To me, this song is very bittersweet. It sounds positive yet sad when you listen to it, but I think it's just a sort of aural trick. The war is over, yes. But at what cost? "If there's no one there,/Then there's no one there." Well, what about the person left behind? They have still have to live through the drudgery of life. The war is over, but maybe life was better during the war. At least "they" were there. The line "All the living are dead and the dead are all living" emphasizes this. No one came out unscathed. The people who died live on in memory, whereas the people left alive are so destroyed by the war that their old selves are dead.
To me, this song is very bittersweet. It sounds positive yet sad when you listen to it, but I think it's just a sort of aural trick. The war is over, yes. But at what cost? "If there's no one there,/Then there's no one there." Well, what about the person left behind? They have still have to live through the drudgery of life. The war is over, but maybe life was better during the war. At least "they" were there. The line "All the living are dead and the dead are all living" emphasizes this. No one came out unscathed. The people who died live on in memory, whereas the people left alive are so destroyed by the war that their old selves are dead.