A WAR doesn’t end when the guns stop firing. For Robb Johnson’s grandfathers Private Ernest Johnson and Private Harry Jenner the years they spent on the Western Front overshadowed the rest of their lives.

Hove-based songwriter Johnson first told their story in 1997 as part of the Passendale Peace Concert. The resulting album Gentle Men became The Daily Telegraph’s Folk Album Of 1998.

Now he has revisited the song cycle as the nation marks 100 years since the bloody conflict began.

“Cameron and Gove wanted to celebrate it as a triumph of Britishness,” says Johnson, who is teaming up with folk legend Roy Bailey for this Shoreham performance.

“It’s important we acknowledge the centenary of this cataclysmic event - but we should understand it properly.”

Using stripped-down acoustic instrumentation and powerfully direct lyrics Gentle Men covers the experiences of Johnson’s grandfathers and their families before, during and after the conflict.

Ernest, owing to his musical talent, was placed in the 6th London Field Ambulance, serving an unbroken three years and nine months in France between 1915 and 1918, only missing out on the Battle Of Ypres to marry Johnson’s grandmother Lil.

As a 15-year-old postman Harry was given a white feather on his rounds accusing him of cowardice for not volunteering when war broke out. The young man lied about his age to join the Post Office Rifles, where he was later to see action in the Somme and Ypres.

Luckily when he first arrived a sergeant realised his true age and put him to work in the hospital.

“When he got older he was back on the frontline,” says Johnson, who pieced together both his grandfathers’ stories through a combination of family memories and his own research.

“He went to the trenches where he was shot in the lower leg, and spent three days in a shell hole full of mustard gas. Lung cancer killed him, but it took him 50 years to die.”

Johnson’s album uses a range of different voices. Bailey’s expressive waiver represents the soldiers’ point of view both in the trenches and once the killing stops. Johnson plays himself as a young boy interacting with his grandfathers and an adult looking back at their experiences.

Singers Barb Jungr, Jude Abbott and Jenny Carr act as a chorus, setting up the English idyll destroyed by the conflict, and telling the heartbreaking stories of the women left behind.

“Often the voices we focus on are those of the soldiers,” says Johnson. “I wanted the voice of the unknown sweetheart. I wanted to have as many voices as I could to provide a fuller picture and try to keep it personal.”

The second disc features stories of Ernest’s time on the road with the band Noni And The Golden Serenaders, whose successful career is cut short in Germany with the rise of the Nazis; an account of Harry returning to Ypres to see the graves of his fallen comrades; and the two men meeting at the marriage of Johnson’s parents.

The 1997 album closed with a contemporary tale about Johnson’s experiences with a German exchange student - suggesting such conflicts were now a thing of the past.

Since then there has been the war on terror and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“For children in the 1990s war was something on television like a video game,” says Johnson.

“In 1997 we never expected we would have a government sending more young people to war.

“It’s an issue for us as a society - a lot of people have had traumatic experiences, they are the homeless on our streets now.”

The end is now a eulogy to the dead, recalling Johnson’s grandfathers’ gardens and the moment Harry silently showed his grandson a book of battlefield photographs.

“It was a completely different narrative of war than I had grown up with in Victor comic,” remembers Johnson. “There were pictures of people with no arms and legs, starving children, a very different experience of war. I’m now someone who thinks war is an abomination. I love my granddads to bits - they were lovely blokes, who had to endure unimaginable things. With these songs I felt as if I was embedded with them.”

The Shoreham performance of Gentle Men will open with Attila The Stockbroker reading a poem in memory of his father Bill Baine who also served as a soldier in the First World War.

Gentle Men – Robb Johnson and Roy Bailey
Ropetackle Arts Centre, Little High Street, Shoreham, Thursday, July 24