War Songs Which Helped Public Along

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 7249, 31 August 1933, Page 3

War Songs Which Helped Public Along

SONGS OF THE MARCHING DAYS.

Those who in the war years were moved—as mueli greater music before and since has failed to move them by tlio yearning lilt of *‘A Long, Long Trail A-winding, ” will learn with genuine regret that the author of this famous song, Mr Stoddart King, has just died in Washington, after a long illness, at the age of forty-thTCO. Ho wrote the song (another American, Mr Zo Elliott, composed the tune) before the war, when he was a student at Yalo University. It “caught on” for some months nnd was then forgotten—until British soldiers in France began to sing it on the march. Woon the Germans in the opposing trenches were singing it too. It was carried to Mesopotamia, to Italy, to every hamlet in Britain. It was not music of distinction; the war songs were not great, music. But it has entered, like a half-dozen other war-time songs, into the consciousness of an entire generation. It is a part of the music that wrings the heart. Keitlicr in Britain nor in the United States was Mr Stoddart King’s name well known. The authors of war songs which stiT two continents often w neither fame nor financial reward. M. Gitz Rice, who wrote “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” in 1915, when he was serving with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France, declared recently that he had “never received a cent” for this famous song, which—m ono version or another —is known, to everyone who served in the British Army during the war. Other composers of songs which acquired immortality during the war have been more fortunate. Early this year the Cross of the Legion of Honour was conferred upon M. Camille Robert, the composer of “La Madelon,’ a song which was as popular with the French soldiers as was “Tipperary” and A Long, Long Trail” with our own. To ■its inspiring strains the French anny marched through the Arc de Triumphc on Victory Day, 1919. It. was not written as a war song. A music hall artist, M. Bach, obtained the score early in 1914 from M. Robert, who was on the verge of giving up composing as a, “thankless trade,” and in 1916 -sang it at a, soldiers’ concert behind the lines. Its appeal was immediate. Ho other song enjoyed such favour in the French ranks —with tlie possible exception of the very Gallic dirtty which immortalises the misfortunes of an obscure station-master. It was an expression of the indomitable refusal of the French nation to allow its spirit to be broken by carnage and suffering. One has only to hear this glorious absurdity sung in a Paris music hall to-day to realise what poig-

nant memories o£ the war it awakens in the hearts of an audience. I No historian of the future will be able to ignore the evidence which the I war songs furnish of the changing 1 mood of the belligerent nations. For it j was by catching the prevailing mood of the time —defiant, exultant, subdued, 1 resigned—that they leaped into fame.