Well how do you do, young Willie McBride.
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside?
I'll rest for awhile 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 dead heroes in 1915.
Well, I hope you died quick, and I hope you died clean.
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did they beat the drum slowly; did they sound the fifes lowly;
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle 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 faithful heart are you forever enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1915,
In some faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined forever behind a glass frame,
In an old photograph, torn & tattered & stained,
And fading to yellow in a bound leather frame?
Chorus
Well, the sun, it shines down on these green field of France.
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished now, under the plow.
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns fire now.
But here in this graveyard it's still no man's land.
And the countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
A whole generation were butchered & damned.
Chorus
Well, 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 this war would end all wars?
Well, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killling, the dying, it was all done in vain.
For William McBride, it's all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Chorus