the mournful lullabye: "If my darling is safe, walk my love"

From the dawn of photography,
a starving Irish family
from Carraroe, County Galway,
during the Famine (1845-1849).
(National Library of Ireland)

Mike has been kind enough to respond to my plaintive cry for help with the Irish Gaelic "shule aroon," "shule agra" and "thu Mavourneen slaun," and I'll post it here, so anyone interested enough in this song and this subject can understand this lullabye. Mike, was this song sung to you as a childhood lullabye?

Well, I am Irish, but I don't speak it, but I'll give you a brief run through anyway. Basically, it means "If my darling is safe, walk my love", and "come love". Basically, the singer (who's traditionally been female, though not always) is saying something along the lines of, "If you're not dead already, then let's get the hell outta here." She's asking him to elope pretty much.

The Irish don't have the world historic monopoly on trouble and hard times, but they're certainly among the top long-running contenders. One aspect of Ireland's centuries of hard economic times has been their over-representation as common soldiers in the British empire's overseas wars; faced with economic hopelessness on their island, young Irishmen took the King's shilling as a way out. By American Colonial times -- long before the catastrophe of the potato famine -- most of the common soldiers in the anti-French commando force of Rogers' Rangers were Irish.

The Irish Potato Famine launched a mass diaspora from the island from 1845 to 1849; the seminal history is Cecil Woodham-Smith's "The Great Hunger," a chronicle not for the squeamish. Woodham-Smith (a woman and CBE) concludes, unenthusiastically, that the British government was not specifically guilty of intentional genocide, though the results of a genocide could hardly have been worse. In Gaelic the Famine is called An Gorta Mór or An Drochshaol. Ireland had had an earlier crop failure and famine, of comparable severity, in 1741-1742.

After the famine, Irish immigrants to the US were so over-represented in the Union draft/conscription of the Civil War (a wealthy man could hire a poor man to serve in his place) that largely Irish anti-draft riots broke out in New York City. "Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier" was popular once again during the Civil War/War Between the States, with both armies.

John Ford's cavalry Western movies, set in the decades after the Civil War, use the Irish flavor, speech and music of America's frontier military for color and humor, but it's historically accurate: The US Cavalry's wars against the Plains Indians were a heavily Irish-American endeavor, though the era also produced the famous freed slaves who served as the Cavalry's "buffalo soldiers" (the Indians' name for them).

Custer chose Garryowen (also Garyowen, Garry Owen and Gary Owens), an Irish tune for a quickstep dance, as the martial theme for his Seventh Cavalry. It was probably the last music his soldiers heard in this life.

Though the ethnicities have changed, the pattern today in the "all-volunteer military" is the same: Economic desperation fills the military's ranks, particularly the combat arms, which require low levels of education. And, to be fair to the military, it's a good life that offers job security -- if a soldier's lucky. (The first page of any probability text says very clearly that there's no such thing as luck; luck is a psychological illusion.)

War is important and in wartime, citizens are strongly encouraged to devote their patriotic attention to it. Love is unimportant, love is for selfish sissies, love never accomplished Great Things. Heartbreak and loss, widows, and children who never knew their fathers -- these are just inconvenient distractions from the Great National Crusade. Only mournful old lullabyes linger from love during wartime.