Christopher Murray Grieve was born and brought up in the small town of Langholm in the Scottish Borders. He enlisted in the war in late 1915 and after a period of training was posted to Salonika in Macedonia with the Royal Army Medical Corps, arriving at the 42nd General Hospital there in August 1916. A record of his war service and – more important for the poet Hugh MacDiarmid he was to become – a record of his psychological and intellectual development during these years is provided by the series of letters he wrote from Greece and later from France to George Ogilvie, his former English teacher at Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh. Grieve's letters to Ogilvie continued after the war, through the development of what came to be known as the Scottish Renaissance movement and into the early 1930s, thus offering what might be seen as the ‘growth of a [Scottish] poet's mind’. At this early stage, however, the European correspondence of the war years charts Grieve's gradual progress towards his postwar role as modernist editor and poet by way of a multiplicity of eclectic reading and writing projects, while at the same time capturing his early interest in the cultural avant-garde.