Lyrics

Remembrance Day
Frank Blades

[verse]
An earnest lad of fifteen joined up and went to war,
He never spoke about it but his diary told us what he saw,
A dying soldier’s nightmare lay in the Flanders mud,
A bullet through the windpipe slowly drowning in his own blood.

[chorus]
So I always buy the poppy when they're rattling the tin,
I always bow in silence when I hear those church bells ring,
And when they're at the Cenotaph, those veterans on parade,
I remember sacrifice on Remembrance Day.

[verse]
A mortar hit his trenches; he thought that he had died,
The sappers heard his screaming and dug the lad out half alive,
Those German medics saved him; No morphine for his pain,
Then marched him off to Lamsdorf; no hope to see England again.

[rpt chorus]

[bridge]
Liberation found him rotting in the corner of some foreign field,
Though the doctors saved his life, sometimes there are wounds that never heal,
Yet he never hated German soldiers, in spite of all of the horrors that he saw,
He knew it was the politicians, marched a generation into war.

[verse]
Pin-striped city gentleman with collar buttoned tight,
Hid the scars that nearly killed the soldier-boy that summer night,
But he was only Grandad; he never told his tale,
That he had been a hero; fought in the mud at Passchendaele.

[rpt chorus]

[outro]
I remember sacrifice on Remembrance Day (x4)