"Fun in Flanders—Part 2"
by Lieutenant Gitz Rice and Henry Burr
Mar. 1918 Victor record supplement from the Archeophone Records collection |
"Fun in Flanders" is more a skit than a song, and has a long history in British recording before it was Americanized, but it includes snatches of several popular war songs. It is three minutes of life in the trench. We hear the troops entertain themselves with homemade instruments, look forward, oh my, to their daily ration of rum (a fact of war life long buried by veterans and the government alike), and they indulge in a black humor that mirrors their fatalistic outlook on life under the gun. But all taken together, it is not much more than a short dramatic piece such as put on stage to entertain in the popular theater. At the end of "Flanders," the troops march away to be relieved, leaving the war for another troop and freeing themselves from that care. It is as close to a happy-ever-after ending as such an episode could have. No one dies, everyone goes back alive and no one is left "waiting for shrapnel to put [them] to sleep."
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