Pop quiz, assholes: which Union Jack T-shirt clad public school educated punk rocker's far more successful** post-punk band's second album closes with an Eric Bogle cover that's been played on cheap or stolen guitars by newly-discharged angloglot veterans after every conflict since that in Vietnam during which, in 1971, it was written? [[ **than the punk-era 'Nipple Erectors' aka 'The Nips', which he fronted from 1978. ]] I used to strum a bit of guitar and caterwaul over it, and the only song I've yet to fail to screw up the vocal of in performance - by crying, basically - is Peebles-born Bogle's 'And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda'. Sometimes I broke earlier, but the line that always got me was the one about faces being turned away: sung from the inside, it's wrenching. So, this being ANZAC day and with yet another war for control of the Black Sea raging even as you read this, please spare six-minutes-and-change to listen to, say, <https://www.youtube.com/embed/_IcomIB-F-I>, performed live in 2013. Alternatively, if you literally only have five minutes, try 1985's <https://www.youtube.com/embed/gsXEGvX_ksI> where, interestingly, he omits the cruellest** verses - possibly for the same reason - and when, like me, he had real teeth. In both senses, probably. (And that's your final clue, kids.) [[ **April being the cruellest month haha. YouTube's million-view (ie million-ear) studio version is online too, at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKURhqmSLmM>, which has links to several versions of Bogle performing the song himself. ]] Musically, Bogle's competition third-placer (source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Band_Played_Waltzing_Matilda#Background>) sounds like a downbeat parade march but, actually, only the last verse is about a parade: the others are about fighting. Or not fighting. Bogle wrote it in 1971 during the Vietnam War but, being Australian by then, he set it in 1915. Wikipedia incorrectly says that it's set in the Battle of Gallipoli but the lyrics refute that: the Allies made two attempts to win control of the Dardanelles Strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean - at Gallipoli in April and Suvla Bay in August - and, although the protagonist mentions the Gallipoli Peninsular early on, he later makes clear that he was wounded at Suvla. All this was Churchill's idea: he was high-up in the admiralty at the time and, war having only broken out the previous year, Russia was already critically short of shell. Then as now, (hilariously enough) Russia's only warm-water port was at Sevastepol on the Black Sea's Crimean Peninsular. Famously, Germany lost the first world war for exactly the same reason that it lost the second: because it fought on two fronts, east and west, at the same time. But, to fight, Russia needed not just personnel (sixteen million of whom were killed in the second, by the way), but artillery shell, too. And Churchill knew that it was hell's own job to ship shell through the northern passage to St Petersburg so he figured to de-mine the Dardanelles Straight and ship materiel past Constantinople (now Istanbul) into the Black Sea - the problem being that to de-mine a fairly narrow waterway you have to clear the banks of enemy artillery. Hence the two British-led but largely ANZAC-manned 1915 Bosphorus campaigns, both of which failed completely with terrible loss of life. Despite resupply, the Allied assault on Suvla Bay in August was never very likely to succeed, but the earlier surprise attack on Gallipoli in April failed for almost the most ridiculous reason imaginable: having landed unopposed, the British commanders merely ordered camp to be made on the beach instead of capturing the overlooking high ground on which the Turks wisely placed their artillery the very next day. Other spectacular examples of British command expertise in that same year include the Battle of Loos in northern France when, on 26 September, nearly 10,000 Brits spent three-and-a-half hours attacking German positions, achieving absolutely nothing but suffering 8,246 casualties - during which the Germans suffered no casualties whatsoever. Quite brilliant.
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