Sabaton: Artists Of War

Milunka Savić is the most decorated female soldier in history and her life story reads like a movie. She is also the subject of Lady Of The Dark, a song on the latest album from SABATON. She grew up in a tiny village in Serbia and her early years were unremarkable, but things took a dramatic turn during the First Balkan War. When her brother was called up for military service, the young Milunka cut her hair short, disguised herself as a man and joined the army in her sibling’s place.

She was so good at soldiering, that even after her secret was exposed, her Commanding Officer let it slide and she continued to fight alongside the men. She went on to see combat in the First World War and was wounded multiple times, but ultimately survived. By the time the guns fell silent, she’d been awarded medals by her home country, Russia, France and Britain, becoming a Balkan hero in the process. Her fame didn’t last and she spent her later life looking after her children and working a variety of menial jobs, dying penniless in 1973. She’s a fitting subject for one of the standout tracks on The War To End All Wars.

Like their previous record, 2019’s The Great War, it’s based entirely on the First World War. The two albums go hand-in-hand and there’s a clear link between them, however there is one difference. This time around, SABATON focus their attention on some of the lesser-known moments and figures of the era. Serbia’s real-life Mulan is only one of them. The Great War dealt with the Battle Of Passchendaele, Lawrence Of Arabia and The Red Baron, but this time we get the Harlem Hellfighters, and the Battle Of Doiran.

“I think it comes from us wanting to tell the more personal, human stories,” singer Joakim Brodén tells us from his home studio. “A lot of the bigger ones were already taken on the previous album, but it’s also more fun to discover those stories that maybe you feel like, oh, people haven’t heard about this,” he explains. “What I find interesting is every country has its own history obviously, but certain things are obvious in some countries but totally unheard of elsewhere. I could probably surprise a lot of people with stories from five hundred years ago in Sweden and have them go ‘ah, I didn’t know that.’ Whereas in the UK and America, where you have a world language, a lot of your stories are already in movies and they’re easily understood, so this is something we’ve been trying to work with as well. We find that there’s a lot of good stuff out there behind the language barrier.”

There are a lot of obscure events that inspired The War To End All Wars, but there is one glaring exception. The song that’s inevitably going to attract the most attention is The Christmas Truce. A mini-epic inspired by the Christmas Day ceasefire of 1914, it’s an emotive and bittersweet song. It’s one of the most famous events of the war and still carries tremendous cultural significance over a century later. Of all the songs on the album, this feels like one that SABATON were destined to write. Joakim agrees with this, they’ve been trying to figure out how to do it justice for a long time.

“It was there since 2007 or 2008 maybe. The first time we discussed this was when we were doing the lyrics to Price Of A Mile. We missed the boat on The Great War because that was one of the most important stories, one we really wanted, but we didn’t have the right music then. We thought it was better to let it go than do a song that wasn’t good enough for such an important topic.”

Years later, it’s finally ready and it’s one of the highlights of the record. It’s hard not to feel a tug on the heartstrings when the chorus kicks in, thinking of the moment when soldiers on opposing sides looked across no man’s land and for once, didn’t see an enemy. They saw men like them; cold, tired and frightened. It happened relatively early in the war, only five months after hostilities started, but its placement at the end of the album was deliberate.

“It’s easy to forget when you start talking about the numbers of people dead, of countries and nations pitted against each other, you don’t think of people anymore.” After all the macho, chest-pounding anthems before it, The Christmas Truce is a poignant reminder of the faces behind the gas masks.

Taking milestones from military history and turning them into big, booming anthems has been SABATON’s stock in trade for years and they’ve become very good at it. Looking at their career now, it’s hard to believe that this wasn’t the plan all along. But their evolution into heavy metal’s resident history teachers was never planned.

“We had a song which sounded big – Primo Victoria – and we thought we couldn’t sing about boobs and beer basically. At that point, lyrics were a necessary evil but all of a sudden, when we started making that song and a few others, we thought ‘oh, this is really interesting. Shall we make a whole album about military history?’ And that became the Primo Victoria album, and we had some ‘leftovers’ that we wanted to tell and that became Attero Dominatus, and it sort of became our thing and our own personal interest in history grew along with it.”

Joakim’s obviously proud of this, but at the same time he has a sense of perspective about it. “I don’t think you can learn that much from SABATON songs,” he says while laughing. “We can be the thing that makes people want to learn, inspire them, there’s a limit to how much we can teach in a three-and-a-half-minute heavy metal song.”

It’s a two-way relationship as well. Thanks to their willingness to accept song ideas from fans, SABATON have had a wealth of history’s unsung heroes thrown their way. They’re constantly receiving emails about the overlooked or forgotten. They only discovered Milunka Savić because bassist Pär Sundström had a chat with a fan when they played Serbia and their back catalogue is full of songs with similar origins.

This approach has taken SABATON from humble origins to Wembley Arena. They’ve headlined festivals, started their own cruise and become successful beyond their wildest expectations. After all they’ve achieved though, there’s still more they want to do. Joakim talks about how he wants to resume the tour that got cut off by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as his hopes of one day performing on battlefields across Europe (Normandy Beach especially). However, it’s especially telling that when asked what his ultimate goal is, his reply is simply to get better at his job.

“The main priority for us is to get better. Can we write better songs? Do better shows? Getting bigger and getting more famous is just a consequence of that. We can’t make every SABATON song the best because it’s subjective, but if we try at least then we’ll do better.”

The War To End All Wars is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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