Music in the Trenches: A Christmas Essay
And in despair I bowed my head:
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christmas Bells
The recitation books of the late-nineteenth century inevitably contain a selection of patriotic texts, necessary for the period’s rituals of memorialization and national pride. Civic events held in town squares, cemeteries, and school auditoriums took place on the fourth of July, Memorial Day, or the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln. Many of the poems recited at such events have not worn well. The overblown praise of bold boys in blue, the saccharine tales of little drummer boys, the sentimental stories of dying soldiers and their mothers seem naïve and clichéd now. It is difficult to imagine who could have penned such texts or espoused such sentiments. The symbolic reverberations of the acts of heroism they hailed—old Barbara Frietchie’s declaration, “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag”—are somehow lost to us. Given how many humorous parodies of Whittier’s Barbara Frietchie were also found in poetry anthologies, we might speculate that people of the time found the self-sacrificing sentiments as suspect as we do. Yet for the most part, darker visions, such as Longfellow’s 1863 Christmas Bells, do not find regularly find their way into volumes declaring the glories of victory and national pride.
Every now and then, the harsh realities of long ago wars surface in this literature. The cover of George M. Baker’s Grand Army Speaker of 1888 shows a Civil War veteran missing his left arm, with a wooden stick to replace his right leg. In the anonymously published poem, “Searching for the Slain,” a mother and her daughter-in-law go out on to the battlefield at night to find the body of their loved one, stepping carefully amidst moaning, dying soldiers. The sights of war’s carnage are masked by darkness, yet horrifying all the same. These sorts of portraits of war become more prominent after World War I. A little anthology published in 1918, Wartime and Patriotic Selections for Recitation and Reading by Carleton B. Case, represents a moment of upheaval. Within its olive and khaki paperback covers are still the traditional patriotic and sentimental texts about the flag and “Somebody’s Darling” from earlier wars. But one can also find the hard, tight poetry of the modern age being born: the flowery language of the past cannot capture the terrors of running from mustard gas or the degradation of a generation of young men dying in muddy trenches.
Case’s anthology contains a short poem by Frederick Niven, called “A Carol in Flanders,” that tells of the famous World War I Christmas Truce, where opponents set aside their rifles and met each other between the trenches. The events of this day have been celebrated numerous times since, mythologized in books, songs, movies (Joyeux Noel), and even an opera (Silent Night). This moment of hope seems modern to us, as it comes not with calls to bravery, but a pointed recognition of the huge forces that individuals are only sometimes able to transcend. Niven’s poem tells us that “Not all the Emperors and Kings, Financiers, and they / Who rule us could prevent these things—For it was Christmas Day.” John McCutcheon’s song, Christmas in the Trenches, penned almost seventy years later, ends with the similar reminder, “That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame.”
One theme in the poetry of war is not limited to a particular historical period: in many stories it is music that brings the sides together. As McCutcheon’s song describes it:
Well I was lying with my messmates on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound.
Says I, “Now listen up, me boys!” each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
“He’s singing bloody well, you know!” my partner says to me
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in in harmony
The cannons rested silent, and the gas cloud rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war.
Well as soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” struck up some lads from Kent.
The next they sang was “Stille Nacht.” “Tis ‘Silent Night’,” says I,
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky.
Looking back to poetic evocations of war in the nineteenth century, one can find the same story—the power of music to transform people into a single community. Nineteenth-century elocutionists regularly recited a work that went under the title, “Music on the Rappahannock.” Like the Christmas Truce, the Civil-War-era tale is based in truth. Capt. George E. Pingree recalled:
“One evening while I was on picket duty on the Rappahannock before the battle of Fredericksburg, a rebel band came down to the river and played ‘Dixie.’ A brigade band on our side responded with ‘John Brown’s Body.’ The rebel band retaliated with the ‘Bonny Blue Flag,’ and our band came at them with the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ So they played back and forth at each other until late in the evening. Suddenly all music ceased, and silence reigned; when all at once a musician on our side played splendidly on a key bugle ‘Home, Sweet Home.’ As the sweet sounds rose and fell on the evening air, and were wafted down the Falmouth Heights and over the Rappahannock, all listened intently, and I don’t believe there was a dry eye in all those assembled thousands. For a moment or two after the bugle ceased a dead silence reigned, broken then by a wild exultant cheer from both armies.”
“Music on the Rappahannock” was heard across America, including at the sorts of patriotic events where the poems described earlier were heard as well. What text performers used is difficult to determine, as there were at least five poems published about the incident. In some versions, the soldiers, like those of World War I, sing to each other. In John Thompson’s Music at Camp, they listen to the bugle playing Home, Sweet Home.
And yet once more the bugle sang
No shout upon the evening rang:
There reigned a holy quiet.
The sad slow stream its noiseless flood
Poured o’er the glistening pebbles;
All silent now the Yankees stood,
All silent stood the Rebels.
C. C. Somerville’s similar Home, Sweet, Home ends by stressing the men’s unity:
Then lo! By mutual sympathy there rose
A shout tremendous, forgetting they were foes,
A simultaneous shout, which came from every voice,
And seemed to make the very heavens rejoice.
The period’s reciters accompanied their performances of these poems with the actual music described in them. When the poem climaxed with the universal anthem, Home, Sweet Home, heard by the soldiers, audiences heard it too.
The “Music on the Rappahannock” texts, couched as they are in language that may not speak as eloquently to us now, nonetheless carry a message told and retold by subsequent generations. Not only on both sides of the Rappahannock River or across the trenches of wartime Europe, but also across space and time are human beings the same. Perhaps there will always be war and forces that lead people to turn against one another. But there will also always be poetry and music made by human beings to share a vision of something different, something better: of peace on earth, goodwill to all. Merry Christmas.
John McCutcheon sings Christmas in the Trenches
The King’s Singers sing Stille Nacht
Richard Conrad sings Home, Sweet Home
On the other side of the world, Kiri Te Kanawa sings Home, Sweet Home in her native tongue.
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