At Britain’s annual festival of remembrance on Nov. 10, America received a moving hat tip from the United Kingdom.
Attended by the queen, Prime Minister Theresa May, and other senior British officials, the festival of remembrance honors Brits killed in war. The event has a special focus on World War I, which between 1914 and 1918 took 2 percent of the British population, or more than 1.1 million lives. (If applied to today’s U.S. population, those losses would amount to more than 6.5 million people.)
It was a truly awful cost that engendered the appeasement policies of the 1930s, and a later British military discomfort with the more aggressive tendencies of American commanders such as George Patton. But seeing as this year was the 100th anniversary of World War I’s end, the 2018 festival was a particularly important and somber affair. I finally got around to watching the ceremony last weekend.
That takes us to the U.S. hat tip. While it was not until 1917 that the U.S. joined the allied war effort, Britain has never forgotten the more than 116,000 Americans who gave their lives for European security. In their memory at this year’s festival, the massed bands of the British armed forces played the chorus of George Cohan’s patriotic song “Over There.” Written in 1917 to support U.S. Army recruiting efforts, “Over There” soars with American energy and exceptionalism.
But don’t take my word for it, watch how it played out at the festival.
The chorus embodies the American spirit at its best: energetically courageous, unashamedly patriotic, and deeply moral.
Some may call it silly, jingoistic even, but I call it glorious: “Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word over there. That the yanks are coming, the yanks are coming, the drums rum-tumming everywhere! So prepare! Say a prayer! Send the word, send the word to beware: We’ll be over, we’re coming over! And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there!”
But it’s worth noting that “Over There” also featured heavily in the patriotic 1942 movie starring James Cagney, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Released in late May 1942, the movie spoke to a nation still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor. In a perfect scene in which the power goes out on the stage (perhaps a metaphor for the Pearl Harbor attack), the assembled troops are rallied to keep up the song. They are then shown going off to war.
Yet the true measure of “Over There”‘s glory is not its upbeat tone, but its enduring truth. It speaks to an America that, albeit imperfect, is immensely good and rightly strong. It’s a proof that the audiences watching “Yankee Doodle Dandy” would have realized just a week after the movie was first released. That week, the U.S. would destroy the imperial Japan’s ambitions near a little island called Midway. Three years after that, America would see the Axis powers destroyed and the Soviet Union constrained from usurping a blood-drenched peace.
In short, “Over There” is a simple but special song.
