Over There

“Over There” is a refrain in a patriotic song that Harry S. Truman played on the piano while preparing for military service in 1917. In the book, its repeated promise that American forces were coming across the ocean gives voice to Truman’s sense of war as a collective undertaking—and stands against the immense losses that undertaking entailed.

The Refrain and Its Performance

The excerpt begins with the repeated call, “Over there. Over there.Send the word, send the word over there,That the Yanks are coming…” Truman played the song on the piano alongside other rousing and sentimental songs, including Goodbye Broadway, Hello France and Keep the Home Fires Burning. The refrain thus appears not as an isolated phrase but as part of a musical repertoire through which the prospect of going to war could be felt and expressed.

Patriotism and the Cost of War

The phrase belonged to the emotional atmosphere in which Truman helped organize a new Missouri artillery battery in the spring of 1917. He had described service as a job that someone had to do and remembered feeling stirred by Woodrow Wilson’s war messages and by the idea of a noble crusade across the sea. Looking back, he emphasized that most Americans had responded as he had, “stirred by the same flame that stirred me in those great days.”

The book places that remembered fervor beside the realities of the war. In 1916, the Western Front had suffered two million casualties while the battle line scarcely moved; at Ypres in 1917, a British assault gained 7,000 yards at the cost of 160,000 dead and wounded in five days. Against this scale of slaughter, the song’s confident refrain preserves the hope and solidarity with which Americans approached the conflict, while the surrounding account makes clear how little such hope could say about the price of fighting.