March away my brothers, softly march away…’ is the opening line of a poem by Jack Duggan, a Dublinman who served with the Royal Irish Regiment in the Dardanelles. In our world of instant downloads it is hard to imagine the part songs played in the lives of soldiers in the Great War. Lacking recordings of any kind, they learned songs from sheet music and sang while they marched and waited and at performances in makeshift venues behind the lines in Flanders and Picardy. Everyone associates ‘It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary’ with the British forces (although it had nothing to do with Ireland): the First World War also produced classic songs like ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ by Ivor Novello, ‘Keep Right On to the End of the Road’ by the great performer Harry Lauder and ‘Roses of Picardy’ by Frederick Weatherly and Haydn Wood, some of which were written to boost the morale not of the soldiers but of their loved ones at home. In each chapter the author focuses on one area of conflict, from the Dardanelles to the Somme, through the personal story of Irishmen who left their jobs in Guinness or Jacobs or unemployment behind to seek adventure in a foreign war, from which many of them never returned.