The Officer Who Brought a Sword to a Gun War (Mad Jack Churchill)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You went to war in 1940
carrying a longbow, a Scottish broadsword,
and a set of bagpipes
as if someone had explained the twentieth century to you
and you had politely declined
Your commanding officers
filed the appropriate paperwork
to object to your equipment
and you filed the appropriate paperwork
to ignore them
and then you walked onto the beach at Dunkirk
playing "March of the Cameron Men"
on the pipes
while the Luftwaffe
provided accompaniment
they had not been asked for

[Verse 2]
In Norway you got the only confirmed
longbow kill of the Second World War —
an arrow through a German sergeant
in 1940
which is a sentence
that should not exist
in the same century as radar
You led commando raids in Sicily
storming the beachhead
with the broadsword in your right hand
and the pipes under your left arm
and when your men asked
why you brought a sword to a war
that had invented the tank,
the machine gun,
and the atom bomb,
you said any officer who goes into action
without his sword
is improperly dressed

[Chorus]
You captured forty-two Germans
in a single night in Sicily
armed with the broadsword
and what witnesses described
as an enthusiasm
that the Germans found
more disorienting than the blade
You would creep into position,
play a few bars on the pipes
to announce yourself —
because ambush without courtesy
was not how you fought —
and then charge with the sword raised
and the sound coming out of you
was not a battle cry
but something closer to delight
which is considerably more frightening

[Verse 3]
They captured you twice —
once in Yugoslavia, once in Germany —
and you escaped both times
The first time you walked out of a prison camp
in the middle of the night
through a drain
The second time
you walked a hundred and fifty miles
to the Baltic coast
with a rusty can of onions
for provisions
and when the Americans liberated the next camp over
you were already gone
because waiting to be rescued
was not an activity
your schedule had room for

[Bridge]
When the war ended in Europe
you were reportedly furious —
not at the outcome
but at the timing
You said if it wasn't for those damn Yanks
we could have kept the war going
another ten years
which is either
the most appalling thing
a man has ever said about a war
or the most honest thing
a man has ever said
about what he was built for
and you were built
for the version of war
that no longer existed
and you fought it anyway
in the one that did

[Outro]
After the war you learned to surf —
one of the first men
to ride the Severn Bore tidal wave
on a homemade board —
because the ocean
was the only opponent left
that didn't require permission
from a commanding officer
You died at eighty-nine in Surrey
having brought a longbow to Dunkirk,
a sword to Sicily,
bagpipes to every beach
that had the poor judgment
to be between you and the enemy
The drawer where they keep your name
is improperly dressed —
it should contain a file
but it contains a broadsword
and the sound of pipes
playing through a century
that never quite figured out
what to do with you