"Deck of Cards is apparently an extremely old performance piece. I have seen a newspaper clipping of the lyrics pasted in an old (late nineteenth-century) "ballet book" from the Southern Appalachians. The prologue assigning the episode to WWII and the final line making the narrative autobiographical were added or modified by Tyler, but the rest of the text is pretty much as I remember it from the clipping and from the old versions I used to hear on the radio. The version I have dates from the 1870's, and the story is told by a soldier "who was taken before the magistrate in Glasgow;" so that I assume the clipping to have a Scottish locale.