Songs of the Bad War

A s the Iraq War was going sour in 2007, I interviewed the acerbic and authoritative rock critic, Robert Christgau. I was seeking comment on what seemed like a dearth of present anti-war music compared with the past. Without exactly telling me I was an idiot kid gulled by Boomer propaganda, he corrected me. There was hardly any anti-war music in the 1960s, he said. Movies had projected the few major anti-war songs such as “Fortunate Son” backward by a few years in our collective memory. Just look at the charts; some of the California sound was coming in. But Frank Sinatra was still nabbing big hits by crooning Broadway show tunes. In 1966, the No. 1 hit on American radio was “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Big acts such as the Dixie Chicks and Green Day had publicly turned against President George W. Bush in a much more explicit way than any similarly popular act in the 1960s went after Lyndon Johnson.

Christgau was right. Besides folkies like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs, the culture industry mostly waited until it was Nixon’s war before turning on it. And even when it did, artists often didn’t attack the subject directly. In fact, they attacked a different war altogether.

Some of the earliest and most powerful anti-war songs of this era don’t mention Vietnam, but World War I. If World War II had already been sanctified as “the Good War,” people with misgivings about Vietnam turned to World War I as the bad one. It took almost a decade after the Great War for the literary and artistic world to fully assimilate it as a disillusioning tragedy of waste. And it was the theme of patriotism betrayed that filled up these songs. They remain probably the most powerful anti-war songs of the era, and they likely will endure the longest.

Perhaps the first of this type is “Butcher’s Tale” by the Zombies, released in 1968. Like many of these Vietnam-era songs reflecting on World War I, the songwriters opt for a crushing literalism:

And I can’t stop shaking — my hands won’t stop shaking

My arms won’t stop shaking — my mind won’t stop shaking

I want to go home — please let me go home

Go home.

That literalism would be repeated by the Kinks in “Some Mother’s Son”:

Someone has killed some mother’s son today

Head blown up by some soldier’s gun

While all the mothers stand and wait

Some mother’s son ain’t coming home today.

American songwriters of the era also turned to World War I. Don McLean, famous for “American Pie,” wrote the utterly haunting “The Grave” in 1970 about a man “barely 20” who placed his trust in his nation. No name is given to this character, “But eternity knows him, and it knows what we’ve done,” McLean sings accusatorially. The song builds up image upon image of mortars exploding, creating a “morgue of Marines” in the trench, until the subject begins to bury himself in the mud and earth, and cries out abjectly, “I know I’m not brave.” George Michael would cover McLean’s hit early in the Iraq War.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LA3WCfiaR8A

Perhaps the most movingly lyrical anti-WWI songs of the era were written by Scottish songwriter Eric Bogle. They included “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” (1971), “All the Fine Young Men,” and “The Green Fields of France.”

The first of this trilogy is considered a classic of Australian folk music and memory of the war, telling the story of a man maimed during the campaign in Gallipoli. In interviews, Bogle was plain that he meant it as a “an oblique comment on the Vietnam War.” Bob Kerrey sang the song to his supporters the night he was elected to the Senate in 1988.

“The Green Fields of France” was the last of Bogle’s trilogy and was partly written with The Troubles of Northern Ireland in mind. Bogle decided that in his song about sitting next to the white crosses in France, he would choose an Irish name, Willie McBride, as the one on the gravestone, to provide English ears with “a wee reminder that they weren’t all Tommy Atkins.” It’s now routinely included in lists of the most important Irish folk songs.

The power of “The Green Fields of France” is the contrast of chorus and verse. The former brims with martial honor and valor, “Did they beat the drums slowly, did they play the fife lowly?” And the verses muse wistfully and nostalgically on what Willie McBride’s life may have been like, “Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind / In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?” The poetry is deliberately elevated. But in the end, it lands on something definite and rueful, the awful promise made to young men going into that war, the one that could never be fulfilled:

And I can’t help but wonder, oh Willie McBride

Do all those who lie here know why they died?

Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?

Did you really believe that this war would end wars?

Well, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame

The killing and dying, it was all done in vain

Oh Willie McBride, it all happened again

And again, and again, and again, and again.

In a strange way, Bogle had answered Irving Berlin’s 1914 song “Stay Down Here Where You Belong,” one of the few genuinely well-known anti-WWI songs written during the war itself, though one written safely before the U.S. entered it:

To serve their king, they’ve all gone off to war.

And not a one of them knows what they’re fighting for.

There is something plain and prophetic about the World War I songs. No matter the number of flags, or the cartoonishly militaristic sentiments of penny dreadfuls and comic books, an unjust war is nothing else but the organized mass murder of our sons, murder accomplished by the betrayal of their highest and noblest ideals.