A friend recently told me that his father, as a German prisoner in the second world war, had to pick cotton, supervised by black people. Many of his comrades died, not being accustomed to the heat. Evidently the Geneva convention should have been more widely publicised.
   I can see that some people might think the song was trivialising the arduous conditions, but if we always used that as a criterion of acceptability, there would be a great many songs about work which we would have to delete from our repertoires, leaving only the miserable ones.