"On Patrol in No Man's Land"
by Lieutenant Noble Sissle, with Lieut. Jim Europe's 369th U.S. Inf. ("Hell Fighters") Band
Record courtesy of Clarence Johnson |
"Fun in Flanders" and "No Man's Land" approach the target audience from the direction of realism. Noble Sissle's lyric in "No Man's Land" as accurately as the public probably would accept, depicts, in small, the progress of a patrol in "No Man's Land." We hear a gas attack, we feel the anxiety in the singer's voice when he tells his troops to get the mask on right, we hear a reasonable representation of a German Minenwerfer (mortar), and as no where else on record, we hear the chaos of a frontal charge. We hear Jim Europe's band recreate a bayonet charge and hear the shouts "Now, boys, . . . stick 'em with the bayonet, boys. Ram it to 'em." For the uninitiated, that's pretty grim stuff in a popular amusement. The realism continues when, at the end of the attack, we hear what are the plaintive calls of the German soldiers crying "kamerad, kamerad" for mercy. In any other venue, this might be realism. But the accompaniment of the song has the sound and feel of the opening of a minstrel walkaround or a vaudeville sketch. The instrumentation is not martial brass band but is more like a semi-ragtime cake walk.
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