As one of popular songs in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Three Years of War (2015) highlights the preciousness of the blood shed by the Korean people in the three-year Fatherland Liberation War (June 25, 1950-July 27, 1953) by expounding its meaning in a profoundly lyric way.
The four-verse song written by the collective and composed by Sol Thae Song starts as follows:
The war dragged on for three years, swallowing everything into flames and agony.
The fight between the two-year-old DPRK and the aggressive US was beyond imagination. It was more than a clash of strength and firepower. It was rather a war of indiscriminate destruction and brutality, in which the US dropped 18 bombs per square kilometre of the DPRK. The US committed appalling atrocities, unprecedented in human history of wars, against the Korean people.
The song says: The catastrophic war covered the mountains with empty shells and cartridges, turning rivers into those of tears and blood, expelling birds and reducing flowers to ash. This passage speaks volumes about the sufferings, pains and agonies sustained by the Korean people during the war.
We couldn’t bury the bodies of fallen comrades-in-arms with flags to cover them torn by enemy bullets. This is about neither sorrow nor despair. It is more about an outcry of history from the bottom of the heart of former combatants, or alive war veterans, who dashed towards the enemy positions through a hail of bullets with no time even to look back their fallen fellows during the charge.
A passage goes: Dear things were lost but a precious thing was won—great victory of war. This reflects the feeling of the Korean people who would not take the memories of the war merely as those of the bygone years.
The thought-provoking line carries a great weight of the war that brings a dramatic change to the destiny of a country or a nation, and it also bears the ideological and artistic core of the song, for which it has become a song of sacred defence and great victory.
In a word, the song is a hymn to the war victory that sings of the truth that the righteous struggle of the people to defend the validity of their own cause and their own things rallied around their great leader will bring about a brilliant triumph.
During the war, the Korean people lost their beloved parents, wives, children, brothers and sisters, with their fellow villagers and comrades-in-arms falling back. They died too young and too sorrowfully.
But the Korean people braved it out sacrificing themselves to defend the dignity and honour of their country. It was a great victory.
They proved themselves through the three-year war.
While the world’s people were keeping their eyes on the newly independent DPRK, the Korean people dedicated their lives to defending the national dignity and honour and saved all the precious things from the claws of aggression.
The melody of the song commensurate with its profound lyric description is extremely impressive as it is finely combined with emotion evoking deep thought and powerful appeal.
The song ends with We will never forget the three years of war when everything precious was saved from trials.
Without any clarion call for a do-or-die battle and delight of destroying the enemy, the song is run through with lyricism of victory based on the people’s absolute confidence in their leader and passionate love for their country, and filled with their determination to carry forward the tradition and history of their great victory.
Yang Ryon Hui
