The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken: Second in a Series

There's nothing wrong with your computer screen. These faded faces are all that remain of this image, at least the copy that's posted on the Pier A monument marking the spot where America's troops left to fight in what was then known not as "World War I" but as "The Great War" or "The War to End All Wars."

Maybe that's why these guys were smiling: they believed they were going off not just to fight a war, but to end war itself.

Like the faces of these doughboys, memories of that war have faded with time, and now, more than 86 years after those young men got on the boat to Europe, few veterans remain to tell the tale. Nobody even remembers why they were called doughboys in the first place; you'll find a few theories here.

"Over There" was one of the most popular war songs of the day; it and others are immortalized in the Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection at the University of South Carolina. Bruccoli fought in eight major battles and never fully recovered from the serious wounds he received. His son Matthew J. Bruccoli, better known for being the world's foremost expert on the life and work of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, funded the project as a way of honoring his father's memory.

I heard another popular World War I song one night a few years ago in a small Bohemian village (Bohemia is part of the Czech Republic, which was once part of Czechoslovakia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before "The Great War.") One of the very best books about that war, or any war, is the hilarious picaresque novel The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek. And in my opinion, the best film on the subject is the original All Quiet on the Western Front. That's the 1930 version, and the trenches where the movie doughboys fought are now the site of Fashion Island, the most upscale of many upscale shopping malls in Orange County, California.

Back to that night in Bohemia: I was at a party at the village firehouse, a party with a live band: drummer, accordionist, violin, various horns, the youngest of them in his 70s, and these guys were polka-ing hardy. They insisted that their guests share a drink, in this case a greenish liqueur that turned out to be absinthe. After our toast, the drummer, who spoke not a word of English, began to sing:

"It's a long way to Tipperary,
It's a long way to go
It's a long way to Tipperary
It's a long way to go
It's a long way to Tipperary
It's a long way to go..."

That was the only part he remembered. He then explained, in Czech, of course, that the Americans who had come through the village in that war had taught him the song. He had waited more than seven decades, through the Nazi Germany years, through Communism, for the chance to sing it to, and with, Americans once more.

I didn't know any more of the song than he did, but that didn't matter. We sang and sang and sang those same lines over and over, until it was time for the next round of absinthe.

We didn't sing "Over There," that night, but perhaps it will enjoy a revival in this century, because whether there's an actual war with Iraq or not, more than a quarter million Yanks are already in the region, they won't come back till it's over over there, and some won't be coming back at all.

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:25 PM

10.3.03