“'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky
Than at Suvla or Sud-el-Bar.”
I’ve listened to the song many times on my iPod and always was mystified by that sentence and those strange sounding place names. So, in preparing for this past weekend, and doing my 
research on the story of St Patrick, and also some of the songs the guys were going to be singing, I delved into the background of the “The Foggy Dew” It was written by a Charles O’Niell of Newcastle
County Down, as a lament to the memory of the men who lost their lives in the failed Easter Rising of 1916. That part I knew. But it also serves as a complaint against the futile irony of war, where Irishmen in their thousands were off fighting for the Allies in the horrors of the First World War, while their own land continued to be subject to the British crown.
“Suvla” and “Sud-el-Bar” were places on the Gallipoli peninsula in the Aegean sea, which, along with the Somme, has become a by-word for the futile waste of young lives through poorly devised war plans. I had always thought of that as an Australia/New Zealand tragedy. But apparently two Irish platoons formed a part of that Allied disaster. Men assisting the Allies in bringing about the liberation of the smaller nations of south eastern Europe, while their own nation remains under British rule.
And so, "The Foggy Dew”
“...'Twas England bade our wild geese go, that "small nations might be free";
Their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves or the fringe of the great North Sea.”
Makes me think that there’s still a lot of senseless lives being lost in Afghanistan and elsewhere, in the service of political and military decisions that are maybe less than wise, and not always in the best interests of the people they’re supposed to be helping.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13MQFCfCYdQ&feature=related
