The word war lends itself to diverse uses. For instance, we can proclaim a war on drugs, not because we would in the literal sense, kill drugs, but because we wish to portray the gravity of the current situation. It is a matter of poetic license. Yet, there is the other, much darker, literal side of war, where people are urged to fight for their country, to fight for freedom from oppression, and are given deadly weapons with which they ought to spill the blood of other people they have never met before, who have not done them any wrong, whose only flaw is that they are from another country, and the governments of these two opposing countries decided to send soldiers into battle, while they sit comfortably and safely in their offices, doing nothing but forming strategies. Eric Bogle’s song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and John McCutcheon’s “Christmas in the Trenches” speak exactly of this. Their humanized and personalized, almost diary-like epigraph on their war experience portrays war not as a liberating movement, but as a dehumanization of their uniqueness, where soldiers are no longer individuals with emotions, a past and a future, but are one unity of the present, where the loss of a individual does not matter, as long as the unity is victorious in the end.
In their effort to fight this unfair loss of identity in war, both Bogle and McCutcheon paint a vivid portrait of their own experience, and not the experience of the whole regiment, with McCutcheon even giving himself a name: “Francis Tolliver” and a past: “I come from Liverpool” (line 1). Bogle also offers his own past: “Now when I was a young man, I carried me pack, and I lived the free life of a rover/ From the Murray’s green basin to the dusty outback, well, I waltzed my Matilda all over” (lines 1-2). They are telling the story of their idyllic lives before the war, when they were individuals who loved and cherished their lives. Then, harsh reality put a halt to their tranquil existence and they were asked to step up to their manly duty of fighting in the war.
During the war, Bogle’s narrator speaks of being “butchered like lambs at the slaughter” and how the Turks “in five minutes flat, [had] blown [them] all to hell” (lines 8, 10). Bogle is alluding to The Gallipoli Campaign and the unsuccessfully attempted invasion of Turkey. The attack was devastating, and numerous lives were lost. For some, like the Bogle’s narrator, the life that was left was worse than being dead: “When I woke up in my hospital bed,/ and saw what it had done, well I wished I was dead. Never knew there was worse things than dyin’” (lines 16-17).
Bogle’s experience varied greatly from McCutcheon’s, who in the midst of bloodshed and utter animosity witnessed a miraculous event: the joining of two opposing sides in a symbolic song. “Stille Nacht” was sung together with “Silent Night” erasing any cultural, racial and religious differences between the people fighting in this war. All that was left was humanity in its purest form. Right there, on no man’s land, the two opposing sides offered each other the hand of peace and for one blissful moment, forgot that there was a war raging on. They were not enemies anymore, they were all brothers, sharing liquor on a cold night, enjoying the company of one another, telling stories of their families and loved ones and treating one another to chocolates and cigarettes. But, as the old saying goes that all good things come to an end, and so ended this blissful night: “Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more./ With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war” (line 33). The magic was over. It was as if they stopped being human, but transformed into mere killing machines yet again.
The finalization of the war experience differs greatly for Bogle, because he did not witness anything miraculous during the war, and in addition, he returns home a cripple. His words that there will not be any more waltzing Matilda’s for him serve as a potent symbol of what he had lost in the war. Like many other crippled and maimed people, he returns home not even realizing what it was he was fighting for, what it was he lost his mobility for. The times pass and the younger people look bewilderingly at the old soldiers, asking what it is they are marching for, a question which, until the very end, remains unanswered.
McCutcheon returns home with a hopeless gleam of a lesson learned well. His life continues where it had left off: “In Liverpool I dwell,” but it is a different life, marred by his war experiences and visions of people dying in horrible pain (line 41). Despite being fortunate enough to return in one piece, like Bogle, he has seen the true meaning of war. Those who decide about the war are never the ones who return from it devoid of their limbs, hearing, eyesight. For these people, soldiers are just machines, dehumanized vehicles of weaponry that shed blood on command.
In the end, both songs strongly oppose war and uphold the belief that it is never the answer. Violence only brings more violence and can never result in peace. Men, young and old, who go to war, urged by the government’s erroneous beliefs, always return physically and psychologically maimed, and no victory can aid them.
References:
Bogle, Eric. And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, 1971. MP3.
Dinstein, Yoram. War, Aggression and Self-Defense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print.
McCutcheon. Christmas in the Trenches. Winter Solstice, 1984. MP3.
