The revised policy concerning homosexuality in the armed forces involving service personal states that the commanding officers must put each case of “social misconduct” up against The Service Test: “Have the actions or behaviour of an individual adversely impacted or are they likely to impact on the efficiency or operational effectiveness of the Service?”
The callous stoic would say that any excessive emotional involvement with your brothers in arms is detrimental to the “operational imperative.” On the other hand, the more sentimental, affections-based romantic would champion close kinship as the most useful way of further tightening the bonds of the imperative’s goal to “sustain team cohesion and to maintain trust and loyalty between commanders and those they command.”
After hearing The Decemberists’ tale of homoerotic amore in the armed forces, “The Soldiering Life,” I was quick to jump and attribute to it First Pop Song to Deal With Homosexuality in the Armed Forces status. Then I remembered “Next.” While Jacques Brel’s ominous lament of the inherent and injurious machismo of the corps–typified in the song by the story of the forced assembly-line deflowering of young soldiers in a mobile army whorehouse–was possibly the first song to deal explicitly with homosexual undertones (as well as using the epithets “queer” and “fag,” which, keep in mind, were still taboo even in the newly Code-liberated Hollywood of the late 60s), the emphasis was on the painful and murky outcome. In opposition, The Decemberists’ pen and voice, Colin Meloy, puts a tender touch on the controversial and hush-hush subject.
Firstly, I must say that the love between the two World War I soldiers in Meloy’s tale could just as well be interpreted by the cursory listener as nothing more than devoted military camaraderie. I will attempt to quell this interpretation.
Our first encounter with the two men is seeing them stroll “madly” about town (the specific location is not made clear, but one reviewer presumptuously wrote that it was Belgium.) Picturing them hand-in-hand would not be out of order. One, we’re told, is a brawny Manhattan type who is so rough, he is caricaturish. It could be insinuated that this “bowery tough” is using this overly masculine temperament as a guise to hide his unacceptable sexual orientation. More evidence supporting this is the last verse, where we see the storyteller and he swathed in their garments as they lie, “eyes aligned” on a sullied mattress—not something you would expect from a man originally described as the human equivalent of a hurled brick.
The protagonist’s affection towards this more-than-brother in arms is not especially seen in the songs chorus. The only hint of anything more than loving companionship is seen in the macabre sobriquet the protagonist gives the unnamed soldier: “my bombazine doll.” Bombazine, a diagonally woven silk fabric, is often dyed black and used for mourning clothing. This last detail gives the impression that the protagonist sees his partner in dour but affectionate light— breeding grounds for homoeroticism.
Our final image of the two shows the men, side by side, clutching their rifles and hugging the long furrow as they blaze away into no man’s land. The protagonist, knowing full well death is at his elbow, declares the moment cognizant bliss. He wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. “The bullets may singe your skin and the mortars may fall / But I have never felt so alive.”
At a time where the popular tone is cynical gloom-and-doom, Meloy could have easily written about the perils of war—like the obligatory barbarism and moral degradation of Brel’s “Next”–but instead he paints a tender and evocative mural of unnatural love in the midst of unclear fate. The Service Test is discernibly inconsequential in the face of love.