Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna (1887–1967) was a Scottish Gaelic Bard, North Uist stonemason, and veteran of the First World War. He was perhaps the best-known of the Gaelic poets of the First World War.

Donald MacDonald, known as Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna, was born in the township of Corùna in North Uist. Donald was named after the place where he was raised and the croft was probably renamed Coruna because Donald's great-grandfather served in the Battle of Coruna in Spain in 1809. Although he went to Carinish School, Donald never learned to write in Gaelic. There was poetry in the family and he began composing poetry and poetry at the age of 13.
It was his ‘love for the musket’ and the hunting on his native North Uist that prompted the seventeen year old Donald MacDonald to join the militia, and led to his early entry to the First World War. Many soldiers were not raw recruits, but men who had been in the special reserves, the militia, before the war. Donald enlisted in the 7th Battalion of the Cameron Highlanders in France, which saw action at the Somme in the summer of 1916. He was wounded in the autumn, and returned to England for convalescence. For the rest of the war, no longer fit for infantry duties, he served in the West Riding Field Regiment. Throughout his time in the West Riding Field Regiment, despite regulations, Dòmhnall Ruadh proudly kept the Cameron badge on his cap.
He returned to his native Uist after the war, and worked for most of his life as a builder and stonemason, marrying Anne MacDonald in 1922 and raising two children. Life on the island was hard, and Dòmhnall Ruadh must have suffered the disillusionment of many returning servicemen, but his poetry always showed an innate sympathy with his fellow men.

Dòmhnall Ruadh’s war poems express the horror of the front-line soldier in the face of modern warfare. He chronicles with dismay the awful difference between stalking a stag with his gun and his dog, and warfare in the trenches, and how little he would have guessed that he would be wedded to his rifle until they fell together. Although the reality of war was very different from what his youthful enthusiasm, and experience in the militia prepared him for, his poetry retained dignity and pride, and sympathetic understanding for his comrades.

He is perhaps the best-known of the Gaelic language poets of the trenches, despite the fact that he did not himself write the poems down – they were transcribed before his death, and published in two editions, the second one bilingual, edited by Fred Macaulay, and published under the title Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna: orain is dain in 1995.

The Battle of the Somme began on 1 July 1916. Nearly 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day alone. The soldiers used to say that the time when they were waiting to attack the enemy was more frightening than the fight itself.
In the poem the bard describes the night before this tragic battle as they rested in the trench and also at the beginning of the battle itself. It doesn't say much about feeling alone. That comes through the picture he gives us of what happened. The way he uses sound, and especially the chorus, adds a lot to this. That is the strength of his poetry.