Your country needs YOU

Come and join us, your country needs you
The old country needs you, come on and go
The Hun is afoot, he'll crush us all
Don't, and you're a coward, here's your white feather

Jump on the train, here is a corner
Have a fag, we'll be in France soon
March down the cobbled roads, the guns are calling
Here is your trench and here is your mud

Go on your ship and join the navy
Oh, you're now a soldier and not a sailor
Missed the train out of Antwerp
Missed the rest of the war interned in Holland

Sailing the seven seas, curse those U-boats
Dodge the torpedoes, strafe the subs
Lest they strafe you or leave you to drown
Better still Jutland, and knock Jerry for six

No volunteers left, not wanting, or all dead?
Draft them in, the dodgers, the malingerers
Push them to Haig's mincers, never mind they be ill
Never mind the trauma, won't go? Shot at dawn.

Givency, Somme, Passchendaele, add some more names
The glory is mud, the terror, the death
Torn to pieces, ripped to smithereens
Over the top, boys, hang in the barbed wire

What's the point, nothing is shifting
Jerry's bled white and so are we
Strategy's to pot, what's that, intelligence?
Throw out some chlorine, damn the wind's turned right round

November eleventh, the eleventh hour
Guns fall silent, the shooting has stopped
The point of it all?
You tell me, I don't goddamn know