The Real Enemy

The origins of the song lie in a visit by the Australian folk singer Eric Bogle and his wife to Flanders and northern France, where the couple visited three military cemeteries. They “saw all the young soldiers who were buried there”. That was in 1976. After this experience Bogle wrote a song that became famous as an anti-war anthem. It was called “No Man’s Land”. Or also “The Green Fields of France”. Standing at the grave of the soldier Willy McBride, the singer muses on the life and death of the fallen man and poses a weighty question. It had already adorned a poster that became famous, showing a soldier who – hit by a bullet – collapses dead: “Why?” Bogle sang:

Willy McBride – his name here stands for thousands – died in the First World War. Even today it makes one angry and sad to realise that humanity has apparently learned nothing since then. Not the politicians, who cling to the fiction of a “just war”; not the soldiers who – as Donovan’s classic “Universal Soldier” put it – allow themselves to be misused for any purpose whatsoever, thus keeping the machinery of death alive for all eternity; not the citizens who let war narratives stir them up again and again, who willingly hand over even their sons and, increasingly today, their daughters to the bloody trade.

The cult anthem of the peace movement

Hannes Wader was already an established German songwriter when he released his album “Es ist an der Zeit” in 1980. In his great autobiography “Trotz alledem”, published in 2019, he describes the genesis of the song only briefly:

The title song is my adaptation of a song by the Australian-Scot Eric Bogle: “No Man’s Land”. In my (very free) translation into German, “Es ist an der Zeit” soon becomes one of the anthems of the peace movement of the early eighties. Even in the other part of Germany the song becomes, and remains, popular.

Even at my post-reunification concerts in the former GDR, people would not let me off the stage until I had sung it. No problem – I still enjoy singing it.

Hannes Wader wrote a text which, in my view, even surpasses the original in its intensity. They must have been extraordinarily inspired hours that the great songwriter devoted to this poem. Hannes Wader, who has often said that writing was hard for him and that he frequently had to wring it out of himself over weeks of work, was completely in flow here. As with any successful poetic adaptation, Wader allows himself every freedom to vary Bogle’s template, to change the order of the thoughts, to leave some out, to add new ones.

Grave crosses and poppies

Wader begins with an almost idyllic mood of nature. It is warm – summer. The deep-red poppies, the grasses, the tender vocabulary (“whisper”, “gently”, “softly”) stand in striking contrast to the horror we associate with war. For the idyll is deceptive: the poppy blooms, after all, in the midst of a field of graves.

It seems as if the artist wanted to illustrate that peace, that beauty and tenderness which would have been possible, had the madness of war not carried off that young soldier.

We learn that he was only 19 years old, and that his grave bears no name. Next, Hannes Wader once again addresses directly that love which would have been possible:

It is not only the horror of war that the singer laments here; it is the abyssal sadness over an unlived life – the fate of a young man in his prime, longing to savour his life as a young adult, probably full of hopes and possibilities.

And Wader does not leave out this shadow side of sexuality either: many soldiers rape the women of the countries they conquer – brutalised, hollowed out and dehumanised by the experience of war. In a beautiful turn, however, “our” soldier in the song does, after all, decide against the act of violence: “(…) but then you were ashamed of yourself and never did it after all.”

Despairing, embittered, brutalised

The next verse strikes me as immensely shattering and lays bare without mercy what war really means – and that with thoroughly deterrent and squalid details:

In contrast to the torn-apart limbs and other terrible accompaniments of the killing, the singer also hints at the euphemistic phrases with which warmongers try to sell their victims the march to the slaughterhouse. They are urged to go to their death “believing and willing” – for purposes that go by the name of “fatherland”, “God”, “security”, “defence” or whatever else. So who is the “real enemy” that the young soldier in Wader’s text did not recognise? I will come back to that.

In the final verse Hannes Wader artfully arcs back to the beginning of the song. We are once again in the present, and the singer takes an oath at the soldier’s grave:

To fight for peace and to stay vigilant:
will humanity fall for lies once more (…).

Falling for lies again

The line touches me even more deeply today than at the moment when I first heard the song – it was probably in the 1980s. For over a long period it looked as though humanity had learned something since the two terrible world wars – especially its “civilised”, Western part. The old European quarrellers such as Germany and France lived peacefully side by side for decades. Even Russia, the former arch-enemy, seemed to have had its sting drawn; the Gorbachev era seemed marked by mutual rapprochement and disarmament.

Even on the question of the feasibility of a limited nuclear war, “thinking taboos” are currently falling. Here, however, the song issues a clear warning:

Then it may come to pass that soon no one is left alive,
no one to bury the billions of the dead.

This clearly refers to the danger of a great world war involving the nuclear forces of both camps. The conflict “the West against Russia” is implicitly present here. Yet there is also a glimmer of hope. Eric Bogle’s original ends on an even more pessimistic note (“again, and again, and again…”). Wader, by contrast – inspired, presumably, by the spirit of departure of the peace movement in the year the song was written – ends with a positive vision:

But more and more people are ready
to prevent this war. It is time.

That was, mind you, at the start of the 80s. Since then the song has been taken up again and again, gladly, by peace activists, and sung with conviction by friends and colleagues of Wader’s such as Reinhard Mey. That is no surprise – for I myself know of no more haunting and more perfect anti-war song. At most one might also name here Mey’s truly moving avowal “Nein, meine Söhne geb ich nicht” (“No, I will not give up my sons”). With “Es ist an der Zeit”, in any case, everything is simply right. The melody too, which Eric Bogle found, I find exceptionally beautiful. In its simplicity it radiates great warmth, as we know it from other folk and soft-rock ballads distinguished by a special melodic coherence – think, for instance, of Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” or “Vincent” by Don McLean.

A hard subject, gentle music

The music, accompanied as always by Wader minimalistically with only the guitar, clearly does not illustrate the harshness of war; rather it reflects a world as it ought to be: compassionate, soothing, a little sad, to be sure, but in its beauty – which seems wrested from the horror – also capable of making one happy. Hannes Wader is not a man of emotional outbursts. He sings in his own sonorous, serious and composed way. Here, however, more anger and emphasis can be felt than in other recordings by the artist.
And not to be forgotten: the refrain. It bridges then and now. The liars and the lied-to: they are universal, while the wars and the pretexts for war appear, by comparison, interchangeable.

Yes, you too were lied to in just the same way,
just as they still do to us today.
You gave them everything,
your strength, your youth, your life.

Analogous to the “Universal Soldier”, it is the Universal Warlord. He never goes to war himself – he has others drill, bleed, kill and die.

“Why don’t you give your own blood?”

No one is sweepingly exempt from this song’s message. To apply it to today’s circumstances: neither Biden, nor Scholz, nor Zelensky, nor Putin could escape this shattering indictment. Let essayists rack their brains over assignments of guilt and innocence in the context of global politics. Artists – anti-war singers in particular – often think differently about this: more simply. Guilty is whoever sacrifices people, sends them to war, talks or forces them into military service on false grounds, whoever tears their young life away from them or, as a result of the experience of guilt and suffering, overshadows it with trauma.

In his German rendering of the French chanson “Le déserteur”, Hannes Wader says it once again very plainly:

“If you believe so firmly that it is necessary to shed one’s blood in a war, Monsieur le Président, then why don’t you go and give your own?”