Gunners Dream lyrics: meaning?

Can someone please elaborate what the lyrics to The Gunners Dream mean?

I'm doing a school project and I'd really like more insight from Flyidians.

thanks.

Well, I'll have a bash.

The first stanza is told from the perspective of "the gunner," a character whose presence subtly or overtly influences every song on The Final Cut. It's probably the spirit of Roger Waters' father, Eric Fletcher Waters (with some poetic license taken here as EFW was a fusilier and not in the air force), but could also be a war buddy of "the teacher" from The Wall (whose voice is the narrator of "One of the Few" and "The Hero's Return").

Moments before the song starts, we hear "the gunner's dying words on the intercom" as his airplane is shot down "over Dresden at Angels-One-Five" and crashes "in the corner of some foreign field." As the narrator imagines these fatal moments, he relates the "memories... rushing up to meet me" while the gunner's last dream appears before his eyes.

We flash forward to a memorial service, possibly Veteran's Day outside a tiny church in England. The attendees are exiting and saying their goodbyes, echoing the farewells they said to their families before going off to fight years before (see: "Southampton Dock"). A brass band creaks away in the background. Someone (Roger?) reaches out to support an elderly woman (his widowed mother?) and feels the spirit of the gunner rise again (which breaks out in a sax solo).

Finally this "dream" that the narrator is having through the spirit of the gunner is elucidated and described vividly. Rather than getting a parade of half-hearted and patronizing memorials every year, those who fought and died for the freedom of others live in a comfortable retirement where they themselves can enjoy that freedom without answering to the tyrannical catalogue of oppression that we'll see in "The Fletcher Memorial Home" (note the use of EFW's middle name).

One of my cousins from Northern Ireland considered the first two lines of this stanza to be directly about the Troubles between warring Catholic and Protestant factions in that country (which were particularly bad around the time Roger composed these lyrics). At any rate, needless killing for causes that don't even really matter are one of the themes that Roger explores throughout The Final Cut, which tramples over the idea of the gunner's dream-like world where "everyone has recourse to the law, and no-one kills the children anymore." In reality, of course, things are still as bad as they were in 1983, if not worse (see: "To Kill A Child").

It seems we are powerless to stop the nightmarish cycle of violence, and the utopian dream remains just that. The killing goes on, but the narrator urges us to remember the dead hero lying in his blackened plane wreck for a gravesite, in the hopes that this image somehow will spark empathy for the price paid by our veterans and make us realize the value of human life again.

Very impressive were did you get all that?

From repeated listenings.

Well said, Bot.

Roger's choice of Dresden is significant, because it has remained a highly controversial mission. Most people agree (20/20 hindsight helps) that it was a needless mission; a merciless slaughter of innocents on the ground and therefore also a waste of the airmen who died. i.e., "the gunner", which, of course, is the theme heard over and over in Water's work.

"In the corner of some foreign field" is a phrase lifted from a poem by Rupert Brooke, who perished in WWI:

Sonnet V: THE SOLDIER

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blessed by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts a peace, under an English heaven."






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I remember reading that poem and recognizing the line, thanks for posting it Stratters!