Somebody in the brass section had a school copy of Cowper, and by the second week of the tour the whole bus could recite the runaway-horse business at the least provocation. The Diverting History of John Gilpin is from 1782 and concerns a London linen-draper whose borrowed horse bolts, takes his hat and his wig with it, and carries him thirteen miles past the dinner he was going to. We kept the predicament and we kept the refrain. Everything else here is ours.

What makes the old poem work is that it never blames anybody. Gilpin is a perfectly sensible man who agrees to a perfectly sensible favor and then gets carried a great deal farther than he ever agreed to go. That is a war story if I ever heard one, so ours is a soldier, the steering wheel comes off in his hands on the first bend, and after that it is the Jeep's afternoon and not his.

Cowper's best joke is that the crowd watching assumes the poor man must be racing for a wager—"he rides a race!" they shout as he goes by—and nobody thinks to ask whether he is trying to stop. We stole that outright. Our Gilpin means only to get his Captain to safety and is decorated instead for a piece of tactics he never intended, which is, when all is said and done, the way life usually works.

The month in 1943 we recorded it, the newspapers ran a Gilpin story of their own. On June 12, 1943, the day after Pantelleria fell, RAF Sergeant Sydney Cohen was flying a Swordfish biplane out of Malta on an air-sea rescue search when his compass failed and his fuel ran low, and he put down on the nearest land he could find: the Italian island of Lampedusa. The garrison came out waving white sheets and handed him a signed offer of surrender, and a London paper promptly crowned him “King of Lampedusa.” In fairness to the Italians—some 4,000 men who had just been bombed for days—they had already decided to give up, and a Royal Navy officer took the formal surrender later that day. But Cohen, a tailor's cutter from London who had only been looking for somewhere to land, went into the papers as the man who captured an island, which is exactly what happens to our Colonel Gilpin.

Colonel John Gilpin was a man
Who never dodged a chore;
So when the Captain called for wheels,
John answered, "Yes, sir—sure."
But just as they began to roll,
A bolt gave way and squeaked—
John tugged the wheel, it came off clean,
And left him slightly freaked.

He held it up and stammered, "Sir…
I think we've got a flaw."
The Captain ducked as bullets sang,
And shouted, "Drive! That's law!"
The Jeep shot off without a guide,
A bucking metal steed;
It bounced and swerved and rattled hard
At reckless, breakneck speed.

[Chorus]
Oh, away went Gilpin, bold and free,
And never lost his head;
He meant to drive the Captain safe,
But ran a race instead.

They tore across a ridge of stone
Where snipers lined the crest;
The Jeep plowed through like bowling pins—
And laid them all to rest.
They hit a ditch, they cleared a mound,
Crashed through the Nazi camp;
They plowed through tents, tables and men
Leaving all with Gilpin's stamp.

The Jeep then turned, returned to camp
And, out of gas, it died.
It rolled to stop at Headquarters' door
Exactly where they'd tried.
The General took one look and said,
"By thunder, that's a feat!
You wiped out half the enemy
And parked him at my feet."

He said, "You deserve a medal, son,
A hero's shining prize."
But Gilpin stepped politely back
With terror in his eyes.
He said, "Sir, I'm honored, truly so…
But after this I ken,
I'd rather walk to get that medal
Than ride a Jeep again."

[Chorus]
Oh, away went Gilpin, bold and free,
And never lost his head;
He meant to drive the Captain safe,
But ran a race instead.

[Band solo, the length of one verse]

[Chorus]
Oh, away went Gilpin, bold and free,
And never lost his head;
He meant to drive the Captain safe,
But ran a race instead.