Singing was a pronounced feature of the Great War, 1914-18. Soldiers sang in camp, on the march, in the trenches and wherever else they felt the need. 1st Lieut. Elmer Hess of the 15th Field Artillery wrote in his diary:

‘The battalion moved again to the front.  The left side of the road was filled with trucks, ammunition, retreating French soldiers, field hospitals-all in great confusion.  We marched until midnight with practically no rest and on into the morning.  We could hear the songs sung by the American artillery marching ahead.’

Many of these songs were made by the soldiers themselves. They were based on their experiences and attitudes to the war and to the authority of officers and were circulated among themselves without commercial involvement or intention. Rifleman Patrick MacGill of the London Irish fought at Loos and left a brief but evocative account of such songs and their singers. He wrote:

‘Their origin is lost; the songs have arisen like old folk tales, spontaneous choruses that voice the moods of a moment and of many moments which are monotonously alike. Most of the verse is of no import; the crowd has no sense of poetic values; it is the singing alone which gives expression to the soldier’s soul.’

One of MacGill’s comrades observed the essential difference between trench songs and those sung elsewhere: ‘”These ‘ere songs are no good in England,” my friend Rifleman Bill Teake remarks. “They ‘ave too much guts in them.”’

Here are some of the most widely sung songs among British, Canadian, Australian and, later, American troops in the trenches …

One of the earliest and eventually most widely-heard trench ditties of the war was known variously as Fred Karno’s Army’ or ‘The Ragtime Army’. Sung to the hymn tune ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, its lyrical variations were many, though the core of satirical self-deprecation remained the same. Ragtime was a form of popular music of the period and Fred Karno was a renowned comic, whose crazy stage antics were the perfect metaphor of the madness in which the soldiers found themselves:

We are Fred Karno’s army, the ragtime infantry,

We cannot shoot, we cannot fight, what bloody use are we?

And when we get to Berlin, the Kaiser he will say:

‘Hoch, hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody useless lot

Are the ragtime infantry’.

A Royal Welch Fusilier wrote home in December 1917 describing the songs he heard in the trenches. He thought they expressed ‘the men’s stoical cynicism, which is always cheerily, and usually blasphemously expressed’. He gave the lyrics of ‘The Bells of Hell’:

The bells of hell ring ting-a-ling-a-ling

For you but not for me;

The herald angels sing ting-a-ling-a-ling,

They’ve got the goods for me.

Oh death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling

Oh grave, thy victoree!

The bells of hell ring ting-a-ling-a-ling

For you but not for me.

A whizzbang was any kind of artillery shell, as in the trench parody of a pre-war pop song titled ‘Hush, Here Comes the Dream Man’:

Hush, here comes a whizzbang,

Hush, here comes a whizzbang,

Now, you soldiers get down those stairs,

Down in your dug-outs and say your prayers.

Hush, here comes a whizzbang,

And it’s making straight for you,

You’ll see all the wonders of no-man’s land

If a whizzbang – crump! – hits you.

One of the popular trench ditties of the war, referring to the enemy as Alleymand (Allemand) from the French for German, described what each side did when the other was erecting barbed wire defences:

Keep your head down, Alleymand,

Keep your head down, Alleymand,

Last night in the pale moonlight

I saw you, I saw you,

You were fixing your barbed wire

So we opened rapid fire

Keep your head down, Alleymand.

A widespread trench ditty summed up the effect that machine guns had on morale:

Machine guns they rattle, Jack Johnston’s they roar,

I don’t want to fight with these Fritz anymore,

Take me over the sea where the Germans they can’t get at me,

O my, I don’t want to die

I just want to go home.

A soldier parody of the pre-war hit song ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’, this ditty was known not only to Canadian, but also Australian troops and would probably have been sung by British soldiers as well. ‘Jack Johnson’s’ were large, loud shells that left dark smoke in their wake, named after the African American boxer of the period.

I’ve a little wet home in the trench,

Where the rainstorms continually drench,

There’s a dead cow close by,

With her hoofs towards the sky

And she gives off a beautiful stench.

Underneath in the place of a floor,

There’s a mass of wet mud and some straw,

And the ‘Jack Johnsons’ tear

Thro’ the rain sodden air,

O’er my little wet home in the trench.

There are snipers who keep on the go,

So you must keep your napper down low,

And their star shells at night

Make a deuce of a light,

Which causes the language to flow.

Then bully and biscuits we chew,

For its [sic] days since we tasted a stew,

But with shells dropping there,

There’s no place to compare

With my little wet home in the trench.

Some ditties were even more directly critical of the war and those running it, as in the Australian version of some short but pointed couplets:

Our officer’s out on his favourite stunt,

Taking us out for a souvenir hunt,

Taking us out in front of the wire,

Getting us killed by our own rifle fire.

We used to be fifty-odd non-coms and men,

We used to be fifty but now we ae ten,

And if this cross-eyed war doesn’t end ruddy soon,

There’ll be no Aussies left in our purple platoon

There were few subjects that the Tommies, Poilu’s, Diggers and, later, the Doughboys, did not subject to musical mistreatment. Usually their ditties were to the tune of popular songs of the war or immediate pre-war period, such as ‘Tipperary’ and were often sexually suggestive:

Comments on the perceived inequities between officers behind the liens and the fighting men at the front were not uncommon in trench songs. In one or another of many versions, this one was very popular:

The fresh troops arriving from America in 1917 were full of the same confident enthusiasm that the British troops had initially possessed. An American ditty to the tune of ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie’ expressed a no-nonsense approach to winning the war by finishing off, or ‘canning’, the German leader:

We’re off to can the Kaiser,

Hurray! Hurray!

In Kaiserland we’ll take our stand,

Until we can the Kaiser.

Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go and can the Kaiser.

The following year allied troops did exactly that.

MORE: Graham Seal, The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

KEYWORDS: World War One; Great War; trench songs; soldier songs