For half a century after the First World War, histories only told half the story. Generations were schooled to think the proper study of military history was not the experience of war — that was merely for memoirs — but grand strategy. Historians sang of arms, but not of the man. What chiefly changed that were the books of Lyn Macdonald, the recording angel of the common soldier.
In the early 1970s, Macdonald was working as a radio producer for the BBC when she heard of a promising subject for a half-hour documentary. At Victoria station, she joined the Old Comrades Association of the 13th (Service) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. Its members were visiting for the last time the battlefields of Flanders to which they had been returning annually since 1928.
Until then, she observed, she knew little of the First World War beyond the usual snatches of poetry and received ideas about the conflict. What she was afforded over the following week was a seat in a snug where veterans felt able to reminisce about things that often they had never shared with their families.
At their destination, Monchy-le-Preux, near Arras, an old soldier told Macdonald how he had walked up the same hill behind the cavalry in a snowstorm on Easter Monday 1917. He had then seen the horses fly back down it, without their riders.
A handful of books had begun to make use of the ordinary Tommy’s perspective and not just that of generals or men of letters. Not least as a woman, Macdonald appreciated, however, in her words, that “here was a view and a truth that had not been documented before”. Her 30-minute documentary became a new calling, relating the story of the war as it had been lived through by its survivors.
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Beginning with They Called it Passchendaele (1978), she spent the next 20 years coaxing from her “boys” their memories just before they were lost for ever. “I was after experience,” she recalled. “I wanted to tell it like it was — what it was like to be lousy, how your feet got sore, how your head ached after ten days of wearing a helmet, how you didn’t get enough to eat. Most of them were young men and still growing.”
Her natural empathy and non-judgemental approach made her interviewees feel their stories mattered to her, eliciting detail which could be as startling as it was illuminating.
One veteran remembered how the continual bombardment at the Somme had made helmets ring like tuning forks, and another how casualties there were mown down before his eyes “like sickle grain”.
Significant facts which had been forgotten or overlooked because of their mundane nature came once more to light. Macdonald learnt for instance that each day 40 shiploads of feed and 100 tonnes of horseshoes had to be landed in France to provision the cavalry. The nature of sanitary arrangements was also instructive. Self-closing lavatory lids had been devised on the Western Front because clouds of flies hovering over the latrines gave away their position to snipers. Macdonald came to believe this was the origin of the phrase “caught with your pants down”.
While she amply fulfilled her ambition to “stand in their boots”, Macdonald admitted to once or twice being caught out by her own expertise. A recorded account of the trenches that she was sent by a Canadian veteran mentioned a meeting with a fellow citizen of Ottawa who said in peacetime he was “manager of the f------ theatre.”
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No prude, she typed in the missing word using the soldier’s favoured epithet. On checking the proof, her correspondent informed her that in fact the blanks represented his being uncertain if it had been the Follies or the Frivolity.
Macdonald’s other books included The Roses of No Man’s Land (1980), which was about nurses during the war and inspired the television series The Crimson Field (2014); Somme (1983); 1914: The Days of Hope (1987); and 1915: The Death of Innocence (1993). All deepened understanding of the war, restoring to it its human dimension. The battlefield was commemorated as a place of terror but also one of friendship, resilience and hope.
While some critics carped that Macdonald added little of her own scholarship to this chronicling of experience — she much disliked being described as an oral historian — all the books were bestsellers and influenced a new kind of historian. The great strength of British popular military history now is that it is written from the ground up, and increasingly recounted from all sides, including that of the enemy (as is not customarily the case, for instance, in its French counterpart).
Another of her legacies was the novel Birdsong, which Sebastian Faulks was moved to write after meeting her and a group of veterans on a press trip for the 70th anniversary of the armistice.
When Macdonald’s editor at Penguin, Eleo Gordon, retired, she celebrated with a lunch at The Ivy in London with her cadre of distinguished historians, such as Sir Antony Beevor. None knew that Macdonald, who had published her last book 20 years earlier, was to be there. Her peers greeted her entrance with a spontaneous burst of applause.
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An only child, Evelyn Mary Macdonald was born in Glasgow in 1929. Her father, who came of Highland stock, was an engineer. As a child Lyn would eschew the smoky rooms filled by the menfolk at family gatherings and hide under the kitchen table, for she found the wives’ chatter more fascinating. From Hutchesons’ Grammar School she went into journalism and by the 1960s was working as a writer and producer at Scottish Television. There she met a reporter, Ian McNeilage. They married in 1964 and had three children: twins Aline and Alastair; and Michael.
Macdonald afterwards worked in London for the ABC television company (which made The Avengers) before joining the BBC and Woman’s Hour. She turned to writing full-time in 1973.
Lively company, and not afraid to say her piece, she settled with her husband for some years in France. Macdonald spoke the language well and her love of the country was perhaps reflected in her dress, invariably a two-piece suit, immaculate coiffure and high heels.
She left her archive of some 600 interviews of veterans to the Imperial War Museum. Macdonald was once asked what was for her the abiding image of the war. It was not, she replied, the mud or the trenches, nor even the poppies, but the roads.
“I just see the boys going along them,” she said, “singing.”
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Lyn Macdonald, historian of the First World War, was born on May 31, 1929. She died on March 1, 2021, aged 91