E. Alan Mackintosh
1893—1917
Poet Ewart Alan Mackintosh was born in Brighton, England, but his father’s roots were in Scotland. The younger Mackintosh was educated at St. Paul’s School in London and Brighton College and studied classics at Christ Church, Oxford University. He received the Military Cross for leading a successful raid on a German trench near Arras during World War I. During the raid, three of his soldiers were fatally injured, a loss he shared in his well-known poem “In Memoriam.”
Mackintosh’s poems of war are often both elegiac and plainspoken. He wrote two books of poetry: A Highland Regiment (1917) and the posthumously published War, the Liberator, and Other Pieces (1918), which also includes memoir. Mackintosh’s work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Up the Line to Death: the War Poets 1914–1918 (1964), In Flanders Field: Scottish Poetry and Prose of the First World War (1990), and Minds at War: The Poetry and Experience of the First World War (1996). He is the subject of the biography Can’t Shoot a Man with a Cold (2004), by Colin Campbell and Rosalind Green.
Mackintosh was killed November 21, 1917, at age 24, in the Battle of Cambrai. He is buried in the Orival Wood Cemetery in northern France.
Mackintosh’s poems of war are often both elegiac and plainspoken. He wrote two books of poetry: A Highland Regiment (1917) and the posthumously published War, the Liberator, and Other Pieces (1918), which also includes memoir. Mackintosh’s work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Up the Line to Death: the War Poets 1914–1918 (1964), In Flanders Field: Scottish Poetry and Prose of the First World War (1990), and Minds at War: The Poetry and Experience of the First World War (1996). He is the subject of the biography Can’t Shoot a Man with a Cold (2004), by Colin Campbell and Rosalind Green.
Mackintosh was killed November 21, 1917, at age 24, in the Battle of Cambrai. He is buried in the Orival Wood Cemetery in northern France.