>. Although provisionally accepted by MacDonald and praised by John Buchan, an early supporter of MacDiarmid who read it in manuscript, the collection never saw the light of day. Following protracted printing delays, MacDiarmid withdrew his MS, feeling\u00a0that it was no longer timely.<\/p>\n

Later comments by MacDiarmid reveal that life in Salonika was not quite as \u2018cushie\u2019 as the poem and the letters to Ogilvie suggest. Disease \u2013 malaria, blackwater fever, dysentery — was rampant, killing many more soldiers than the enemy did. In an interview given to Stella Duffy in 1975 (quoted in Alan Bold\u2019s biography of the poet), MacDiarmid spoke of the extraordinary mortality rate and of the many friends he saw die in the General Hospital. MacDiarmid himself suffered three bouts of malaria and was eventually invalided home in May 1918.<\/p>\n

\"Hugh

A young MacDiarmid with Andrew Grieve (right) (Gen. 2236\/3). The brothers endured a fractious relationship.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the autobiographical Annals of the Five Senses<\/em> (1923), he described the prevailing atmosphere in Salonika as one of \u2018highly-coloured nightmarish unreality\u2019, caused by the prevalence of disease, irregular mail, strict censorship, late and unreliable news, and a suspicion (endorsed by many historians) that the whole expedition was a \u2018superfluous sideshow\u2019. As MacDiarmid remarks, the Germans were known to joke that Salonika \u2013 home to 400,000 allied troups — was \u2018the cheapest internment camp they had\u2019. From a purely literary perspective, he wondered whether the \u2018comparative stagnation and monotony\u2019 of life in the city, coupled with the \u2018gruesome dull routine of disease and misadventurous death, unaccompanied by the flame of guns and the glitter of steel\u2019, dulled the imagination and explained why the Eastern Front produced much less memorable verse than the Western.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the two years in Salonika proved a crucial formative experience for MacDiarmid. Ample time for reading, a multilingual atmosphere (the city housing French, Greek, Russian, Serbian, and Commonwealth troups), news of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, all helped forge the Marxist nationalism which would inspire his post-war poetry.<\/p>\n

Paul Barnaby, Archives Team<\/em><\/p>\n

Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n