"Hello Central, Give Me No Man's Land"
by Edna Brown
Sheet music from the Archeophone Records Collection |
"Hello, Central, Give Me No Man's Land," maybe the sweetest lyric of the war, plays on the novelty of the newfangled telephone coupled with the unstudied naivete of youth as a child calls the operator to reach her daddy in no man's land. "My Daddy's there," she assures the operator, "My mama told me." But hers is no idle curiousity. She goes on to explain, "I want to know why mama starts to weep / When I say now I lay me down to sleep." It is a vignette of every family with a son, father, uncle, or cousin in France, and her innocence is the perfect metaphor for American uncertainty and growing dismay as their men go to the front.
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