British music hall of the First World War has been little studied. Half a dozen songs expressing enthusiastic support for the war are well-known, but historians have not generally examined the thousands of songs produced during the war years to attempt to assess the expression of popular attitudes and how these were filtered through the different mediating institutions or actors (theatre management, sheet music companies or singing stars for example). My paper, following on from my book-length study of a sample of over a thousand wartime music hall songs, attempts to assess more precisely the patriotic songs, and the less patriotic ones, as well as to understand what sort of opinions could and could not be expressed in an increasingly respectable music hall. We will see why, in the published Greatest Hits collection of 1915, there are no recruitment songs of any sort, and yet anti-war songs are unknown in the wartime halls. To do this we will examine a large sample of songs about the war, and look at a small number in some detail.