Università di Roma Tre - Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia - Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Comunicazione Internazionale
Modulo English for Intercultural Communicaiton  - Docente: Patrick Boylan

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About the song...

While visiting the Northeastern French border with Germany (scene of the bloodiest battles during the First World War), Eric Bogle happened upon a British military cemetery spread out over the green fields.  He noticed one cross in particular, bearing the name of a certain William Mc Bride ("Willie" McBride), an Irish lad killed at the age of 19.  As the composer sat down and began to reflect on the sense of war, the music of an old Scottish dirge came to his mind.

The resulting song is a series of questions addressed to the dead lad.  After each stanza, the singer evokes the pagentry of British military funerals: the slow drum march, the band that plays The last post (the evening bugle call in military camps telling the soldiers they can sleep), and the Scots fifes or pipes that play The flowers of the forest (an ancient song written to commemorate the death in battle of James IV of Scotland).

A historical note: the composer asks the dead lad, Willie McBride, if he really believed that the war for which he had accepted to fight, would be a "war to end war".  This question alludes to the famous "justification" of the First World War (1914-1918) given by British politicians at the time: it would be a war to end all wars, they had said, by establishing "Universal Justice".   (The theorization of "war to end war" as a premise for "universal justice" was first made in 1914 by the novelist H.G. Wells, who worked for the British Ministry of Propaganda during World War I.  As he candidly admitted later, "[In 1914]...I launched the phrase The war to end war and that was not the least of my crimes." )

To be sure, the real reason for British participation in the war was, as always, economic gain.  By helping the French to defeat Germany and its allies (Turkey, etc.), in 1921 the British gained control over the former Turkish possessions in the Middle East.

There they created the states of Iraq (with a pro-British government... until the Iraqis revolted against British rule), Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.  So while the victorious French were content to demand control over the former German territory of Alsace and, in the Middle East, Lebanon (the leading commercial and cultural center at that time), the victorious British -- who realized before anyone else that petroleum was to be the future black gold -- demanded and obtained the sand dunes that today have become the theatre of new and violent anti-colonial struggles.

Thus, young Willie McBride, blown up by a bomb in 1916, may be considered the ancestor of the Italian soldiers who died at Nassiria seven months ago -- and the hundreds of American and British soldiers who have died with them -- convinced that they had been sent to eliminate "arms of mass destruction" (which their top commanders knew all along were inexistent) and to bring "humanitarian aid" and "regime change" (in other words, neo-colonization) to a people whose only real request was -- and is -- to be left alone.

The Green Fields of France
(No Man's Land)

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, and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in 1916.
I hope you died well, and I hope you died clean
Or, young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene ?

___Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly ?
___Did they sound the Dead March as they lowered you down ?
___And did the the band play The Last Post and chorus ?
___Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest ?

And did you leave ere a wife or a sweetheart behind,
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined ?
Although you died back in 1916,
In that faithful heart are you forever nineteen ?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enclosed-in forever behind a glass frame
In an old photograph, torn and battered and stained,
And faded to yellow in an old leather frame ?

___Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly ?
___Did they sound the Dead March as they lowered you down ?
___And did the the band play The Last Post and chorus ?
___Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest ?

The sun now it shines on the green fields of France,
There's a warm summer breeze, it makes the red poppies dance.
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds,
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,
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
To a whole generation that were butchered and damned.

___Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly ?
___Did they sound the Dead March as they lowered you down ?
___And did the the band play The Last Post and chorus ?
___Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest ?

Ah, young Willie McBride, I can't help wonderin' why.
Do all those who lie here, know why did they die ?
And did they believe when they answered the calls,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars ?
Well the sorrows, the suffering, the glory, the pain,
The killing and dying, was all done in vain.
For young Willie McBrides, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

___Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly ?
___Did they sound the Dead March as they lowered you down ?
___And did the the band play The Last Post and chorus ?
___Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest ?

© Eric Bogle
Larrikin Music,
Sydney, Australia
http://windbourne.com/ebogle/