RTE - And the Red Poppies Dance

McArmalite

Heard this was a good programme last night, though I've got to admit I didn't se it myself. I beleive it was very well made ( even though Kevin Meyers feautred on it :rolleyes: ). Appearently it showed the different agendas at the time, and how it was reflected in song. From what I hear, it's concluding point was what an enormous waste of decent lives who were deceived into battle.
Any thoughts ?

Erin Go Brath

McArmalite wrote: »

Heard this was a good programme last night, though I've got to admit I didn't se it myself. I beleive it was very well made ( even though Kevin Meyers feautred on it :rolleyes: ). Appearently it showed the different agendas at the time, and how it was reflected in song. From what I hear, it's concluding point was what an enormous waste of decent lives who were deceived into battle.
Any thoughts ?

Yep it was a bloody waste of life. They should have stayed at home. Wearing your poppy these days McArm?

Morlar

McArmalite wrote: »

Heard this was a good programme last night, though I've got to admit I didn't se it myself. I beleive it was very well made ( even though Kevin Meyers feautred on it :rolleyes: ). Appearently it showed the different agendas at the time, and how it was reflected in song. From what I hear, it's concluding point was what an enormous waste of decent lives who were deceived into battle.
Any thoughts ?

I thought it was a pretty interesting aspect of the subject of WWI which doesn't get much attention. ie focusing on the songs of the time as forms of propaganda.

It did touch on some interesting areas - ie the use of 'poor little catholic belgium' by the english to enlist Irish people to defend a small catholic country invaded and occuppied by its oversized neighbour.

Also showed some anecdotal detail about the 36th and the Dublin fusiliers and also the Irish involvement in Gallipoli which made it a bit more watchable. Also interviews (from the 1980's) with some Irish veterans.

Even before seeing it though I would have agreed with the person who mentioned Waltzing Matilda as being one of the greatest songs ever (specially the McGowan version which is the definitive one far as I am concerned) also No Mans land (Willie McBride) both of which came from that era.

An ok programme with a wierd approach - the novelty wore thin in some parts and that Clancy prat should not have been on it in my view - he added nothing. I would probably pick it up on dvd if RTE do some kind of commemorative boxset of their WWI armistice coverage.

Fratton Fred

Erin Go Brath wrote: »

Yep it was a bloody waste of life. They should have stayed at home. Wearing your poppy these days McArm?

10,000,000 wasted lives. even more reason to remember them.

Erin Go Brath

Fratton Fred wrote: »

10,000,000 wasted lives. even more reason to remember them.

Indeed what a needless waste of human life both World Wars were. The people who organised these wars (on both sides) need to hang their head in shame. Its the ordinary joe that was pushing up daisies after the war finished, while the gangster politicans who sent them there remained at large. Thats the biggest tragedy!

McArmalite

Erin Go Brath wrote: »

Yep it was a bloody waste of life. They should have stayed at home. Wearing your poppy these days McArm?

Yes Erin, I wore it proudly along with the loyalists cheering on the other loyalists known as the british army's RIR
Correct me if I'm wrong, but did british presenters always wear the poppy for bloody 4/5 weeks ?? Jayus, ( and I'm not personally blaming Joe Calzaghe in the least ), but even as Joe Calzaghe came out to fight Roy Jones in New York last weekend had a f**king poppy on the lapel of his robe :rolleyes::rolleyes:The powers that be in britian seem to preceive that they have to ram it home to glorify the british forces at every oppurtunity. ( Heard Roy Keane politely but firmly declined to wear one - I'm not your biggest fan but - good on ya Roy )

Make no delusions that the ruling classes on both sides were not advancing the cause of freedom or democracy, just like today in Iraq or Afghanistan. Thats why I find it so objectionable that they are still being used now as they were then, to advance other peoples greed and agendas.

McArmalite

Morlar wrote: »

I thought it was a pretty interesting aspect of the subject of WWI which doesn't get much attention. ie focusing on the songs of the time as forms of propaganda.

It did touch on some interesting areas - ie the use of 'poor little catholic belgium' by the english to enlist Irish people to defend a small catholic country invaded and occuppied by its oversized neighbour.

