A Napoleonic War Ballad
A mortally wounded soldier lies beneath the famous blue sky, rehearsing the heroic homecoming that will never happen as his sentences break off with his life.
Read the complete lyrics ↓Also known as the "Battle of the Three Emperors," Austerlitz pitted Napoleon I of France against the combined forces of Emperor Francis II of Austria and Tsar Alexander I of Russia. It is considered Napoleon's tactical masterpiece: after deliberately showing weakness on his right flank to lure the allied armies out of position, French troops broke through the center at the Pratzen Heights, splitting the enemy line in two and delivering one of the most decisive victories in modern military history.
The morning of the battle began shrouded in fog. When it lifted to reveal a brilliant sun right at the moment of the decisive French assault, the episode entered Napoleonic legend as "le soleil d'Austerlitz" — the sun of Austerlitz — a symbol of fortune, glory, and the almost mystical favor that seemed to follow Napoleon at his highest moments. The image would return again and again in Napoleonic rhetoric and iconography in the years that followed, even during his decline, as a memory of a peak never again reached.
The Bloody Hopes ballad doesn't use that sun as triumph, but as an ambiguous image: the light that reveals the battlefield also reveals its human cost, for the ordinary soldiers who lived that light from the ground, not from the vantage point of History.
Above Austerlitz the sky is wide
so blue it almost sings
and I lie still beneath it
with mud upon my sleeve
The banners moved without me
the horses broke the line
but I can hear the church bells
from my village in my mind
My mother will be waiting
with her hands against the door
she will say “my son has suffered
but he stands taller than before”
They will speak my name at supper
they will pour the winter wine
and the children in the courtyard
will march and call me brave
And I will smile, of course I will
though my coat is torn and red
I will tell them it was nothing
just a scratch, a soldier’s debt
O sky of Austerlitz
do not look so far away
I am only resting here
I will rise before the day
O sky of Austerlitz
keep your blue above my eyes
when they ask me how I conquered
I will tell them—
There is snow along the road home
there is smoke above the roofs
there is bread upon the table
and my father’s old salute
I can see the candles burning
I can hear my sister laugh
someone brings my sword before me
someone says “he has come back”
No, I am not dying
not beneath a sky so clean
heroes do not end in silence
with the grass against their cheek
I have medals yet to carry
I have stories yet to make
I have letters still unwritten
I have—
O sky of Austerlitz
wait for me, I almost stand
I can feel the road beneath me
I can see my mother’s hand
O sky of Austerlitz
tell the drums I heard them call
when I return in glory
when I return—
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