Saved

Saved
Amongst the stone and smoke
We never laid before
Images floating all about
Life in the afterglow

My decaying mind pretends
None of this ever happened
We either learn to live a lie
Or we’re waiting here to die

And after all this suffering
I could lie here for good
But with a mind on fire
I try and stand my ground

Illuminate and I will follow

Amongst the stone and smoke
Rising above it all
Broken but not beyond repair
Let’s see how this soul fares

And after all this suffering
I could lie here for good
But with a mind on fire
I try and stand my ground

Illuminate, and I will follow you
(I will follow you, you, I will follow you)
(Everything you thought you’ve lost you have now)
(Who’s laughing now? Who’s laughing now? Now, now, who’s laughing now?)
Let’s see how this soul fares

“The Private does what The General says
The General does what The President says
The President does what The First Lady says
So-so they say…”

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Hunter, still collapsed in the field and barely alive after the Mustard Gas attack, contemplates his imminent death. Though tempted to let go and let it all be over, he ultimately determines not to surrender if there’s still a chance he could live. Rewarding this determination, an allied soldier comes upon him and brings him safely back to camp to recover.

What’s in a name?
Hunter is dying but gets saved. Casey has mentioned that most songs have extremely literal working titles that sometimes don’t get changed by the time the album goes out. This is 100% one of them.

Aside from that. The horrors of war are now over, and this is a good time to note that we’re entering the second half, and second story arc of the album. There’s a distinct tonal and story difference between these two halves. The first half describes Hunter’s experiences in war, and describes what war is like, almost purely for character development, greatly shifting his worldview and loosening his moral rigidity, while shedding him of his naivety, forcing him to mature, compromising his belief in God, so on. The second half is a more traditional ‘narrative’ focused on Hunter’s personal character conflicts in the overall story rather than ‘what would Hunter’s response/impression be to this horrible war thing or that horrible war thing’, so it’s things like addressing plotlines from Act I and setting him up for Act IV.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:12 Instrumental
What the hell is this, Morning Mood? It’s like he’s in some meadow with birds and bunnies and flowers all blooming and bouncing around. Wakey wakey, rise and shine!

Yeah, so Hunter comes to, having survived the Mustard Gas attack. He is still on the battlefield, not in a good enough condition to get up and go anywhere and in fact presently dying.

>Amongst the stone and smoke / We never laid before / Images floating all about / Life in the afterglow
Oh that’s why it’s so cheery sounding, Hunter is presently totally delirious. Nothing happening around him is registering right now, or is only floating in and out as vague images, while his mind occupies itself with a happy little ‘life flashing before your eyes’, ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ imminent-death euphoria.

Which is what this song is, a description of Hunter’s near-death experience. In that way, it’s really, really straightforward.

>My decaying mind pretends / None of this ever happened
The near-death state is casting out the pain and drawing Hunter’s mind away from any of the horrors he has experienced. He can barely think through this anaesthetic haze and these memories of happier times.

>We either learn to live a lie / Or we’re waiting here to die
Hunter can either delude himself into thinking he’ll survive somehow, and sit here hoping for rescue, or he can be realistic about his chances and recognise that he’s going to be laying here in the mud for minutes or hours until he finally passes. In the latter case, he might as well not protract the suffering and just let himself die.

After all his experiences, he isn’t optimistic enough to believe life will provide him with anything nice, but he still has just enough faith to not want to die.

>And after all this suffering / I could lie here for good
The option of surrendering to death and letting this warm current take him is extremely attractive to Hunter right now.

>But with a mind on fire / I try and stand my ground
‘Happiness is a knife / when the world rolls on its side / and your mind’s on fire’. Our first, and extremely indirect, tie back to Ms Terri in this song. While describing how Hunter is frantically trying to grapple onto consciousness and work up enough anger not to get swept away, it’s also priming us to think about her since Hunter is also going to be thinking about her very soon.

In a more wide-reaching sense, Hunter still feels he has urgent business he hasn’t attended to in his life. It likely isn’t so specific or conscious as ‘I HAVE TO FIND OUT THE SECRETS OF MY MOM AND BURN DOWN WHATEVER KILLED HER!!!’, but he is definitely having fuzzy impulses in that vein.

