1 | Keep the Home Fires Burning
Ivor Novello, born in Cardiff, was only 21 when he wrote Keep the Home Fires Burning (Till the Boys Come Home) in 1914, which touched all families at the outbreak of war with its hopeful message. It was an instant hit. Novello’s war service was less glorious. After a stint in the Royal Navy Air Service, crashing two planes, he enjoyed a long postwar career as an actor, writer and composer of musicals. The Ivor Novello awards are named in his honour. The words of the song are by the American Lena Gilbert Ford, who was divorced and living with her son in London. Both were killed by a German air raid on London in March 1918.
2 | Pack Up Your Troubles
This cheery, upbeat marching song was written in 1915 by Welsh brothers Felix Powell (an army staff sergeant) and George Henry Powell (who became a conscientious objector). It surfaced in music hall and interwar films such as Laurel and Hardy’s Pack Up Your Troubles (1932). In Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) it is sung, ever louder and with deepening emotion, as the first wounded soldiers from the battle of Mons arrive at Charing Cross station. Wilfred Owen used the refrain in his poem Smile, Smile, Smile (1918), a sardonic reference to the false cheer of young soldiers heading out to the front, only to be felled.
3 | Le tombeau de Couperin
Each movement of Ravel’s piano suite (1914-17) is dedicated to friends of the French composer who died in the Great War, in which he himself served as a truck driver. The title is oblique, referring to the tomb of the baroque composer François Couperin, and the work pays tribute to an earlier musical style, delicate and controlled rather than an emotional outpouring. The first performance was given in Paris in 1919 by Marguerite Long, the pianist widow of one of the dead soldiers remembered in Le Tombeau. Accused of making the music too cheerful, Ravel replied: “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.”
4 | Over There
Popular entertainer, producer, playwright and composer George M Cohan, “the man who owned Broadway”, wrote Over There after hearing the news, in April 1917, that America had declared war on Germany. Brazen propaganda and the hope that war would be brief set the mood for this song, with its much borrowed refrain “The Yanks are coming”. It ends emphatically: “And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.” Cohan’s story was told in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy (starring James Cagney as Cohan, seen writing Over There note by note) and the 1968 musical George M!. A statue of him stands in Times Square, New York.
5 | In Flanders
The Gloucester-born Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) wrote poems and songs in the trenches, where, already physically and mentally frail, he was shot at and gassed. In Flanders – “I’m homesick for the hills” – is a setting of words by his friend William Harvey. It speaks of a longing to be back in the Cotswolds and shares an English pastoral mood captured in the prewar songs of another brilliant young composer, George Butterworth, killed by a sniper in August 1916. Gurney was invalided out and spent much of the remainder of his life in mental asylums. With terrible irony, the comradeship and routine in the trenches may have been his happiest times.
6 | Noël des enfants
This little-known song, written by Claude Debussy in 1915 when he was ill and depressed by news of war, is a piteous tale of homeless French children at Christmas whose houses have been ransacked and destroyed by the enemy. Papa is away at war, Mama is dead, the school has been burnt and the schoolmaster too. They have no toys, no wooden shoes and, worse than that, no bread. They pray for the little children of Poland, Serbia, Belgium, concluding “Grant victory to the children of France”. The song was part of Debussy’s final burst of creativity, before his death, aged 55, in 1918.
7 | Slavic Woman’s Farewell
This Russian patriotic march was written for the first Balkan war (1912), but in the first world war became a familiar marching song for the imperial Russian army, well known too across Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia. It was composed by Vasily Agapkin (1884-1964), a regimental trumpeter who served in the Russian/Soviet army and the NKVD, a forerunner of the KGB, for 62 years. He devised the brass music for Lenin’s funeral in 1924 with a band consisting mostly of children left homeless by war. He also led the orchestra at the annual Red Square parade in Moscow in 1941, with German forces less than 20 miles away.
8 | The Planets
Gustav Holst always denied that Mars, the Bringer of War in his orchestral work The Planets (1914-16), was a direct response to the onset of war. Yet the snarling, bellicose opening and angry, sweeping main theme stir indelible images of warfare. A later movement, Jupiter – the Bringer of Jollity, confirmed the work’s identity with WWI as its melody became the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country. The words, written by diplomat Cecil Spring Rice, were reworked in 1918 to reflect British losses: “The love that never falters, the love that pays the price/ The love that makes undaunted, the final sacrifice.”
9 | To Gratiana Singing and Dancing
Composer William Denis Browne (1888-1915) forged a close friendship with poet Rupert Brooke. They were commissioned together as naval volunteer reserves. Browne was with Brooke when he died in Greece en route to Gallipoli in 1915. “No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay… fragrant with sage and thyme,” Browne wrote. He reached Gallipoli but was killed in action weeks later. Most of his music was burnt by a friend immediately after his death. The wistful, tender To Gratiana, a pinnacle of English song, reminds us of the talent lost in the first world war.
10 | The Last Post
For the British army, the Last Post, played to signify the end of the day, came to represent a final tribute to the fallen. The German-Austrian equivalent is Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden (I Had a Comrade). The Last Post is played every Remembrance Day. Since 1928 it has been played each evening at 8pm at the Menin Gate, Ypres. Robert Graves, wounded on the Somme, wrote a poem, The Last Post: “O spare the phantom bugle as I lie/ Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,/ Dead in a row with other broken ones,/ Lying so stiff and still under the sky…”
