Devils & Dust is an album preoccupied with home—how to get there, taking others there, or being far from home in a foreign land on an uncertain battlefield.
On the title song, Springsteen sketches the distance between home and war with metaphor; the singer dreams of someone he loves "in a field of blood and stone." It's impossible to tell if the narrator is the one in the field thinking of his lover, or if the horrors of conflict have driven him to imagine his lover actually bleeding and dying.
God is on his side, but fear "takes your God-filled soul/fills it with devils and dust." What you do to survive can kill the things you love; surviving war may bring you home, but not as your recognizable self. You lose that person to the realities of battle.
Home is a long, long way from the singer. It's so far away, it may be impossible to ever return. The full cost of war includes those men and women who return from conflict and may never feel safe again.
Listen to what Springsteen does with the arrangement here; starting on voice and acoustic guitar, the song slowly expands, bringing in bass-heavy piano and a rumbling electric guitar. Then that spinning string arrangement, looping around the melody again and again; three notes, pushing constantly forward toward nothing. The tambourine and drum, like a distant gunshot in the night; a harmonica solo, like sandpaper on skin.
It's that violin accompaniment that lingers, even when the song concludes in an echo of feedback. The song makes its statement, seems to end, but the agonies it describes--war itself, or the damages of war—they never stop. They just play on.
Stream this song on the service of your choice.
"What if what you do to survive/Kills the things you love"
This line. Whew! I keep coming back to it.