All Quiet Along the Potomac

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 921, 5 April 1957, Page 20

All Quiet Along the Potomac

HE American Civil War was the last full-scale conflict in which the basic issues of the struggle and the personalities of the principal combatants could seize the public imagination, and form the fructifying basis of myth and legend, I was reminded of this forcibly when listening to the BBC programme The Blue and the Gray (ZB Sunday Showcase), an evocation through song of this bitterest of internecine wars. The songs were splendidly sung, sparely and imaginatively orchestrated with melancholy trumpets behind the voices, and the Northern and Southern speakers were accurate in intonation, and eloquent both of the glories and the miseries of this savage dress rehearsal for global -war. All the principal events of the war had their fitting memorial in song, and the great generals, Jackson, Lee, Sherman and Grant were appropriately celebrated. Stonewall Jackson’s grotesquely ironical end, at the hand of one of his own pickets, was given a most moving elegy. In fact, apart from the ra-ra songs, "Marching Through Georgia," "Glory Hallelujah," and so on, the note of elegy was struck more often than any other, and the haunting cadences of "All Quiet Along the Potomac" had. a most persuasive poetry. War has since then become progressively more horrible, and ever less personal, involving whole populations against their will, and the issues have become so vast and overwhelming, that no songs can appropriately express

them. Think of World War I: neither "Tipperary" nor "Pack Up Your Troubles" was strictly a war song, and Haig, Kitchener, Foch and Pershing remained uncelebrated. And of World War II, what survives? Only "Lili Marlene," a German ballad with a good tune, and no Churchill, Stalin, Montgomery, Eisenhower songs. The truth is surely, that modern wars are fought without the support of great popular conviction; they are accepted as the bestial necessities of our times, and this is no ground on which to nourish an eloquent, popular art. Byt back to The Blue and the Gray. It seemed at first somewhat strange that the BBC should pay a tribute to an American war, but the standard of the programme was so high, its shape so vividly compelling, that I doubt whether it could be better done

in the States.

B.E.G.

M.