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Finding peace through poetry

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Soldiers in the First World War amused themselves with old-fashioned entertainments.

Wind-up gramophones were about as high-tech as it got. The war happened at a time when writing and reading poetry were popular pastimes, as were sing-a-longs with acoustic accompaniments such as concertinas and harmonica.

The popular songs about the war paint a fairly complete portrait of that awful conflict. Some of this music was examined during a Peace Poetry event in Port Dover Thursday night.

“There were a lot of jingoistic, patriotic, go-get-'em songs,” folk singer Ian Bell, a past curator of the Harbour Museum in Port Dover, told the 40 in attendance.

“But those songs aren’t the songs that survived. The ones that survived longed for the war to be over or regretted that the war ever began in the first place.”

When the First World War broke out in August, 1914, recruits in Norfolk County and elsewhere were told it would be over by Christmas.

The war actually lasted more than four years and claimed millions of lives. A total of 250 people from Norfolk died before the Armistice was declared in November, 1918.

Along the way, soldiers endured dangerous, hellacious living conditions at the front under the command of officers who often viewed them as little better than cannon fodder.

As such, Bell says the most popular songs in the trenches tended to be subversive. The more officers tried to suppress them, the louder soldiers sang them.

One of the songs Bell performed was called Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire.

The simple song tells of the officer class and where a soldier might look if they were trying to find them. Proposed locations include passed out on the canteen floor, drinking the privates’ rum, pinning a medal to themselves in front of a mirror, or miles behind the line away from the fighting.

At the end, the narrator speaks about his battalion mates and where you would look if you were trying to find them. The answer: In no-man’s land “hanging on the old barbed wire.”

George Clarke, poet laureate of Toronto and former poet laureate for all of Canada, picked up that theme when he spoke about the end of the Second World War and how the British people voted out war-time leader Winston Churchill at the first opportunity.

Clarke said soldiers returning from the Second World War recalled how their fathers’ generation was put through the grinder 30 years earlier and then left to their own devices upon their return.

“The soldiers that came back from the Second World War made sure that didn’t happen to them,” Clarke said. “So the first thing they did was vote themselves a Labour government.”

The Peace Poetry event is part of a year of remembrance in Norfolk marking the 100th anniversary of the end of First World War. The Norfolk Public Library Board also mounted the event in recognition of Poetry Month in Canada.

John Lee of Port Dover, poet laureate of Norfolk County, kicked things off Tuesday with his annual poetry reading at Norfolk council. Lee also read several of his poems at Thursday’s event.

“'Lest we forget’ always reminds me of the sentiment 'Never again,’” Lee said. “I hope we can leave here tonight giving off the feeling -- the vibe – that warfare represents a failure of the human imagination.”

MSonnenberg@postmedia.com 

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