Well how do you do, young Willie 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 forces of nineteen-sixteen   Well I hope you died well, and I hope you died clean   Or young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene      Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly   Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down   Did the band play The Last Post in chorus   Did the pipes play the 'Flowers of the Forest'      And did you leave a young wife or a sweetheart behind   In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined   And although you died back in nineteen sixteen   In that loyal heart are you forever nineteen   Or are you a stranger without even a name   Forever enshrined behind the glass frame   In a old photograph, torn and tattered and stained   And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame      Oh, did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly   Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down   Did the band play The Last Post in chorus   Did the pipes play the 'Flowers of the Forest'      Yeah!      Now the sun's shinin' down on the green fields of France   The warm winds blow gently; the red poppies dance   And the trenches, they 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 the mute witness stand   To a man’s blind indifference to his fellow man   And a whole generation that were butchered and damned      Oh, did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly   Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down   Oh, and did the band play The Last Post in chorus   Did the pipes play the ´Flowers of the Forest.´      Whoa   Young Willie McBride   Can you hear me   Cause I'm prayin'   By your side, yeah   Yeah