What comes through most strongly from this production is the voice of the ordinary soldier and citizens. His (and her) fears and experiences, loves, reflections, moods, humour, and some surprising preoccupations, are represented through the works of a wide range of authors and musicians. The result is a profoundly moving experience.

Broadly, cd 1 recalls the earlier years of the war, and cd2 the later. Hilary Bell, well known traditional folk singer, is the female soloist and hers is the first voice to be heard in the song ‘The Unawakened Hills’, a sweet lilt about the beauties of home, undisturbed by a war, while the dead lie sleeping in the fields of France. John Nichol appears next in his first guise as ‘Mr. William Beattie, Veteran Knitter’. Mr. Beattie, an elderly man, sits knitting and bragging of his skill as he knits socks for the soldiers: ‘A comfortable soldier is worth ten wha’s persishin’ with the cold’.

‘Somewhere in France’ is a wistful flute solo, and is followed by a sad little letter to Charlie, a pony now serving with the colours in France. The farmer who owns him was proud to send him (and got £50 for it), but now misses him. ‘Home, Boys, Home’ is sung by silver voiced Hilary Bell, a work song about the men coming home at sunset. The singer clearly sees and hears them coming along the leafy lanes in the twilight, but of course she doesn’t really as they are all away in France. Bell manages to permeate the chorus with a warm and poignant longing.

It’s the turn of the music hall next with two renditions of routines by Sir Harry Lauder performed by John Nichol. In ‘Granny’s Laddie’, he chuckles and jokes about just coming back from the front, and praises the courage of the Scots and the grit of the boys who serve, the boys who will be able to boast that they were one of the ones who went. The second routine is similar in tone and designed to encourage enlistment. ‘The Slacker’ is in the same vein as a mother gently chides her son to enlist or he will not be able to look in the faces of those who served when they come home. ‘Thank God I Went’ is another cheery jingoistical encouragement to sign up.

All these pieces refer to after the war, the admiration of girls, the pride of future children and so on, and never the actual experience of war. But all the same, recruits aren’t entirely fooled. ‘’Raw Recruiting’ is a dramatic monologue by a young man waiting for his friends outside the recruiting office for his friends who all agreed to sign up together in the pub the night before. His thoughts and fears are simply articulated and lent a sombre note by a quiet voice which repeats ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’ And as he waits in the sleeting wind, he discovers he has more than one kind of cold feet. ‘Mothers, Daughters, Wives’ is about the pain of women who lost fathers in the Great War and then sons in the next.

‘Sergeant Major On Parade’ is a humorous sketch of a magnificent Sergeant-Major who impresses spectators with his impact on raw recruits on the parade ground. Not so humorous is the next Sergeant Major who is engaged in training shivering recruits in the art of killing with a bayonet. ‘This is no a blade for shaving…’ And on he goes to deliver a powerful lesson in twisting and turning blades.

The tension of that piece is relieved by a sweet and simple love song ‘My Laddie In Khaki and Gold’, and then by a comical dialogue between two soldiers in ‘Facing The Enemy’. The soldiers have dug trenches, laid wire, killed lice, had trench fever, but they have never actually seen a German, live or dead. They imagine what the enemy looks like (they believe their ears stick out and that’s why they have helmets with sloping sides) with hilarious results.

Bell sings that well known song ‘If you want to see the general’ in a racing jeering tempo, all down the ranks, until she reaches ‘If you want to see the private…he’s hanging on the old barbed wire’. The piano music stops at this verse and the tempo slows to a kind of stunned bewilderment, a remarkable conclusion to the first cd.

‘Postcards To The Front’ is a selection of correspondence, oddly formal in their attempt to convey emotion, from people who are perhaps not used to writing letters. ‘Letters from The Front’ are from Sandy to Margaret and Sylvia and Mother, eternally grateful for gifts of chocolate and cigarettes and modestly boasting of his exploits at the front (heroic accounts to Margaret and Sylvia, a truthful account to Mother). He cannot help rejoicing to Mother that he has met a pretty nurse who will supply him with chocolate. Poor Margaret and Sylvia!

Robert Service’s narrative poem ‘The Haggis Of Private McPhee’ is a hilarious and also touching account of the lengths two Scots soldiers will go to get their hands on a wonderful haggis sent to the front for Burns’s Night. This is one of the highlights of the cd and it is most wonderfully recited by Nichol.

John Buchan’s war poetry is perhaps not so well known as his novels, but it should be. There are four poems of his on the cd. ‘The Kirk Bell’ is a first person narrative of a heavy barrage and an attack on enemy lines. In the distance, the soldier hears the kirk bell ringing and the sound transports him home to a Scottish Sabbath and the comfort and beauty of the quiet village he comes from. The bell takes him so close to home that he scarcely notices what is happening around him. The poem is full of a longing that is palpable, as is ‘Sweet Argos’. Here, a soldier explains why he is fighting. It is love for home and family, of Ettrick, and the quiet places. He longs to live and see it all again, but if death takes him, he will be all the quicker home. ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ looks forward to the end of the war and the resumption of the soldier’s old life. Not for him stress and unsettlement. He’s going back to his roses and his bowling and his walks through the glen with Davy his brother. Evenings with Davy are beautifully evoked – and then the killer last lines.

‘But Davy’s deid.
We happed him doon by Beaumont toon
And the half of my heart’s in the mool beside him.’

And the pleasant dream of things being as they were before is gone.

‘Screens’ by Winifred Letts is a short poem about a young soldier put behind screens in the hospital because he’s dying. It is a very stark scene as he lies alone and the other men play cards.

Starker still is the beautiful lament ‘O Flanders Field’ (adapted from the old lament for Flodden). Bell’s unaccompanied voice is the embodiment of sorrow and misery. John Buchan pops up again with ‘The Return’, a poem recited to the accompaniment of Elgar’s Nimrod – he describes ‘the ruthless hand of war’ as it can be seen in the expressions and faces of those who came back. Eric Bogle’s Private Willie MacBride appears in ‘No Man’s Land’.

‘Only Remembered For What We Have Done’ was the piece which affected me most deeply. It comprises a Sunday School piano playing a Sunday School hymn, and a strangely disembodied solitary voice:

‘Fading away like the stars of the morning…
….Then shall we pass from this earth and its toiling…
…Only Remembered for what we have done.’

I have played this track over and over. It haunts me. ‘Who’ll Sing The Anthems? And who’ll tell the story?’ the singer goes on to ask.

The answer is John Nichol.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.