Alan Mackintosh was only one of millions of young men who met a premature and bloody death in the trenches of World War I. He had family connections on his father's side with Inverness-shire and Ross-shire in Scotland. He was brought up in Brighton, attended St Paul's school in London and when war broke out he was a student at Oxford.
But Mackintosh's aspiration to be a poet distinguished him from his peers. He died in battle in 1917, attached to No 4 Company of the 4th Seaforth Highlanders. He had previously fought, won the Military Cross, and been wounded serving with the 5th Seaforth Highlanders.
He had already published a small volume of poems, A Highland Regiment. Having written a will at the tender age of twenty three, he left work for a posthumous volume, War, the Liberator. Though lines from his poem A Creed adorn the
Scottish American war memorial in Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens, so far his life and works have not had the exposure that they merit.