>Illuminate and I will follow
Hunter hazily asks for a sign from God to point him on where to go. If God assures him that there’s purpose to his survival, and there’s worth in him fighting to live, then Hunter will fight to his absolute limit. Hunter felt abandoned by God as of WIMTBA and outright disavowed Him in Mustard Gas, but in this dying moment he is desperate enough to hope and want that guidance.

Simultaneously, he is asking to see Ms Terri. ‘I still see her face; her beauty, her grace / Transfixed like a light in front of me’. If Ms Terri can appear before him, then he will happily give up and let himself die so that he can join her.

>Amongst the stone and smoke / Rising above it all / Broken but not beyond repair / Let’s see how this soul fares
Hunter is so close to death now that he has an out-of-body experience. He watches himself on the field with shockingly lucid impartiality, observing that even though he’s seriously injured, the injuries are not yet so grievous as to be fatal despite treatment. There is still a genuine chance he could survive this. Whether he does or not, though, is ultimately God’s hands — Hunter himself can’t do anything to influence the outcome. That said, he’s content leaving it to chance.

>Chorus Repetition
Hunter resolves to stay alive for as long as he can so as to keep the option to live open.

>Illuminate, and I will follow you / (I will follow you, you, I will follow you) / (Everything you thought you’ve lost you have now) / (Who’s laughing now?)
But Hunter’s will eventually flags as he gets that sign he was looking for — and it’s not God knocking, it’s Ms Terri.

We have this amazing buildup through this whole verse of absolute felicity and bliss as Hunter finds himself reunited in death with this vision of Ms Terri. He is so, so, so, so happy to see her again as his spirit turns to her, runs straight to her, and in the image I get, hugs her up to the ending of the verse…

‘I will follow you’ -> Hunter will follow Ms Terri into death.
‘Everything you thought you’ve lost you have now’ -> Hunter has Ms Terri back, as well as all the light, warmth, fulfilment, happiness, and love that comes with being in her presence.
‘Who’s laughing now?’ -> Hunter is! Screw your lame ‘life’ with its ‘suffering’ and ‘drama’ and ‘pain’, and alright he was dumb to get so dramatic about all that in the first place, because in the end Hunter got everything he wanted after all! Thanks God! It’s all okay!

But, before Hunter’s spirit can be whisked away into the loving embrace of Ms Terri…

>Let’s see how this soul fares
some TOTAL JERKWAD comes on the scene and resuscitates him! Atrocious! The image of Ms Terri disappears as Hunter is yanked back into reality, illustrated by the abruptness of this line after all that buildup.

We can hear from the distinct intonation that this is a new speaker — the Son. He’s a soldier who belongs to an allied regiment. Right now, his platoon is scouring the battlefield left behind after Mustard Gas, retrieving the corpses and looking for survivors like Hunter. Hunter is truly hanging by a thread when the Son finds him, so the Son isn’t certain he’ll survive, but he’s hopeful.

>4:19 – 4:26 Instrumental
Fade to black & timeskip.

>”The Private does what The General says / The General does what The President says / The President does what The First Lady says / So-so they say…”
Hunter awakens in the Son’s camp to the unfamiliar sound of this wartime ditty on the radio. Some time has passed since he was found, and he has received medical treatment, though I figure he still needs some time before he’s at 100% again. He’ll be staying at camp for now while he recovers, and if he’s well enough after that he’ll join on as a member of this group, since his own regiment got destroyed by the Tank.

Another thing about this ditty — we’re at the Western Front and about to go into the Battle of the Somme, but these soldiers are plainly American if they’re talking about the President and the First Lady. I read this as confirmation that Hunter himself is American, rather than British, since we know he had to cross an ocean to get here, and the members of this regiment include his father and brother, who we can figure to be American and who also came from the City. There’s other stuff like the Dime’s closing coinciding with legislation on brothels tightening in America specifically, so I figure it’s another alternate history slip moment from Casey where he’s had America in mind as the setting the whole time, because why else is it showing up here when America wasn’t involved in the Battle of the Somme?

Mustard Gas | Act III | He Said He Had A Story