"The Boys Who Won't Come Home"
by Henry Burr

Just as we had begun with songs of mothers denying their sons to the army, "The Boys Who Won't Come Home" ends by reflecting the callous treatment of those who gave all and then were forgotten. "My boy," the mother of the lyric says, "was one of those who went away / He was my pride and joy." The correlation between that phrase and the lyrics of Al Bryan's anti-war hymn of 1915 are not coincidental. "He gave his life to Uncle Sam," the song goes on, "he's sleeping o'er the foam" (the euphemistic use for death in Europe are remnants of the fantasy existence that the war created). "So while you're cheering, don't forget the boys who won't come home" is the end of her plaint. This movement from mother to mother is the closing of a circle. Mothers tried to deny their sons to the war, failed, and now they try to assure their remembrance by the crowd cheering live, marching, polished sons who have come home. This mother seems doomed, also, to failure. The accompaniment by a brass band at the tempo of a dirge and the violin-harp duet in the bridge set the appropriate mood, but history, to paraphrase ancient wisdom, is written by the living. The good that men do does not live after them, and the fantasy that was the Great War, in the years from 1919 to 1929, deteriorated into a grasping need to recover that euphoria in the face of denial and deprivation.

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