Simply a song, a piece of music and a poem to mark 100 years since Armistice Day 11 November 1918, the end of the First World War, in which there were 40 million casualties. The song, by the Scottish-Australian singer-songwriter Eric Bogle, written in 1976, is also known as The Green Fields of France or Willie McBride, and reflects on the grave in Flanders of a young soldier who died in 1916. The lyrics say it all, and in some performances Bogle also sings a verse in German to honour the dead from the other side. The song also refers to two remembrance pieces of music The Last Post, and The Flowers of the Forest, the former was originally a military end-of-day bugle call, but has since become the ultimate remembrance melody. Since 1928, it has been played every evening at 8pm by buglers of the local Last Post Association at the war memorial at Ypres in Belgium known as the Menin Gate, a site at which 300,000 British soldiers died, 100,000 of whose bodies were lost in the mud and never identified.
Well how do you do, Private William McBride
Do you mind if I sit here down by your grave side?
A 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 that you were only 19
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916
Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, William McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did they beat the drum slowly?
Did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing 'The Last Post' in chorus?
Did the pipes play 'The Flowers 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 19
Or are you just a stranger without even a name
Forever enclosed behind some glass-pane
In an old photograph torn and tattered and stained
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?
Did they beat the drum slowly?
Did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing 'The Last Post' in chorus?
Did the pipes play 'The Flowers o' the Forest'?
Well the sun it shines down on these green fields of France
The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance
The trenches are vanished now under the plough
No gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing now
But here in this graveyard it is still No Man's Land
And the countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man
And a whole generation that was butchered and downed
Did they beat the drum slowly?
Did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing 'The Last Post' in chorus?
Did the pipes play 'The Flowers o' the Forest'?
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 them that this war would end war?
But 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
Did they beat the drum slowly?
Did they sound the pipe lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing 'The Last Post' in chorus?
Did the pipes play 'The Flowers o' the Forest'?
Finally, The Last Post, a poem by Robert Graves in 1918:
The bugler sent a call of high romance –
“Lights out! Lights out!” to the deserted square.
On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer,
“God, if it’s this for me next time in France…
O spare the phantom bugle as I lie
Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,
Dead in a row with the other broken ones
Lying so stiff and still under the sky,
Jolly young Fusiliers too good to die.”
Remembrance Day
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