Thought I'd put this in for Remembrance day - as Newfoundland

[HEyHEY]

Was its own country during WW1 and 2

DOn't know if we have any newfies. But here's a good song about it, it's great big sea's version but probably stems from a newfie folk song. -----



Two recruiting sergeants came to the CLB,
for the sons of the merchants, to join the Blue Puttees
So all the hands enlisted, five hundred young men
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

They crossed the broad Atlantic in the brave Florizel,
And on the sands of Suvla, they entered into hell
And on those bloody beaches, the first of them fell
Enlist ya Newfoundlanders and come follow me


So it's over the mountains, and over the sea
Come brave Newfoundlanders and join the Blue Puttees
You'll fight the Hun in Flanders, and at Galipoli
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

Then the call came from London, for the last July drive
To the trenches with the regiment, prepare yourselves to die
The roll call next morning, just a handful survived.
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me



The stone men on Water Street still cry for the day
When the pride of the city went marching away
A thousand men slaughtered, to hear the King say
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

Chorus

[CHIMO]

1. Footnotes from the fields

Several times a year, Dutch historian Koen Koch, professor of political science at the University of Leiden, takes Dutch and American students on trips to the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western Front.

It has been 90 years since the outbreak of fighting in World War I and the formation of the Front, which stretched for 400 kilometers from Flanders across northern France. During four years of fighting from 1914 to 1918, the trench lines hardly shifted while millions of men were sent to the slaughter.

Visiting the Front with Professor Koch, one of Holland's foremost experts on the Great War of 1914-1918, is a very moving experience for the young students, who are now roughly the same age as those who died in the carnage of No Man's Land.

In the early spring of 1916, a handsome, prosperous and intelligent young poet wrote in his diary, "As for me, I had more or less made up my mind to die, the idea made things easier. In the circumstances there didn't seem to be anything else to be done." For Professor Koch, the despair and fatalism of these simple lines, written by the British poet Siegfried Sassoon in the trenches on the Western Front, go straight to the core of one of the persistently haunting mysteries of the First World War: how a society could both accept and inflict death and inhuman suffering "for the sake of defending civilization and democracy."

http://www.rnw.nl/special/en/html/041110doc.html