Song of the Day - 10th November

On this solemn Remembrance Sunday I would like to share with you the second of my songs on the theme "War's End".

This is a setting of a poem by Robert William Service (1874 – 1958) called "Victory Stuff".

Service was born just down the road from me actually, in Preston, Lancashire. Of Scottish descent, he moved back to Scotland with family when he was 5 years old, and then emigrated to North America at the age of 21, spending years drifting around western North America, wandering from California to British Columbia, taking and quitting a series of jobs: "Starving in Mexico, residing in a California bordello, farming on Vancouver Island and pursuing unrequited love in Vancouver."*

Aged 40 when World War I broke out, Service was turned down for active duty on health grounds, but he served by working as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver with the Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross. 

This poem—Victory Stuff—is from a collection published in 1921 called "Ballads of a Bohemian".

It shows the victory celebrations from the point of view of a surviving veteran, observing but detached from the giddy festivities. The narrator reminisces with a comrade about the lost chums he served with and how they'd have "topped the fun".

But it's the final two lines that drew a tear for me, and made me realise this was the poem I had to use to commemorate Remembrance Sunday.

Get the music for this song for free - find out how here.

Victory Stuff

By Robert William Service

What d'ye think, lad; what d'ye think,

As the roaring crowds go by?

As the banners flare and the brasses blare

And the great guns rend the sky?

As the women laugh like they'd all gone mad,

And the champagne glasses clink:

Oh, you're grippin' me hand so tightly, lad,

I'm a-wonderin': what d'ye think?

D'ye think o' the boys we used to know,

And how they'd have topped the fun?

Tom and Charlie, and Jack and Joe --

Gone now, every one.

How they'd have cheered as the joy-bells chime,

And they grabbed each girl for a kiss!

And now -- they're rottin' in Flanders slime,

And they gave their lives -- for this.

Or else d'ye think of the many a time

We wished we too was dead,

Up to our knees in the freezin' grime,

With the fires of hell overhead;

When the youth and the strength of us sapped away,

And we cursed in our rage and pain?

And yet -- we haven't a word to say. . . .

We're glad. We'd do it again.

I'm scared that they pity us. Come, old boy,

Let's leave them their flags and their fuss.

We'd surely be hatin' to spoil their joy

With the sight of such wrecks as us.

Let's slip away quietly, you and me,

And we'll talk of our chums out there:

You with your eyes that'll never see,

Me that's wheeled in a chair.

*"Robert Service: Under the Spell of the Yukon" by Enid Mallory, YukonBooks.com, Web, 4 Apr. 2011