Ten Green Bottles

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Ten Green Bottles is a song for children that is popular in the United Kingdom. In essence the song is a single verse repeated, each time with one bottle fewer:

Ten green bottles sitting on the wall,

And if one green bottle should accidentally fall,

There'll be nine green bottles sitting on the wall.

In some less common versions the words hanging or standing are sung instead of sitting. "Sitting" is more commonly used according to google. It brings 245,000 results for sitting against only 236,000 for hanging.

The original Lemmings game features an instrumental version of this song with Chopin's Funeral March and Wagner's Bridal Chorus between each verse.

Ten Green Bottles is also a book by Vivian Jeanette Kaplan. It is the true story of a Jewish family that escaped from Nazi occupied Vienna to Shanghai under Japanese rule. The award winning book was published in English in the U.S. by St. Martin's Press (2004) and has been republished in German, Italian and Hungarian. The title of the book comes from the same song sung in Marco's Bar by British servicemen stationed in Shanghai. Quoting from the book:

"Every night there is some eruption of violence outside or inside the bar. Inevitably one customer insults another's homeland and a brawl erupts. Broken bottles, bloodied fists and faces, screams and threats are the nightly fare. Nearly a year has passed since we started this venture with Marco, and now even these events become routine.

There is a melancholy loneliness among the servicemen that surfaces in their drunken haze. After the fighting, when anger and physical tension have been released, they break into song. Slurred masculine voices penetrate the grey smoky air with tunes of their boyhoods. The British have a favourite that we soon learn to recognize. Arms wound around one another's shoulders, swaying in rhythm and whiskey-soaked nostalgia, they begin:

Ten green bottles hanging on the wall,

etc.,

One green bottle hanging on the wall,

And if this green bottle should accidentally fall,

There'll be nothing left but the smell upon the wall.

Even the burliest man in a state of inebriation and homesick longing finds himself weeping as the words are sung. From their soulful singing it seems to me that the sailors are conjuring memories of things they miss, being stuck as we are in this sordid refuge. Surely they remember the innocence of youth, surely they are thinking of friends who have fallen in battle, of their families back home, gathering at holidays, of home-cooking, girlfriends or wives who are becoming vague memories of tenderness, too far away and long ago to seem real any more."