I discovered it on a summer’s day, while at a yard sale in southwestern Paris. It was a red and gold book, which seemed to have aged well. On the cover was a man in uniform, average height, with a Red Cross armband and a pair of binoculars through which he surveyed a khaki-colored no man’s land. The mouth of a cannon peeped out from beneath the mound he stood on. Clouds of white smoke billowed on the horizon. The emblem of the Red Cross hovered, crucifix-like, over the landscape.
Only moments later did I notice the book’s title, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, and its author, who bore the unlikely name of Robert W. Service. I guessed this copy to be over a hundred years old. I was right: the first page bore a message from a certain “Luther” to a loved one dated December 25, 1918 – barely a month after the November 11 Franco-German armistice that officially ended the war.
On the cover was a man in uniform, average height, with a Red Cross armband and a pair of binoculars through which he surveyed a khaki-colored no man’s land.
How many emotions that Christmas Day must have held, after four years of repeating the unmet promise that, come the New Year, everything would be over.
Born in Lancashire in 1874, Service was schooled in Glasgow where he educated himself in English verse. Employed as a clerk with the Commercial Bank of Scotland, he traveled to British Columbia and the Yukon and stayed there as the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-1899) was ending. His poems from that time, namely “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” brought to life the colorful characters in the frontier town of Dawson City where Service was based. By 1913, hailed as the Canadian Kipling, he had settled in Paris’s Latin Quarter. He married a Parisian woman with whom he had two daughters, a pair of twins, one of whom died at a year old of scarlet fever in early 1918.
Haggis is a traditional Scottish savory pudding. It is made with organ meats from a sheep, oatmeal, suet, onions, and is encased in the sheep’s stomach.
When World War I broke out the summer of 1914, Service was much older than most British conscripts. Barred from active duty on account of varicose veins, he began as a war correspondent for the Toronto Star until censorship laws prevented journalists from accessing the front lines. He volunteered for the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver and stretcher bearer until1916, when a health crisis caused him to be hospitalized in Paris.
It was during his convalescence, far from gunfire, that Service put his recollections and musings on paper: thus, his collection Rhymes of a Red Cross Man was born.
Despite its title’s quasi-epic tone, most of the collection’s poems are far from Homeric. Far from glorifying the Allies’ exploits on the battlefield, Service’s vignettes depict scenes that are by turns horrific, exhilarating, and endearing.
The first poem I discovered in the collection, titled “The Haggis of Private McPhee,” is written in a Scots dialect, in honor of Robert Burns. Burns’s birthday, January 25, better known as Burns Night, is the narrative premise to the poem; for the occasion, the titular protagonist’s mother has sent a homemade haggis to her son, a soldier in France.
Private McPhee quickly grows homesick. He plans with his friend, Private McPhun, to celebrate Burns Night in their trench, but their plans are dashed when their superior, Sergeant McCole tasks them with the “[Listening] Patrol” out on No Man’s Land. McNair, another soldier in their division, promises to keep the haggis warm for their return.
As soon as McPhee and McPhun clamber out over the top, any expectation of comfort vanishes. Service writes, “the rockets like corpse candles [haunted] the sky / And the winds o’ destruction went shudderin’ by.” The soldiers hide in a small alcove where they think about the dangerous mission ahead, while taking heart in the hope of the haggis awaiting them. German soldiers spot them and lob a land mine powerful enough to blind one and blow off the other’s leg. As the two privates gather their strength to retreat to their side, the thought of the haggis sustains them, becoming, in that desperate moment, the one reason to fight and stay alive. Shells and bullets whistle overhead while McPhun carries his friend on his back. He laments that although now blind, “it is not [his blindness] that embitters [his] lot – it’s missin’ that braw muckle haggis ye’ve got.”
They manage, half-conscious, to stagger the last few yards before being taken in by a few of their Scottish brothers in arms. Sergeant McCole cannot comprehend their ravings about haggis until Private McNair narrates the tragic irony of the situation: an enemy shell blew the haggis to bits just as he was getting it ready. None of the soldiers has time to grieve the loss because the captain’s whistle calls them over the top. The haggis, until a few seconds ago, a depository of hopes and dreams, has become yet another casualty.
As the two privates gather their strength to retreat to their side, the thought of the haggis sustains them, becoming, in that desperate moment, the one reason to fight and stay alive.
This poem, like any good work of verse, can be interpreted in multiple ways. One can see it as a commentary on homesickness, a critique of the absurd futility of war, a tribute to Rabbie Burns, or a simple pastime for a bedridden Red Cross nurse.
However one reads it, it is — no pun intended — a work of service. Robert W. Service, perhaps unknowingly, stepped into the shoes of poets that wrote of vulnerability during wartime. Much like his contemporaries and forebears — ambulance drivers like Ernest Hemingway or John dos Passos, and nurses like Walt Whitman during the Civil War — he wrote to make sense of a war-scarred world and to carry on the stories of the deceased.
I look back at the copy of Service’s book on my desk, reflecting on the inscription from that “Luther” lost to history and on the poems’ ghostly verses. Service’s words remind me that before too long, more poems of pain will be heard; yet, faith will be somewhere within their stanzas.
Writing sustains me, much as the hope of that haggis did for those two lost soldiers.
For it is through writing, an act of service among many, that I am reminded to look within myself and ask: “Have you seen your fellow man?”
