Red Army Blues

When I left my home and family, my mother said to me:
“Son, it's not how many Germans you kill that counts; it's how many people you set free.”
So I packed my bags, brushed my cap, walked out into the world,
Seventeen years old, never kissed a girl.

I took the train to Voronezh. That was as far as it would go.
Changed my sacks for a uniform, bit my lip against the snow.
I prayed for mother Russia in the summer of ‘43,
And as we drove the Germans back, I really believed God was listening to me.

We howled into Berlin, tore the smoking buildings down,
Raised the red flag high, burned the Reichstag brown.
I saw my first American. He looked a lot like me.
Had the same kind of farmer's face. Said he came from somewhere called Hazard, Tennessee.

When the war was over, my discharge papers came.
Me and twenty hundred others went to Stettiner for the train.
“Kiev,” said the commissar, “From there you’re own way home.”
But I never got to Kiev. We never came by home.

The train went north to the taiga. We were stripped and marched in file
Up the great Siberian road, miles and miles and miles,
Dressed in stripes and tatters in a gulag left to die,
All because comrade Stalin feared we'd become too westernized.

Used to love my country; used to be so young;
Used to believe that life was the best song ever sung.
I would have died for my country back in 1945,
But now only one thing remains the brute will to survive.

---- Mike Scott The Waterboys