Also showed some anecdotal detail about the 36th and the Dublin fusiliers and also the Irish involvement in Gallipoli which made it a bit more watchable. Also interviews (from the 1980's) with some Irish veterans.

Even before seeing it though I would have agreed with the person who mentioned Waltzing Matilda as being one of the greatest songs ever (specially the McGowan version which is the definitive one far as I am concerned) also No Mans land (Willie McBride) both of which came from that era.

An ok programme with a wierd approach - the novelty wore thin in some parts and that Clancy prat should not have been on it in my view - he added nothing. I would probably pick it up on dvd if RTE do some kind of commemorative boxset of their WWI armistice coverage.

Yes, interesting how catholic Belgium was used as propaganda to enlist Irish nationalists into the brits ( with the conivince of the Irish Catholic Church ? ). I think it was James Connolly coming from the train in Belfast noted how most of the posters had " Fight for King and Country " with the images of british lion and Butchers Aprons ( union jacks ) etc on them. But as the train headed more south onto Newry, Dundalk etc, the theme of the posters changed to " Join the Army and save Catholic Belgium ". Says it all doesn't it.

As far as I'm concerned, the aristocracy/upper classes of Europe who brought about the war should have been tried for war crimes. If that happened WW2 would have avioded but.....that's history unfortunately.

One thing I think worth considering. If Germany and co had won the war, would Germany and co. as retribution to britain have made them give 32 county independece to Ireland ( the fact that we ' stabbed them in the back ' in 1916 would surely have helped our case )| and the Civil War, partiton, the Troubles etc have all been avoided ??

Fratton Fred

McArmalite wrote: »

Yes Erin, I wore it proudly along with the loyalists cheering on the other loyalists known as the british army's RIR
Correct me if I'm wrong, but did british presenters always wear the poppy for bloody 4/5 weeks ?? Jayus, ( and I'm not personally blaming Joe Calzaghe in the least ), but even as Joe Calzaghe came out to fight Roy Jones in New York last weekend had a f**king poppy on the lapel of his robe :rolleyes::rolleyes:The powers that be in britian seem to preceive that they have to ram it home to glorify the british forces at every oppurtunity. ( Heard Roy Keane politely but firmly declined to wear one - I'm not your biggest fan but - good on ya Roy )

Think what you like about the selling or wearing of the Poppy in Ireland, but in Britain it is very much a case of rememberence. The pressure is more peer pressure and a feeling that the young should be made aware of what happened and the sacrifices made. Good for Joe as well, as a Welshman I have no doubt that he feels the same.

If you don't like it, may I respectfully request that you don't watch British TV. As for Roy, good luck to him, it made beating them the way we did that much sweeter

Snickers Man

I would like to have seen this. How events are depicted in poetry and song can tell you a lot about the mood of the times.

For example I think a lot of the War Poetry of the First World War exposes the shocking hubris that the British had about their own sense of themselves. (The Germans probably had something similar but then I don't know any German poetry)

When World War One broke out, the major nations of Europe had not really fought each other for about 100 years. Maybe you could point to the Franco Prussian War of 1870-71 but that was a rapid campaign, easily won by what became the German Empire. In any case, that was more than 40 years before the Great War broke out.

In the meantime, all Europe's major powers had been steadily building up their overseas empires. There, they had a distinct technological advantage. As Hilaire Belloc's immortal couplet put it:
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not."

Or as the Irish rebel song of later years put it rather more disparagingly:
"Come tell us how you slew, those brave Arabs two by two
Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows.
Did you bravely face down one with your 20 pounder gun
And frighten those poor natives to the marrow?"

Of course the British at the time didn't see it this way. It was not their technological might but their superior moral fibre, robust Christianity and natural fighting abilities that made all the difference. One staff officer wrote on the eve of the Gallipoli campaign that your average Turk was: "an enemy who has never shown himself as good a fighter as the white man."

Yeah right. I think the Turks had disabused him of that notion even before the Allies retreated empty handed from Gallipoli a few months later.

The Germans taught them a few home truths as well. Now instead of fighting spear-chucking Zulus in South Africa or forest dwellers in Burma the British were up against enemies who were every bit as well equipped as they were. No wonder the poetry was so fraught. Where are all the depictions of ghastly futile slaughter from the Boer War? Or the campaigns in India, Sudan, China, Rhodesia, British Guiana?

