Beautiful songs from terrible times

SOME years ago, I found myself amid the spring fields of Flanders, standing in the little cemetery of No Man's Cot, a mere 79 graves compared to the tens of thousands of headstones that bristle elsewhere from the undulating farmlands of the Ypres Salient.

I was being shown round by Piet Chielens, co-ordinator of the In Flanders Fields museum in the magnificently reconstructed Cloth Hall of nearby Ypres. As we contemplated these graves of Argylls, Black Watch, Seaforths and others, a mere fraction of the 325,000 Allied casualties (and 260,000 German) sustained during the third Battle of Ypres – otherwise known as Passchendaele, Chielens observed that some of them would have been comrades-in-arms of Pipe Major John McLellan of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who was moved to compose The Bloody Fields of Flanders, the stirring retreat march that four decades later would provide the tune for Hamish Henderson's Scots internationale, The Freedom Come All Ye.

A man with an ear for Scottish music, Chielens went on to recount, as larks whirred above us, how he conducted Dick Gaughan round the same area, an excursion that prompted the singer to write Why Old Men Cry. Both Gaughan's song and McLellan's pipe tune can be heard, along with much else that echoes from the killing fields of Flanders, in an ambitious double-CD project just released by the Greentrax label, Far, Far From Ypres.

Already finding its way into shops at war museums and battle sites and, one suspects, a potentially useful tool for classrooms, Far, Far From Ypres is a compilation of songs, poems and music from the First World War. One CD is devoted largely to the soldiers' songs and music hall favourites of the period, while the other features modern song-writers' responses to what was referred to in its day – with laughable optimism – as the "war to end all wars".

The project arose after Ian Green of Greentrax and his wife, June, visited the area's First World War cemeteries as guests of Des Brogan of Mercat Tours, an Edinburgh company that organises battlefield visits. Green had previously discussed the possibility of an album of First World War songs with Mercat, but the visit clinched it. "It doesn't matter how many books you read," he says, "it doesn't hit home until you see the hundreds and hundreds of grave stones, and the monuments engraved with thousands of names of soldiers whose bodies have never been recovered. When I got back I couldn't think of anything else, for days on end"

Green reckons the recording to be the first of its kind to come from a Scottish perspective, bearing in mind that we lost a higher proportion per head of population to the conflict than any other country in the British Empire – in his sleeve notes, Mercat's Jim Paris reminds us that, despite constituting only a tenth of Britain's population, Scotland suffered a fifth of British losses.

Yet out of this carnage come these jaunty soldiers' songs, ranging from the ever-popular Long Way to Tipperary and the ribald sarcasm of Oh It's A Lovely War to the grisly humour of Hush! Here Comes a Whizz Bang or The Old Battalion ("Hanging on the old barbed wire"), while the sentimental favourites of the home front include Roses of Picardy and Keep the Home Fires Burning. These are interspersed with some appropriate tunes from the Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming, and poems read by Radio Scotland's Iain Anderson, including John McCrae's famous In Flanders Fields, with its strangely ambivalent mixture of elegy and exhortation to carry on the fight. A crackle of old vinyl introduces Harry Lauder with Keep Right On to the End of the Road, which he wrote after hearing of the death of his son, John, in the trenches.

Retrospective views include such classics as Eric Bogle's Green Fields of France, as sung by the Corries, Bogle himself with his universally recorded And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Roddy MacLeod giving a Gael's view of the nightmare in An Eala Bhan – "The White Swan", and Robin Laing's swaggering rendition of Geordie McCrae, about Edinburgh's famous "McCrae's Battalion" of the Royal Scots, which included many Hearts footballers and other players. The most recent song is Steven Palmer's Black is the Sun, sung over a dark-sounding sampled vocal drone and shot through with anguish.

The soldiers' songs are reprised with gusto by the "Scottish Pals Singers" (a reference to the localised "pals' battalions" who enlisted en masse), an assembly of such folk scene stalwarts as Ian Bruce, Fiona Forbes, Tich Frier and members of the McCalmans, including Ian McCalman who produced the CD and admits that he became "obsessed" by the project. As he researched the songs, he found himself discerning patterns of increasing disillusionment, as the troops' conditions worsened and the assumption that it would be "all over by Christmas" evaporated. "I think this project affected everyone who was involved in it," he comments.

How did he and his fellow-singers feel at taking on songs that one might describe as the property of a previous generation that gone through something none of them had ever experienced and possibly couldn't, begin to imagine? "I did feel like an imposter sometimes," he admits, "almost like a voyeur in some obscene drama. Our job was to record these songs, but sometimes you realised that you were dealing with reality and not just some pretty little song that I or one of the other singer-songwriters had written."

They may have found it a humbling job, but it has been a vital one. An archivist once told me that as the last of its veterans passed from our ken, without the preservation of its essential human history – oral accounts, photographs, letters, memorabilia – the Great War was at risk of becoming mere "archaeology". This CD preserves a whiff of the spirit of those terrible times.