Well, how d'you do, Private William McBride?
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside?
I'll rest here awhile in the warm summer sun;
Been walking all day and I'm nearly done.
I can see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
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 fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles play "The Last Post" in chorus?
Did the pipes play "The Flowers of the Forest?"
Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
In some faithful heart are you ever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined forever behind a glass pane.
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
Fading to yellow in a bound leather frame?
The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
Warm winds blow gently and the red poppies dance.
Trenches have vanished under the plow;
There's no gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it is still No Man's Land,
Countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's pained indifference to his fellow man
And a whole generation that's butchered and damned.
I can't help but wondering, poor William McBride,
Did all those who died here know just why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you, "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that the war would end wars?
Oh, the suffering and the sorrow and the glory and the shame,
The killing and the dying, was all done in vain.
For, William McBride, it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they sound the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles play "The Last Post" in chorus?
Did the pipes play "The Flowers of the Forest?"
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