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An old Irish legend is told of a sailor in search of Fiddler’s Green, a village that is a veritable Garden of Eden. The sailor, so the story says, can know he has finally found Fiddler's Green by walking inland with an oar over his shoulder until he comes to a place where people ask him what he's carrying. The Irish may have taken up that legend up from Homer’s Odyssey in which Tiresia prophecies to Odysseus that the only way that Odysseus may appease Poseidon and thereby find happiness is by taking up an oar; walking until he finds a place where he is asked what he is carrying; and make a sacrifice there.
There is some dispute as to which arm of the military services first adopted the poem Fiddler’s Green as its own. The earliest published version seems to be a recounting of the story in a US Cavalry Manual, printed n 1923. The artillery lays claim to it as well; and certainly publication establishes little to nothing with reference to which service branch may rightly claim it, or even to its origin. Perhaps the most compelling argument any branch may make is the importance the story has to the individuals of those branches, and that can never be known nor satisfactorily expressed. Grim it may be in some respects, but none can dispute the story’s intimation of the importance of camaraderie among artillerymen, and the yearning for a final place where they will be with one another again. The story of Fiddler’s Green for artillerymen is related in poetic form here.
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Fiddler's Green
Marching past, straight through to Hell
Accompanied by the Engineers,
For none but the shades of Artillerymen
Dismount at Fiddlers' Green.
Though some go curving down the trail
No trooper ever gets to Hell
Ere he's emptied his canteen;
And so rides back to drink again
With friends at Fiddlers' Green.
And so when man and horse go down
Or in a roaring charge of fierce melee
And the hostiles come to get your scalp,
And put your pistol to your head
And go to Fiddlers' Green.
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