Fleeting

Fairport Convention performs two songs in this clip. Somehow, I never get past the first to view the second. After reading this post, you may understand why.

Who on God's green earth decided that dying in battle is glorious? My guess would be that, while the Greeks invented this notion, the Romans perfected it.

When you force slaves to fight your battles, you can afford to lose a few ... thousand. When your country is small, you feel every loss more keenly. This, then, is a song about war. It has nothing to do with glory.

Somehow, it is appropriate that a song which reverberates with quotidian details should be memorialized in a clip that's chock full of them, a performance by men at the exact age for going off to war.

The joshing. Isn't that how it always starts when, deep down, the sheer terror of knowing you may not come back alive beats like a bass drum? Dave Swarbrick gets in a good one at Simon Nicol's expense and Nicol, in his three-piece suit, jacket discarded, gets a wee bit defensive as Dave Pegg looks on like a tolerant, older brother.

Nicol, whose self-deprecation charms without even trying, introduces the song, kicking it off with an electric dulcimer that makes a fine, droning substitute for Scottish bagpipes. Swarbrick sneaks a look at a folded page of lyrics in his hand. As Nicol sings the first verse, there's the dawning realization that something has already died:

I've heard them lilting
At our ewe-milking 
And I've heard them lilting
Before light o' day

Swarbrick cranes his neck to see that those high notes reach the mic. Pegg's droning, rock-solid bass mimics the electric hum of the dulcimer. The two of them join the chorus, in memoriam:

Now they are mourning
For all time lamenting
The flowers of the forest
Are all wede away

No, there's no glory here; not even in the battle. Nicol's recollection is dry to the point of being deadpan, with the barest hint of snark:

Where the English, by guile
For once won the day

Again, the chorus, followed by an instrumental break releasing all the emotion that the singers don't quite dare.

All three repeat the first verse in unison, soldiers marching into -- or out of -- a local tavern; or, maybe just marching home. 

Then, the chorus, rendered once more in heart-stopping, three-part harmony, accompanied by nothing more than cymbal hits, struck surely but sparsely, as though the drummer doesn't have the heart to keep the beat.

With the last, fading notes, Swarbrick shakes his head at the futility of it all. 

When it's over at last, Nicol slumps in his chair and sighs. Pegg, the stoic of the bunch, simply turns away.

Written in honor of the Scots killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, today, this song is most often played on Remembrance Day to commemorate those lost in World War I.

This is Fairport Convention with"Flowers of the Forest".