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You are here: Home / Diary Entries / 1917 Entries / Tuesday 16 January 1917

Tuesday 16 January 1917

January 16, 2017 by jbushey

Brigadier General MacDonnel calls me in to receive a cheque for £5.0.0 in recognition for valuable services rendered. Sorry he could not give me any promotion as Army rules do not permit it, being only attached to Bde.


*Pierre Berton described Macdonell in the book “Vimy”: Macdonell was known as a front-line soldier; indeed, (28 year old intelligence officer Hal) Wallis was to say he spent as much time at the front with his brigadier as he had in his days as a private. Not for nothing did the men of the 7th call Macdonell “Fighting Mac” and sometimes “Batty Mac” because of his eccentricities under fire. Everybody knew the story of how he’d gone so far into No Man’s Land that a sniper put a bullet in his arm. Instead of ducking, Batty Mac had stood up swearing, shaking his unwounded arm angrily at the sniper, who immediately put another bullet in his good arm. And everybody also knew that Macdonell, at the Somme, had insisted on walking among the wounded after the attack on the Regina Trench, unmindful of the enemy shells, to salute the corpses of the Black Watch. A sentimental Scot who sometimes swore in Gaelic in moments of great pressure, Macdonell stopped at every corpse and said “I salute you, my brave Highlander,” until Wallis managed to pull him to safety.(Berton, Pierre: Vimy).

Filed Under: 1917 Entries, Diary Entries Tagged With: General Macdonnel;

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