‘It Takes All Sorts to Make a Type’: Scottish Great War Prose

Addressing the under-discussed area of Scottish Great War prose, this chapter argues that Scots with first-hand wartime experience did generate accounts comparable with those emerging in other countries throughout the 1920s, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929). Rennie highlights John Reith’s Wearing Spurs (1966), David Rorie’s A Medico’s Luck in the War (1929), George Blake’s The Path of Glory (1929), and Edward Gaitens’s Dance of the Apprentices (1948) as notable examples – stylistically and thematically – of Scottish writers engaging with the topics of militaristic bureaucracy, the general physical discomfort of army life, and graphic wounding. Furthermore, this chapter challenges the notion that Scottish writing was dominated by North Britons, arguing these works present specifically Scottish war experience not necessarily subsumed within a wider British identity.