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Hidden History: World One One Trench Songs [1]
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Date: 2025-03-18
Today, we remember the First World War as a long drawn-out stalemate that resulted in four years of blood but no gains by anybody—and a peace treaty that did nothing but cause another World War twenty years later. But less often remembered is the fact that the war was one of the most unpopular in history, even among the troops who fought in it.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history. And the troops often expressed their feelings in “trench songs”: dripping with sarcasm, dark humor, and hopelessness. Most of these were parodies that were sung to then-popular tunes of the day, re-written to reflect the brutal realities of life and death in the trenches.
Although a few have become famous, not many of the trench songs from 1914-1918 actually survive today. In both the UK and the US, strict government censorship prevented songs which could be viewed as “critical of the war” from being published or performed, and people who tried it anyway were often arrested. And many of the trench songs were crude and bawdy, offended Edwardian sensibilities, and were banned and suppressed (or were at least attempted to be). The songs we know about now (mostly British) survived only because they were recorded after the war in memoirs and oral histories. Like most folk songs, each has several different versions that changed over time with their own new verses, and there were probably dozens of songs and additional verses of songs which were never written down anywhere and have been lost to history.
DISCLAIMER !!!!!!! If you are easily offended by swearing and/or by some of the most juvenile and crude sexism you will ever hear, some of these songs, uh, may not be for you …
We’re Here Because We’re Here
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Sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”—which every soldier knew—this brutally simple song answered the question on every British soldier’s mind: Why are we here?
It is not known when or where it first appeared, but it was already popular during the Battle of the Somme in July 1916.
I Want to Go Home
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There were various versions of this song, all of them based on a popular music-hall tune of the day. The first versions seem to have appeared among British troops in 1915.
The lyrics in this version refer to “wizzbangs”, which were a type of German artillery shell, and to “Alleymen”, a British slang version of “Allemagne”, the French word for “German”.
Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire
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This bitter song seems to have appeared in the trenches in late 1916 or early 1917, during or after the Battle of the Somme. It was a biting criticism of the British class system in which upper-class high-ranking officers were viewed as privileged and distant from the blood of the trenches, while the lower classes and junior officers were sent to die in waves.
The British Army decided this song was “corrupting” and made several attempts to ban it, but it reflected the attitude of the soldiers at the time, so it kept re-appearing. Some versions were sung to the tune of an anti-British Irish “rebel song”, which gave it an even more defiant tone.
When This Bloody War Is Over
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Sung to the tune of “Take It To The Lord In Prayer”, a well-known hymn of the time, this trench song appeared in 1915 or 1916. Some of the many verses were considered to be “damaging to morale” and a few were held to be outright “subversive”, and the Generals tried several times to ban it.
It would re-appear again towards the end of the Second World War.
I Don’t Want to be a Soldier
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This one appeared early in the war, in 1914, but it really became popular in 1916 when the British Army introduced conscription and forcibly recruited a lot of young men who hadn’t volunteered and didn’t want to be there.
It was also a double-whammy: not only was it blatantly anti-war in sentiment, but the bawdy lyrics were shocking to 1910s British morality. The song was considered both subversive and scandalizing.
Mademoiselle From Armentieres
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Another trench song in the tradition of both “subversive” and “immoral”, this may be one of the most famous songs of the war, though most of the trench verses never get printed today.
It is also one of the few that we know some history for: versions of the tune first appeared in the French Army during the 1830s, resurfaced during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and once again in 1914 at the outbreak of the Great War. It quickly spread from the French Army to the British, who made up most of the iconic verses—reportedly the first English versions were written in 1915 by an Australian-born New Zealand trooper named Cecil Winter. When the Americans entered the war in 1917 they also adopted it and added new verses of their own.
There are dozens of different versions, and the original verses by Winter were “clean”, while the later versions were, uh, decidedly not—they were about as crude as one might expect from a group of 18-year-olds. The new verses also got progressively more critical of the officers and the war as it dragged on. (And the version here contains the prophetic lines; “Just blow your nose and wipe your tears, We’ll all be back in a few short years”.)
Yes, the Generals tried to ban the song.
After the war, a completely scrubbed and laundried version of the song became a popular children’s ditty, usually titled, “Hinky Dinky Parley Voo”.
Do Your Balls Hang Low
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Alrighty then … I could not find the actual full WW1 version of this anywhere on YouTube--although there are a million parodies and short versions on TikTok--so this is a much later version that still contains some of the original lyrics (in the choruses: the verses are modern additions) as they have come down to us. You get the idea.
The tune comes from the old folk song “Turkey in the Straw”.
This one is a marching song and not an anti-war song, but it is remembered as a “trench song” because of a specific historical incident … In August 1916, as the Battle of the Somme was raging, General Douglas Haig, the Commander of the British Expeditionary Force, was inspecting an ammunition supply depot in the rear of the lines when a column of British troops happened to march by on their way to the front, singing an early version of this song. As the story was told in post-war histories, Haig leaned out the window to identify the offending unit just as they reached the lyric, “Can you sling them on your shoulder like a lousy fucking soldier? Do your balls hang low?” His morals outraged, Haig dashed outside, mounted his horse, and rode to the head of the column, where he found the battalion commander cheerily singing along with his men. Leaning down, Haig deadpanned, “I admire your singing voice, colonel, and I like the tune—but you must know that in any circumstances the words are inexcusable!” It made the bawdy marching song famous.
Eventually there were countless versions with numerous verses. By the 1930s, it had been sanitized and bowdlerized and morphed into a children’s song titled “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” which became popular for decades at campfire sing-alongs. It still appears today on children’s television shows. The song also made a very brief appearance (pardon my pun) in 1998 in, of all things, a Canadian Fruit of the Loom underwear commercial (as “Do Your Boys Hang Low?”), which was quickly pulled off the air. The song’s Great War history has now been mostly forgotten.
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