No Man's Land

Well how d'you do Private William MacBride
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
I'll rest for a while in the warm summer sun
I've 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 nineteen-sixteen
Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or Willie MacBride was it slow and obscene

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined
And though you died back in nineteen-sixteen
To that loyal heart are you always nineteen
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane
In an old photograph torn and tattered and stained
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame

The sun's shining now on these green fields of France
The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance
The trenches have vanished long under the plough
No gas and no barbed wire, 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
And a whole generation that were butchered and damned

And I can't help but wonder now Willie MacBride
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 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 MacBride it all happened again
And again and again and again and again

Note

[1980:] Written in March 1976. - A song about the waste and futility of war. Pure and simple. I wrote it after a short sobering visit to one of the multitude of military cemeteries in northern France. I attempted to convey in the song the sad, angry, futile atmosphere of that graveyard. (Notes Eric Bogle, 'Now I'm Easy')

--Eric Bogle