MARCHING SONGS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 622, 29 August 1933, Page 7

MARCHING SONGS

GAY DITTIES THAT CONJURE UP IMPERISHABLE MEMORIES. * Those who in the wai* years were moved — as much greater music before and since has failed to move them — by the yearning lilt of "A Long, Long Trail A-wihding," 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 43, says the Daily Mail. He wrote the song (another American, Mr. Zo Elliott, composed the tune) before the wai*, when he was a student at- Yale Universityl. l't "caught on" for some months, and was then forgotten — until British soldiers in France began to sing it on the march. Soon 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 wai* songs were not great music.J But it was 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. Neither in Britain nor in the United States was Mr. Stoddart King's name well known. The authors of songs which stir two continents often win neither fame nor financiai reward. Mr. Gitz Rice, who wrote "Mademoiselle from Armentieres" in 1915, when he was serving1 with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France, declared recently .that he had "never received a cent" for this famous song, which — in one version or another — is known to everyone who served in the British Army during the wai*. Other composers of songs which acquired immortality during the wai* 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 French' soldiers as was "Tipperary" and "A Long, Long Trail," with our own. To its inspiriting strains the French .Army marched through the Arc de Triomphe on Victory Day, 1919. It was not written as a wai* 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. No other song enjoyed such favour in the French ranks — with the possible exception of the very Gallic ditty which immortalises the misfortunes of an obscure stationmaster. It was an expr.ession of the indom- ' itable refusal of the French nation to allow its spirit to be broken by earnage and suffering. One has only to hear this glorious absurdity sung in a Paris music hall to-day to realise what poignant memories of the war it awakens in the hearts of an audience. No historian of the future will be able to ignore the evidence which the wai* songs furnish of the changing moods of the belligerent.nations. For it was by catching the prevailing mood of the time — defiant, exultant, subdued, resigned— that they leaped into fame.