"TIPPERARY."

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 226, 23 September 1922, Page 17

"TIPPERARY."

THE SACRED AND UNBEARABLE SONG. (By "CYRANO.") They were sitting round the dinner table on ?unday talking, while one of the boys of the ho"use put a curious assortment on the gramophone. They kept a corner of their ear for "The Unfinished Symphony," and suffered Harry Lauder only because by* pleased the master of •the ceremonies. Then, so my friend told mc afterwards, they were aware in the middle of the discussion that someone was singing "Tipporary." The singer had an American aci-ent, and the orchestra was rather strident, hut everybody ■became silent, and when the song was over the company qu etly broky up. My friend says he dared not look at his wife, and that his own eyes were so moist that he went as quickly as li-e could into his study, where he wondered how much of a sentimental fool he was making of himself. Being alone, he took down trom his shelf the last volume of Buchan's "History of the War," and turned to the etory oi those wonderful linal hours of the struggle. "At Mons. on the Sunday night, the Canadians of Home's First Army were in position round the place. Fighting continued during the night, and at dawn the 3rd Canadian Division entered the Streets and established a line east of the town, while the carillons of the belfries payed 'Tipperary.' For Britain the circle was now complete." His eyes were still moister when lie had reread this, and after he had closed the book reverently and put it back in the long red row of bAeniv four volume-!. he went out quietly, got the record of the eong, brought it back to his room, and locked it up. He told mc this over tbe fire one right, when the light was dim. and his face was in shadow. I do not think he could have brought himself to speak of it across a dinner table; ns it wa*. lie mentioned it, after the manner of the ehy Briton, with shamefaced halting-. Did I, he asked, think he was a fool? I replied that I would have thought less of him if he had not taken "Tipperary" that way. For myself, I said, I doubted whether I could have sat through the gramophone record. Then we fell to discussing "Tipperary" and its significance. and we agTeed that nothing in the war had quite the 6ame appeal as that music that came from the belfries of Mons on that November morning. For 6heer drama, for the power to depict tremendous victory and terrific defeat, it is not in the same category as the reception of the German delegates by Marshal Foch in his train in the Forest of Compieirne. or the coming of the German Fleet to the most ignominious surrender in history. "Pride comes to flower and bears a sheaf of doom, whence is garnered a harvest all of tears." Neither of these climaxes. however, brings the same lump to the throat that comes when tiie Briton thinks of the British marching into Mons on the last day of the war to the tune of "Tipperary" played for the deliverers by tha delivered. They had begun the war nt Mons, and they ended it there, and the tune that had consecrated their first heroism now accompanied iheir Petween the two lay the dark years whose awful sacrifices make "Tipperary" at once sacred and intolerable. Tne song is a memorial to the common man, whose homely heroism won rh'* war. A strange thing, this heartrending quality in a common tune, interwoven with words of cheap humour and ordinary sentiment —a jest with a tear in its eye. No army but the British would have taken such a tune to its heart. Associated with th» (I'd Army, wlrc'i fought a series of Thermopylae* in tbe first few months of the war, "Tipperary' - soon ceased to be played. By common consent it was the Old Army's property, and to play it would be to infringe upon a sacred right. This feeling persists. That one does not hear "Tipperary" now cannot be due entirely to the reasons that one does not hear "Ta-ra-raboom- j-de-ay" 0 r "Dolly Gray." It has been said that there is more legend than fact in the association of the song with the original British Expeditionary Force. That may be; we are content with the legend. "Tipperary" will remain a wonderful example of the power of trifles to move our hearts when these trifles are associated with the elemental things of life. Stephen Phillips de--s<*rilx>s in a poem how a man sleepless for thinking of his dead wife rises in the dawn and goes through the things she left. A glove, a sheet of music, a dress, letters in which she had written of deepest sorrow—all these things he could stand, but— A harried happy line! A little ;Jeßt, too sll--*ht for one so dead: This did I not endure: Then with a shuddering heart no more I read. So "Tipperary" means more to us in the way of association than all the company of dignified, solemn music. To stand dry-eyed while at the end of a memorial Bervice the notes of "The Lost Post" ring through the church is difficult enough, ■but it is easier than to sit by your own fireside and listen to "Tipperary."