Video Rememberance Sunday – Eric Bogle

The Green Fields of France – Eric Bogle

Well how do you do, young Willie McBride,

Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside

And rest for a while ‘neath the warm summer sun

I’ve been walking all day lord and I’m nearly done.

I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen

When you joined the dead heroes of nineteen-sixteen.

I hope you died well and I hope you died clean

Or Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene.

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Chorus :

Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly,

Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered you down.

Did the bugles play the Last Post and chorus,

Did the pipes play the ‘Flooers o’ the Forest’.

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And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind

In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined

And though you died back there in nineteen-sixteen

To that loyal heart are you always nineteen

Or are you a stranger without even a name

Forever enshrined behind the glass frame

In a old photograph, torn and tattered and stained

And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.

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The sun now it shines on the green fields of France

The warm summer breeze makes the red poppies dance

The trenches have vanished long under the plough

There’s no gas, no barbed wire, there’s no guns firing now

But here in this graveyard it’s still no-man’s-land

The countless white crosses in mute witness stand

To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man

To a whole generaation that were butchered and damned.

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Now young Willie McBride I can’t help but wonder why

Do all those who lie here know why they died

And did they believe when they answered the cause

Did they really believe that this war would end wars

Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the shame

The killing and dying was all done in vain

For young Willie McBride it all happened again

And again, and again, and again, and again.

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From Wikipedia : Three William McBrides fell in 1916, two were members of the northern Irish Regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, and died more or less in the same spot during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. One was 21, the other 19 years old. “The law of the greatest numbers does beat even the most poetical license”, Chielens remarks