A few days later...
pop
rock
peace
jazz
folk
antiwar
musical
war
rock opera
ww1
Story behind the song
A few days later most of the remaining members of the Vickers Gun crew including Jack Smith, Joe Worcester, and Percy Deans are killed by a trench mortar during a routine evening hate barrage. Harry Fuller, however, is badly wounded [the Blighty one] and invalided back to England.
May visits Harry in hospital and learns about Ron's death first hand from his best friend. May lives to see the end of both world wars but never marries and so has no children of her own, she is however a popular aunt and is visited frequently by her many neices and nephews, she enjoys the company of children.
After a year Harry gets a medical discharge and so survives the war. As the years pass he marries and has children and grandchildren. He lives a long and happy life, long enough to spend time with his great-grandchildren an eventuality that, in the spring of 1915, he had not thought possible.
Alf always attends the Remebrance Service...and chats with anyone who will listen.
Lyrics
Long Road Home
Alf:
When their country's peace was threatened
And the call for heroes beckoned
Heroes innocent of all things yet to come
Embarking in anticipation
Carrying the hopes of nations
They took their first step on the long road home
In trench and sap and dug out
At the Hohenzollern redoubt
They faced the snipers bullets shells and bombs
Enduring they were willing
For the sake of wives and children
To fight and then be laid in a soldiers tomb
Stark the broken brick stacks stood
The shattered stumps of Delville Wood
And all the while Jack Johnson came to call
On the fire step they'd wait
To scale the ladders meet their fate
And now and then you'd see a tall man fall
The barrage set the grass on fire
But failed to break the bloody wire
And machine guns caught and rended flesh from bone
In action they just tried
To play their part prepared to die
And took their last step on that long road home
Now the evening sun is going down
And bodies punctuate the ground
Twelve died for each and every yard of mud
Another day ends bathed in red
And as the sun sets on the dead
All around the land is soaked in blood