Some years ago I was privileged to visit WWI battle sites in Belgium and Northern France. Before that trip, I’d heard the word moving used in various ways, but until that time I’d never really felt its impact. Standing there in those now-tranquil, breeze-blown fields, my overwhelming and lasting impression was of senseless waste on an unimaginable scale.
Millions of young men were cut to pieces by deadly accurate, high power machine gun fire, vapourised or shredded by heavy artillery, or burned alive from the inside by poison gas. And for what? A few yards of land, or, in most cases, nothing at all.
Many of those men had no choice in the matter. They were drafted, transported and annihilated. The entire war was prosecuted incompetently, occasioning an obscene casualty rate. That is what Eric Bogle means when he writes of ‘Man’s blind indifference to his fellow man.’
I believe it vital that we remember this dark stain on history, even though it happened long before our lifetimes. We must remember the anguish, the futility, the suffering, the pain and the loss. We must do everything we can to prevent anything like it ever happening again.
Would that we were unanimous in that sentiment. Some years ago, while listening to a cover version of The Green Fields of France, I came upon a set of alternative lyrics penned by one Stephen Suffett. At first I could not believe what I was reading. My stomach turning, I read to the end, the melody playing in my mind behind the lyrics. A dark shadow seemed to chill the room. I felt the presence of something I thought no longer existed: an adult who glorifies the foul obscenity of war, as though it were something admirable and noble, a path to be chosen by all who uphold the values of liberty and democracy.
Mr Suffett’s stance is, I believe, motivated by a local political agenda, rather than by a desire to see young people butchered and their lives terminated, but I think he has a nerve nevertheless. Willie MacBride, in Eric Bogle’s original lyrics, represents a six-zero number of bewildered, shellshocked boys whose futures were wrenched laceratingly away in a Dantean hell of choking gas, bone-shattering bullets, lung-crushing artillery bursts, slowly grinding gangrene and septicaemia, or landscape-altering subterranean caches of amatol. How many of those children, in their dying moments, retching up gouts of blood and trying vainly to hold in their own intestines, would have thought themselves privileged and noble upholders of global freedom? Suffett’s lyrics, portraying millions of obliterated Willie MacBrides as grinning, gung-ho action man dolls, are insolent in the extreme to the memory of those poor wretches. Mr Suffett, you are seriously disconnected from reality.
The last line is perhaps the most ironic. ‘And I’d do it again, says Willie MacBride.’ Mr Suffett, the whole point of Eric Bogle’s lyrics is that Willie MacBride will not do ANYTHING again. Neither will his contemporaries, on both sides of the conflict. Sir, your assumption that war is necessary to defend freedom is deeply flawed. Look to the local conflict to which you allude in your lyrics. Where did the violence get us all? Is the situation worse now that peace has replaced routine murder? I think not.
