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I got thinking about "Butcher's Tale" this morning when I was trying to go to sleep, and I realized two things about it:
1. The line "And the preacher in his pulpit" has alliteration, and - unlike most of the alliteration I mention - this instance is actually significant. The alliterative sound is the P, which is a plosive. So that recurring P sound mimics the sound of the bombs and shells and that singer/speaker would encounter on the battlefield.
2. There's internal rhyme in the line "Sermon: go and fight, do what is right." And - again - there's significance to this (it's also the only internal rhyme in the song). It's suggestive of a larger pool of rhetorical devices that the preacher might use in his sermon.
I checked the recording, and that line ("Sermon: go and fight, do what is right") is the only line during the verses that has legato chord transitions. During the rest of the lines, there's a staccato interchange between chords and the bass notes. So, musically, there's something different about that line too.
When I looked at my transcription to confirm these lines, I noticed that the line following "Sermon: go and fight, do what is right" is "But he don't have to hear these guns." The intentional mis-use of "don't" ("he don't" instead of "he doesn't") illustrates further distance between the singer/speaker and the preacher. There's the ideological distance and resentment that the song specifically mentions ("But he don't have to hear these guns / And I bet he sleeps at night" and "If the preacher he could see those flies / Wouldn't preach for the sound of guns"), but there's also the distance illustrated by that rift of language - the preacher uses rhetorical devices where the soldier can't even make his subject and verb agree. The pleonastic "he" in "If the preacher he could see those flies" also seems to underscore this distance.
