| Well how do you do young Willy Macbride?
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| Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside?
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| And rest for a while in the hot summer sun
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| I’ve ben walking all day and I’m nearly done
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| I see by your gravestone, you were only nineteen
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| When you joined the great call-up in 1916
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| I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean,
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| Or young Willy Macbride was it slow and obscence?
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| Did they beat the drum slowly
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| Did they play the fife lowly
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| Did they play the death march
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| As they lowered you down
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| And did the band play the last post and And did the pipes play the flowers of
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| the forest
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| Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
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| In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
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| Althought you died back in 1916
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| In that faithful heart are you forever 19
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| Or are you a stranger without a name
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| Enclosed and forever behind a glass frame
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| In an old photograph torn battered and stained
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| And faded to yellow in the brown leather frame
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| The sun now it shines on the green fields of France
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| There is a warm summer breeze,
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| That makes the red poppies dance
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| And look how the sun shines from under the clouds
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| There is no gas, no barbed wire there is no guns firing now
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| But here in this graveyard that' still no mans land
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| The countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
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| To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
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| To a whole generation that were butchered and damned
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| Young Willy Macbride, I can’t help wondering why
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| Do those that lie here know why did they die?
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| And did they believe when they answered the call
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| Did they really believe that this war would end wars? |