The Green Fields Of France Song Analysis

Musicians often use their songs as a vehicle to make cultural or political observations. A persistent trope in modern music has been the anti-war song. Often when a song’s message strikes a certain cord, is so powerful that its message is perennial, other artists will issue their own renditions — covers. Eric Bogle’s“The Green Fields of France” is one such song. This is a song that has been covered by everyone from The Clancy Brothers to the Dropkick Murphys, always maintaining its serious and solemn tone. Originally written by Scottish folk singer Eric Bogle in 1975 after he visited the military cemeteries of the First World War in Flanders and Northern France the song was launched to popularity by the Irish band the Fureys in 1979. In …show more content…
He asks, “And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind/In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined”, Bogle first puts forth the best possible scenario for the fallen’s memory. The best the slain boy could have, Bogle goes on, would be if “to that loyal heart you 're forever nineteen”. Of course nothing is certain in war and as in the first verse, Bogle also offers a much darker alternative: “Or are you a stranger without even a nam/Forever enshrined behind some old glass pane/An old photograph torn,battered, and stained/And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame”. These are the two possibilities for the memory of a slain soldier, forever remembered by their now lost love, or lost completely perhaps only remembered by a ratty old picture. This verse contemplates the negative effects of war on a personal level, on the immediate effect on the soldier’s impact. The second verse goes further than the first in humanizing the tragedy of even just one mans death in war. Not only was he cut down, possibly painfully, in his prime; he also may be completely forgotten not even “living” in the memory of another — completely