Well how do you do Private William 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 working 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 Willie McBride was it slow and obscene?

-Chorus-
Did they beat the drums slowly?
Did they sound the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire over you as they lowered you down?
Did the band play the last post and chorus;
Did the pipes play "The Flowers of the Forest"?

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

-Chorus-

Well, the sun it shines down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow,
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 in mute witness stand,
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
To a whole generation butchered and damned.

-Chorus-

I can't help but wonder young Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
And did you believe when they told you the cause?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well 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.

-Chorus-