| Al Stewart – Roads to Moscow Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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The line "Two broken tigers on fire in the night" reminds me of William Blake's famous poem "Tiger, tiger, burning bright; In the forests of the night..." The second to last verse is intriguing but I doubt it means anything. The Soviet soldier is caught behind German lines and taken prisoner, then stands in a line with other Soviet prisoners, then the Germans take him alone from the lines and put on a train to Russia. Then apparently he comes back to Germany, the war ends (in April), and in October he and other Soviet soldiers are on a train back to the Soviet Union. It's true that when Soviet soldiers became lost from their units and snuck back across the front line, sometimes other Soviet soldiers shot them suspecting they were spies or traitors. But that scenario doesn't fit the song. I'll bet that if you asked Stewart what the second to last verse means, he'd say "I don't know, it just came to me." Indeed "I'll never know, I'll never know" is in the lyrics. Sometimes songwriters are just inspired. That a line says "holy Russia" suggests a religious or mystical experience. The Nazis had some strange religious fascinations, in my imagination a German general wanted to go to a religious shrine in Russia before it was lost to the Soviet army, and chose a single Soviet prisoner with him, for reasons known only to the general. |
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