Probably the only poet who described any of these and whose work survives is the arch imperialist and coiner of the phrase "white man's burden" Rudyard Kipling. And his poetry is not so much "What passing bells for these who die as cattle" but all jolly chipper Tommy Atkins and his cheerful chums.

Fratton Fred

My English Literature GCSE had a large section dedicated to the War Poets and the study of them and their poems, for exactly the reason you give. I don't recall too many conatining an overblown sense of national pride though.

Off the top of my head, the poets we mainly studied were the likes of Wilfred Owen, Siegried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke who wrote some very moving poems.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST by WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!---An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Snickers Man

I wasn't trying to make the point that the war poets were excessively jingoistic or bombastic. Although Kipling certainly was but that was before he experienced the death of his own son whom he had forced into the army despite his being repeatedly rejected as unfit.

The poetry of Owen and his great friend Sassoon (some would say they were more than just good friends) conveys the shock and horror of men experiencing a new form of warfare. It seems to say: "This shouldn't be happening to us. This is not what we were led to believe war would be about."

I'm sure that has been a common reaction to the reality of war since time immemorial but there is something particularly fraught about the experiences of First World War soldiers as described by Owen and Sassoon.

Where are the similar depictions of horror and futility from Britain's colonial wars? If there were any, they have not lasted long.

My guess is (and it is backed up by the comparitive casualty figures from engagements such as the battle of Omdurman) that in most cases the British, and other European armies, had such a technological superiority over those they were colonising that their casualty figures were quite low.

But that was not their analysis at the time. You grew up in England, didn't you? When you think of the Battle of Omdurman, what do you think of? Maxim guns? Trench warfare? Poison Gas? or Cavalry Charge?

Go on. Be honest. In any of the books I read as a kid it was synonymous with the cavalry charge, the last great cavalry charge in a pitched battle by the British Army. Pitting steel against steel. Man to man. War as a noble art.

In fact the cavalry charge nearly went to pot. There were four Victoria crosses awarded during the battle, two of them to Irishmen and all of them for incidents occuring during that charge and usually for coming to the aid of an officer who was having a hard time of it from the fuzzy wuzzies.

But it wasn't a cavalry charge that led to the discrepancy in casualties, about 50 dead British to about 10,000 dead Sudanese. It was superiority in weapons and in the tactics used to deploy them.

In WWI, however, those who found it relatively easy to bear up the White Man's Burden against primitive African and Asian tries got something of a shock when experiencing an enemy every bit as well equipped as themselves. It is that shock which reverberates in the poetry of the WWI writers.

Erin Go Brath

This excellent poem from Siegfried Sassoon sums up the harshness of the experience and the 'home truths' that the ordinary soldiers had to face up to.

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Fratton Fred

If you talk of cavalry charges, then Balaklava is the epitomy of a futile cavalry charge glorified to the point where a complete **** up was somehow viewed as being galant and noble, which is pretty much how it was taught in schools, a futile but somehow glorified death. Anyway, they were different times, different eras and very different wars.

British wars were always in some far off land but Bismarck had created a formidable country, one that had relatively recently given Britains closest equal a very bloody nose. If that was to happen again then the new and very impressive German Navy, along with a captured French navy would suddenly give rise to a serious threat to the British Isles. Something that had not happened for 900 years. Britannia could possibly no longer rule the waves, something that was unthinkable.

People volunteered en masse, they had heard the stories of galantry from abroad (Most of which was propaganda) so off they went to fight the Hun and defend good old Britannia. Suddenly, instead of cavalry charges, nobility and whipping old gerries arse, they were neck deep in flanders mud and suffering from trench foot, whilst having mustard gas thrown at them.

Young men, full of bravado, going off to fight for the greater good, then dying for no real reason at all was nothing new to the British empire, the difference being, the opportunity of glorifying the war had gone, instead of a glorious death defeating a superior number of savages, (Which in reality was probably being shot in the shoulder and dying three days later from infection and blood loss) people were coming home and sitting there maimed injured and suffering from shell shock in the front room of their parents home and bleeding all over the carpet.

WWI, incidentally, was the first major war the British were involved in where more men died from the war itself than doed of disease.