Cry for a Butchered Generation - The Battle of the Somme

Cry for a Butchered Generation - The Battle of the Somme
(Remembering Walther Keienburg, *1898, +1916 in France)
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Next year, it'll be a century ago.
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He was a "Grand-Uncle" of mine. There was no chance for me, to meet him and get acquainted with him (as I was born in Germany in 1953, 37 years after the great slaughter in the trenches that started at 1st of Juli 1916). Just a name, casted in Bronze on a war-memorial, that's all what is left.
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- REQUIAS IN PACE -
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Just one name between one million names - young men from France, England, Scotland, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Rhodesia , and Germany - that were butchered without any understandable reason near Ovillers - La Boiselle - Montauban - Hardecourt - Maurepas - Cléry in northern France.
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My eyes fill up with tears, and my heart is bleeding, every time when I remember Walther Keienburg and all the others... “Nothing but stupid mutual mass-slaughter” (Basil Liddell Hart)... The victims did only this wrong: They believed in the lies their politicians told them, and followed some "wicked old men" in uniforms - into the Poison-Gas-Clouds, into Barrage of Mortars, into Machine-Gun-Salvos.
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Well, Guys: here's one for all of you, no matter, what nation you came from.
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> "The Battle of the Somme" by Pipe Major William Lawrie (+ 1916)
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> Songtext "One day we'll see them", written by Alex Campbell.
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One Day We'll See Them
written by Alex Campbell.
Melodie: "Battle of the Somme" by Pipe Major William Lawrie
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1. The Darkness is fading, the day it is dawning
The fields they are empty, nae workers today.
The Farmers and young men all have been going
To battles in lands that lie far away.
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Yet one day we'll see them come by the hillside
Husbands and sons will return to their homes.
Yet still my heart bleeds; the price of their young pride
Their widows and sweethearts left sadly to mourn.
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2. The call when it came found their menfolk aye ready,
Each knew the reasons or that's what they thought.
Then came the doubting but still they were steady
Slow dying in cold clay a'cursing their lot.
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Yet one day we'll see them, there on the hillside
Though knowing in hearts they are but a gleam.
The grief in the long glen, the gloom at the fireside
Will pass like a Spring breeze that never has been.
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The bagpipe was used as Instrument of war since early medieval times. Sometimes, it makes me shiver, to listen to it's sound in "mixolydian scale" to bourdon-drones.
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FarrierPete