“The recording angel of the common soldier,” she chronicled the war in seven books from the soldiers’ perspective, drawing on 600 interviews with veterans.
Mistakenly, they called it the war to end all wars, a grinding collision of empires and nations from 1914 to 1918 that robbed the young of their youth in the mud-bound reaches of Flanders, the Somme and many other fields of battle. Its course and impact inspired a vast canon of military history and increasingly bleak verse from the trenches.
But in the early 1970s, different and sometimes forgotten voices from the war began to resurface, rising from the recollections of aging veterans who carried with them vivid memories that they might have taken to the grave had it not been for Lyn Macdonald.
Ms. Macdonald died on March 1 in the village of Bottisham, near Cambridge, England. She was 91.
In 1973 Ms. Macdonald was a producer for the BBC who was given what she thought would be a one-off journalistic assignment: to accompany a group of World War I veterans from a British rifle brigade on a final pilgrimage to the battlefields of France.
As it turned out, it was the start of a project that would span decades.
The trip led to a book, “They Called It Passchendaele,” published in 1978, and then six more. Those books turned some 600 interviews recorded over 1,500 hours, along with letters and diaries, into a popular trove of firsthand narratives chronicling the war through the voices of veterans in all their conflicting passions — from revulsion to pride to comradeship.
“It was not the war as recorded in history books or the honed and polished political or military memoirs written in hindsight and with one eye on the judgment of posterity,” Ms. Macdonald wrote in an essay published in 2008. “In all its warts-and-all reality, this was the raw experience of war.”
In all her interviews with the veterans, she told The Guardian, “I never heard one man use the word ‘horror’ to describe their experiences.”
“That is not to say that it wasn’t horrible at times — it was,” she added. “But they viewed it differently to how it is widely perceived today.”
In a tribute that referred to her as “the recording angel of the common soldier,” the publisher Macmillan quoted her as saying, “My intention has been to tune in to the heartbeat of the experience of the people who lived through” the war.
The impact of her work went further. “She popularized and humanized military history,” said Michael St. Maur Sheil, a British photographer and battlefield guide whose photographic study “Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace” shows the scenes of historic battles as they were 100 years after the peace of 1918.
“Her books were groundbreaking,” Mr. Sheil said in an interview. “They used the words of the soldier.”
In 1988, the British writer Sebastian Faulks accompanied Ms. Macdonald on a journey to the battlefields that, he said, helped inspire his novel “Birdsong” (1993). Interviewed on the BBC after Ms. Macdonald’s death, he said her work had influenced other historians because it “stressed the need to tell the story from the bottom up.”
Her second book, “The Roses of No Man’s Land” (1980), was devoted to the members of the British Army medical staff who tended stricken soldiers. In it, Ms. Macdonald quoted a volunteer nurse named Peggy Marten as saying that Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918, “was the most appalling day I’ve lived through.”
Ms. Marten had been assigned to a hospital at Wimereux, in northern France. There had been a modest ceremony to mark the silencing of the guns and, as she was walking to it, she said, “I saw two parents being escorted to the mortuary.”
“They must have been sent for to come and see their wounded boy and got there too late,” she continued, “and now they were being taken to see his body. I thought, ‘Here we are at the end of the war — but we’re not at the end of the grief.’”
Evelyn Mary Macdonald (who was known as Lyn) was born in Glasgow on May 31, 1929, the only child of Hugh and Gertrude (King) Macdonald. Her father was an engineer who served in the Royal Air Force and who spent the closing stages of World War II in northern France, where he befriended a French family with whom he was billeted. After the war, his daughter, then 18, traveled to France to stay with the same family — the beginning of an abiding affection for French culture and language.
Ms. Macdonald studied at a grammar school in Glasgow before starting her journalism career. She was a writer and producer for Scottish television in the early 1960s when she met and married a colleague, Ian Ross McNeilage. The couple later moved to London, where Ms. Macdonald continued to work in television, including at the BBC.
She is survived by her husband; their three children, Alastair (who confirmed the death), Aline and Michael McNeilage; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
According to Mr. Sheil, the photographer and battlefield guide, some academic and ex-military historians tended to be “dismissive” of Ms. Macdonald’s books on World War I, but others applauded her narratives as pioneering for being written from the viewpoints of the ordinary men and women who were caught up in it. By many accounts, she rejected the label of oral historian, insisting that she was a military historian.
Her first book, “They Called It Passchendaele,” focused on the battles around the Belgian city of Ypres in 1917. In her second, “The Roses of No Man’s Land,” she evoked the culture that inspired volunteer nurses and led to huge postwar social change:
“She’s called Elsie or Gladys or Dorothy, her ankles are swollen, her feet are aching, her hands reddened and rough. She has little money, no vote, and has almost forgotten what it is like to be really warm. She sleeps in a tent. Unless she has told diplomatic lies about her age, she is 23. She is the daughter of a clergyman, or lawyer, or a prosperous businessman, and has been privately educated and groomed to be a ‘lady.’
“She is on active service and as much a part of the war as Tommy Atkins,” she went on, using the nickname of British foot soldiers. “On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked out of Edwardian drawing rooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.”
After the war, “they won the vote and the right to work,” Ms. Macdonald wrote. “They earned liberation long before Liberation itself earned itself a capital L.”
In her third book, “Somme” (1983), Ms. Macdonald dwelled on the bloodiest battles of the war, which took their name from a region of northern France. That was followed in 1987 by “1914: The Days of Hope,” about the early months of the war; “1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War,” published a year later; “1915: The Death of Innocence” (1993), evoking the brutal losses from Ypres to the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey; and “To the Last Man: Spring 1918,” the final book in the series, published in 1998. That volume focused on the turning points in the war that led to victory by Allied forces, including the arrival of American troops led by Gen. John J. Pershing.
In Ms. Macdonald’s telling, the grim incongruities of war extended to the American soldiers, known then as doughboys. In one instance, she wrote, soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 42nd Division laid on an elaborate funeral for a single soldier, Everett King, who had been killed by a shell before his unit moved up to the front line.
“The coffin was conveyed in a glass-sided hearse drawn by black-plumed horses; the officers marched alongside,” she wrote. There was a firing party, prayers and the reverent removal of the American flag from the coffin. Hours later, the unit deployed to confront German forces at the front.
As Ms. Macdonald observed, “Not many of the doughboys who would die there in the days to come would be buried with such pomp and ceremony.”
"world" - Google News
May 09, 2021 at 12:30AM
https://ift.tt/3tqn0Kp
Lyn Macdonald, Who Preserved Voices of World War I, Dies at 91 - The New York Times
"world" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3d80zBJ
https://ift.tt/2WkdbyX
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Lyn Macdonald, Who Preserved Voices of World War I, Dies at 91 - The New York Times"
Post a Comment