The Waterboys - Red Army Blues

When I left my home 

and my family
my mother said to me
"Son, it's how many Germans 

you kill that counts
Go set your country free"
So I packed my bags 

and 

I brushed my cap
and 

I 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

Exchanged 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

Then we howled into Berlin,
tore the smoking buildings down,
raised the Red Flag high,
burnt the Reichstag brown

I saw my first American

he looked a lot like me
He had the same kind of farmer's face,
said he came from some place 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 your own way home"
But I never got to Kiev  

I never
came back home

The train went north to the taiga
We were stripped and marched in file
up the Great Siberian road
 

for miles and miles
and miles and miles

Dressed in stripes and tatters

in a Gulag left  

to die 
all because Comrade Stalin feared
that we'd become too westernized !

I used to love my country
I used to feel so young
I 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 things remains
- the brute will to survive

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