Episode
The Follies of War
- Published
- Mar 24, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3528
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Summary
March 24, 1918: German forces crossed the Somme during Operation Michael, Ludendorff’s great spring offensive — the war machine’s last confident lunge toward a victory that never came. In 2026, with the Trump administration dismantling alliances built on the bones of two world wars, treating the consequences of war as someone else’s problem, and marching forward with the kind of certainty that history tends to punish, it felt like a good week to reach back to the era when people were still trying to make sense of what industrialized war actually meant — and some of them were brave enough to say so. “Peter Piper” — Arthur Pryor’s Band (Victor, 1905) It sounds like a march — all brass and forward momentum and purpose. But “Peter Piper” is built on a nursery rhyme tongue-twister, a piece of music that moves with great confidence toward absolutely nothing. Arthur Pryor was the second most famous bandleader in America after Sousa, and when his band played, people stood up straight. On the anniversary of the Somme crossing, it seemed like the right way to open: all that certainty, all that momentum, built entirely on nonsense. “Stay Down Here Where You Belong” — Henry Burr (Victor, 1915) Irving Berlin wrote this in 1915, before America entered the war and before he understood which way the wind was blowing. The conceit is simple and devastating: the Devil urges his son to stay in Hell rather than venture up to the surface, because up there they’re making butchers out of brothers, and there’s more hell above ground than below. Henry Burr recorded it with the quiet conviction of a man who meant it. Within two years, America was at war, Berlin had moved on to writing songs for the troops, and this one was quietly shelved. It is the voice that said don’t go — before the drums go…