The Herd - The Metres Gained lyrics

[Verse 1:]

I hear the oldies harking back to the old days

Work hard, respect your elders and the old ways

My grandma tells me about the war and her old mates

My great granddad barely ever told a soul, hey

Now his correspondence lay on pen and paper

But I find the cursive writing kinda hard to decipher

Apparently he joined in every annual veteran's march

My grandma reflects maybe he remembered too much

I wonder how much he could have forgotten if he tried

Fought for king and country's pride, twice he almost died

First time hair combed by a German bullet

And maybe that's why she became a hairdresser, I don't know

Left at 19 years of age

A country boy from Singleton way

Shipped to France, Wellard's the name

Anything but to be labeled as a shirker

the shame of being sent a white feather in a letter

Life is hell

[Verse 2:]

Churchill don't know what he's doing in the Dardonelles

The newspapers sterilized til it's hard to tell

Say that General Hamilton is getting diggers mowed down at Lone Pine

Still they say "there's no dying"

And mum the stench of death is so trying, well

We fall in line behind the British line

And hell is all around this 700 kilometre borderline

That's like a trench from Canberra to Melbourne, help me god

They're sending wounded men back to the front

While in the training camps fresh enlisters dormant for months

40 000 taken by trench foot, the feet rot

Knowing if you stick your head up you're for sure to be shot

Try hand to hand combat when it's pitch black and foggy

And unable to collect dead bodies, beyond sorry

Sorry for the sons of these nations, in death there's no war reparations

[Chorus x2:]

Life is hell, this is hell

Write me soon, hope you're well

Len Hall Gallipoli veteran

Gently passed away thinking we learned not a thing

Played the Commonwealth cannon-fodder, his ominous words

That if he had to do it again, he'd fight for the Turks

And the facts made way for the mythology, like you remember Bondy's victory speech

Great granddad, would you believe we're the agressors now?

New technology, you should see all the weapons now

Listen closely when the diggers say that we're forgetting how

You shouldn't railroad your citizens to war unless you absolutely have to

Never sell a war you go to war to defend

More than alliances in support of your women and men

Only once has there been a direct threat

Forgetting wars that we still haven't left yet

The next Tojo or Hitler I don't know and who wants that close to home?

[Chorus x2]

And in those days, they measured by the metres gained

As then today, still measured by the metres gained