SOLDIER SONGS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10069, 15 June 1910, Page 4

SOLDIER SONGS.

What has happened to our onetime extensive repertoire of patriotic songs? asks a writer in the London Daily Telegraph. The answer is that they are but a memory, The music halls which once resounded to the strains of "Tommy, Tommy Atkins" and "Soldiers of the Queen," have long since piped another tune, and the heart of "Private Jones" is now inspired with the questionable minstrelsy of popular comedians. "The boys going off to the Crimea sang, 'Cheer, Boys, Cheer!' but now they would gooff singing "Beer, Gloriojus Beer."' The same writer gives the experiences of one who for some half-a-dozen years had ; a wide official experience in a municipal capacity of the smoking concert minstrelsy of the various forces in> provincial towns. This gentleman remarked, "I have seen a peer, two colonels, a baronet, and an archdeacon glued to a chairman's table what time Private Billy Spoffkins or Trooper Johnny Jones religioualy doled outbid five verses of 'What father said to mother when she spilt the beer,' or some such popular two-houses-a-nieht drivel." Sometimes an occasional patriotic song creeps up through the medium of theatre'or music hall, but its career is always of the meteoric type, and its glory is soon dimmed by the latest efforts of Harry Lauder, and his worthy colleagues. The soldier song, as a national characteristic or asset, is wanting, and something ought to be done to fill the void. As in Germany, every soldier ought to carry a national song book iti his pocket. The results at first might be comic, but in the end theywou:d be highly admirable.