No Man’s Land – The Green Fields of France<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Well how d’ye do Private William McBride,

D’ye mind if I sit here down by your grave side,

And I’ll 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 glorious fallen in nineteen sixteen,

Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean, Or

Willie McBride was it slow and obscene?

 

Refrain

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

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

Did the bugles sing the last post and chorus

Did the pipes play the “Flooers o’ the forest”?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind,

In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?

And though you died back in 1916,

To that loyal heart are you always nineteen?

Or are you a stranger without even a name?

Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,

In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,

And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame.

 

The sun’s shining now in these green fields of France,

The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance,

The trenches have vanished, long under the plough,

No gas and no barbed-wire, 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,

And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

 

And I can’t help but wonder now Willie 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, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,

The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.

For Willie McBride it’s all happened again,

And again and again and again and again!

 

Eric Bogle Eric Bogle is Australian Humanist of the Year 2001. Originally from Scotland, he is today one of Australia’s best known and most decorated songwriters and performers.