Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna

According to the family's oral tradition, the bard's great-grandmother, Mór Chaimbeul ("Marion Campbell") of Skye, had given a last drink of water to Sir John Moore moments before he was fatally wounded at the Battle of Corunna in 1809.

"[2] In commenting on the bard's family history, Ronald Black has written, "As Fred Macauley points out, the poet's background thus contained a certain glorification of war which was to expire forever in the mud of France.

Dòmhnall recalled that in his youth he had been very irreligious and that the strict observance of the Christian Sabbath on Presbyterian North Uist was extremely difficult for him to get through every week.

[9] He would later describe his school days in the poem Òran Nan Sgoilearan ("The Schoolchildren's Song") and how all the students were "hungry, deprived, barefoot, bareheaded".

[3] As he later recalled in his war poem Che b' e Gunna mo Nàmhaid ("It Was Not My Enemy's Gun"), a young Dòmhnall was fond of roaming the countryside of North Uist with a muzzle-loading musket, which he used for poaching game birds and red deer, while carefully trying to avoid the factors[12] of the Anglo-Scottish Campbell-Orde family, who had been the widely hated landlords of North Uist since buying the island in 1855.

[1] Following combat training at Hunstanton, Norfolk, he was assigned to the regiment's 7th Service Battalion and landed in July 1915 at Boulogne-sur-Mer as part of the 44th Brigade in the 15th (Scottish) Division.

One of the regimental bagpipers who led the Cameron Highlanders over the top was Berneray-born bush poet Iain Eairdsidh MacAsgaill, who is also an important figure in modern Scottish Gaelic literature.

During his baptism of fire at the Battle of Loos, Dòmhnall experienced what he always thought was one of the first uses of poison gas by the Imperial German Army on the Western Front.

[17] Unbeknownst to Dòmhnall, he was actually describing the first use of poison gas by the British Army on the Western Front and one of the most disastrous friendly fire incidents of the First World War.

On the first day of the Battle of Loos, chlorine gas, codenamed Red Star, was deployed (140 tons) and aimed at the German Sixth Army's positions on the Hohenzollern Redoubt.

The poem ends, however, with Dòmhnall and his fellow soldiers being awakened to grief, as their officers as for and then take down the name of the enormous number of Cameron Highlanders who were killed during the same attack.

[24] In his poem Aisling an t-Saighdeir ("The Soldier's Dream"), Dòmhnall Ruadh recalls seeing a full grown red deer stag in the rush-covered glens north of Locheport and how he scrambled over rocks and banks trying to get a clear shot at the animal.

[34] Despite recovering from his injuries, Dòmhnall Ruadh was ruled unfit to return to active service and spent the remainder of the war in the West Riding Field Regiment.

While serving behind the lines during the 1918 Spring Offensive, Dòmhnall had a brief reunion with his old battalion, which inspired him to compose the poem Na Camshronaich San Fhraing ("The Camerons in France").

"[36] According to Bill Lawson, in some parts of North Uist, land raids took place, as veterans of the Great War attempted to violently seize better crofts from men who had stayed at home.

[37] In the aftermath, however, a sympathetic Member of Parliament arranged for the large tacksman's farm on the west of North Uist, which includes some of the best land on the island, to be bought out by the Congested Districts Board and divided into crofts.

Dòmhnall expressed the hope that the descendants of the Gaels who were evicted during the Highland Clearances would return from around the world to hear from those who had stayed how heartlessly the landlords treated their ancestors.

In the poem, Dòmhnall urged the young Scottish Gaels who were going to war to not be afraid and that victory over Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany would come before October.

[47] At the same time, Dòmhnall's son Calum MacDonald served in the Merchant navy, and regularly sailed within sight of North Uist on his travels between the port of Glasgow and the United States.

[48] According to Ronald Black, "Experiencing a degree of prosperity for the first time in his life after the Second World War, the Voice of the Trenches, as we may call him, became a prolific poet once more, but subsequently suffered a great deal from illness.

On 22 November 1955 the Soviet Union followed suit with the successful detonation of RDS-37, which had been developed by Andrei Sakharov, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Yakov Zel'dovich, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeastern Kazakhstan.

But Dòmhnall urged his listeners to trust that Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross out of love for the human race, would never permit such a terrible destruction to fall on those whose sins he redeemed through his blood and the wounds in his hands and his side.

[49] On 28 March 1956, when BBC Scotland played a recording of a Gaelic-language ceilidh by the soldiers of the Cameron Highlanders during the Korean War, Dòmhnall Ruadh was listening.

Iain Mac a' Ghobhainn, the Church of Scotland minister of that town, wrote a tribute to the poet: According to Fred Macauley, "He not only had an artist's eye for detail but he had an understanding and sympathy for his fellow man which attracted people to his poetry and moved them in harmony with his themes.

[1] Like the 18th century North Uist bard John MacCodrum,[55] Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna lies buried in Kilmuir cemetery,[56] which stands on the site of a Pre-Reformation parish church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

Dòmhnall Ruadh rests underneath a gravestone that bears a carving of a swan and a quotation from the second verse of his love song An Eala Bhàn: According to Ronald Black, "Fortunately, at the instigation of Fred MacAuley of the BBC, most of Dòmhnall Ruadh's poems and songs had been written down from his dictation shortly before his death by John Alick MacPherson, who was at that time a teacher at Paible.

Also, in a sign of how much things had changed since the bard's childhood, his poetry collection was adopted as a textbook for teaching the Scottish Gaelic language in the schools of the Hebrides.

Thanks to the excellent memory of the poet's cousin, Maggie Boyd (Mrs. John MacQuarrie, who died in 1994), to whom Dòmhnall liked to sing each new composition as soon as it was made, the new edition contains 61 items along with extra fragments.

His best known song An Eala Bhàn ("The White Swan") was produced there for home consumption, but in a remarkable series of ten other compositions he describes what it looked, felt, sounded and even smelt like to march up to the front, to lie awake on the eve of battle, to go over the top, to be gassed, to wear a mask, to be surrounded by the dead and dying remains of Gaelic-speaking comrades, and so on.

Others of his compositions contain scenes of deer hunting, a symbolically traditional pursuit of which he happened to be passionately fond, and which he continued to practice all his life.