Adaptation of poem by Mark Grant (see poem below song)
Album version first
G C G C
The young men are lined up in their neat endless rows
The dull earth hides the fact of their unruly bones
G C G C
Bm C Bm C
Commandeered and assembled into neat, covered piles
G C G C
For politicians to publicly reconcile
G C G C
G C G C
In neat lined pages they count the recovered
To assemble neat meaning for all the fathers and mothers
As the mighty mark their conquests by inches and dreams
A dead man’s only a loss when his mangled body can be seen
And the young men who crowded the bars with their dreams
Could not imagine their parents tears falling in streams
All the working class Johnnys and all the peasant Mehmets
Are now all just the same in the ground where they met
Their dreams sunk in the mud of some absent mens’ vision
All youthful joy buried under the weight of their new wisdom
And there’re are no cameras to capture the smashed empty bottles
The screams in the night or the broken man’s stumble./shuffle
In the halls, in the squares, in the newspaper pages
In stiff, formal letters they’re still called up and paraded
Still serving the cause, all of their differences faded
Bloodless and wordless with others icons they’re laden
And the mighty mark their conquests by inches and dreams
A dead man’s only a loss when his mangled body can be seen
Mark Grant’s poem
All the dead soldiers have nowhere else to go
They lie now in their neatly ordered rows
Reassembled by the politician’s attempt to recover
To deliver some meaning to their futile endeavour.
Those who could be found
Have been reassembled back out of the ground
Others remain in tumbled piles
Laid end to end their bones would stretch for miles.
All the working class and peasant Johns and all the Mehmets
Have fought and died where they met
All for many an already lost colonial cause
While their more wealthy compatriots struck out on quite another course.
As has happened in all the countries in all the years
As has happened up and down the rivers of their parents’ tears
Mighty men of mighty conquest
Have chosen to take the generation’s youngest and the best.
They have delivered refreshed fertilizer for the grave’s weeds
In layer upon layer of the human course
All the dead soldiers care little now – of course.
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