The Green Fields Of France

Well how do you do young Willie McBride?
 do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside
 and rest for a while 'neath the warm summer sun
 I've been walkin' all day and I'm nearly done
 I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
 when you joined the great fallen of 1916
 Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
 Willie McBride was it slow and obscene And the beautiful wife or the sweetheart for life
 in some faithful heart are you forever enshrined
 and although you died back in 1916
 in that faithful heart are you forever nineteen?
 or are you a stranger without even a name
 enshrined forever behind a glass pane
 in an ould photograph torn tattered and stained,
 fading to yellow in a brown leather frame? Now the sun shines down on the green fields of France
 a warm summer wind makes the red poppys dance
 The trences have vanished under the plows,
 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 stand mute in the sand
 for man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
 to a whole generation that was butchered and damned Now Willie McBride I can't help wonder why
 Do those who lie here do they know why they died
 Did they really beleive when they answered the call
 did they really believe that this war would end wars
 Forever this song of suffereing and shame
 the killing the dying was all done in vain
 for young Willie McBride it's all happened again,
 and again, and again, and again and again