Green fields of France (No mans land)

Oh how do you do, young Willy McBride Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside And rest for a while in the warm summer sun I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done And I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen When you joined the great fallen in 1916 Well I hope you died quick And I hope you died clean Or Willy McBride, was it slow and obscene

Did they beat the drums slowly Did they play the fife lowly Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down Did the band play the last post and chorus Did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined And though you died back in 1916 To that loyal heart you're forever nineteen Or are you a stranger without even a name Forever enshrined behind some old glass pane In an old photograph torn, tattered, and stained And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame

The sun shining down on these green fields of France The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance The trenches have vanished long under the plow No gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing now But here in this graveyard that's still no mans land The countless white crosses in mute witness stand To man's blind indifference to his fellow man And a whole generation were butchered and damned

And I can't help but wonder oh Willy McBride Do all those who lie here know why they died Did you really believe them when they told you the cause Did you really believe that this war would end wars Well the suffering........

I have that one on a CD by John McDermott. Another good one is “Faded Coat of Blue” on the same album. About a Scottish Soldier.

Both bring a tear to my eye.

“No Man’s Land” (also known as “The Green Fields of France” or “Willie McBride”) is a song written in 1976 by Scottish Australian folk singer-songwriter Eric Bogle, reflecting on the grave of a young man who died in World War I. Its chorus refers to two famous pieces of military music, “The Last Post” and “The Flowers of the Forest”. Its melody, its refrain (”did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly”), and elements of its subject matter (a young man cut down in his prime) are similar to those of “Streets of Laredo”, a North American cowboy ballad whose origins can be traced back to an 18th-century English ballad called “The Unfortunate Rake” and the Irish Ballad “Lock Hospital”. In 2009 Eric told an audience in Weymouth that he’d read about a girl who had been presented with a copy of the song by then prime minister Tony Blair, who called it “his favourite anti-war poem”. According to Eric, the framed copy of the poem credited him, but stated that he had been killed in World War I.

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