"Green Fields of France" — Eric Bogle's original title for it was "No Man's Land" — was written in 1976 by Bogle, a Scottish-born singer who had emigrated to Australia. He wrote it after walking the military cemeteries of Flanders, where the graves run in long rows. The song sits the singer down beside one grave: Willie McBride, a soldier who died in 1916 at the age of nineteen.
It is not a song about a battle. One man talks to one dead man and asks him questions he cannot answer. That is why the song has outlasted nearly every other song written about that war.
Who Was Willie McBride? The Real Men Behind the Name
Bogle answered this question himself: he had no one soldier in mind. He chose the name "McBride" partly because it rhymed with "graveside," and partly on purpose — an Irish name, chosen as a reminder of Irish sacrifice at a time when anti-Irish feeling in Britain ran strong. He has also said that every soldier in the cemetery is a Willie McBride.
People have gone looking. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists eight men named William McBride and six more listed as "W. McBride" who died in France and Belgium — and none of them matches the song exactly, because the song says nineteen in 1916. The closest are two men buried at Authuille Military Cemetery on the Somme, both in Irish regiments. One is Private William McBride of the 9th Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, from County Armagh, who died on 22 April 1916 — but he was twenty-one, not nineteen. The second "W." McBride at Authuille has no age recorded. An Armagh historian and the McBride family argue the Armagh man is the one whose grave Bogle sat beside. That is their researched claim, not a settled fact — and the honest answer is that the grave, if there was one grave, held a real young man whose name happened to fit a rhyme.
Ireland's Forgotten First World War Soldiers
The name matters because of what Ireland did with its First World War dead afterward. Roughly 210,000 Irishmen served in the war, and perhaps 35,000 were killed — the counts differ depending on who is counted, and the Irish War Memorial Records of 1923 put the total dead at 49,400, a figure that includes men in Irish regiments born outside Ireland. Every one of them was a volunteer — Ireland was exempt from conscription.
After independence, the new Irish state largely forgot these men, because they had worn British uniforms. For decades their service went uncommemorated. That long official silence, and Ireland's slow recovery of these soldiers' memory, is the Irish story inside this song. A different post on this blog, Four Green Fields, uses "green fields" for Tommy Makem's Ireland-as-mother; Bogle's green fields are French cemeteries, and the two songs get mixed up often enough to separate them.
What the Song Asks
The verses are questions. Did the drums beat slowly at the funeral? Did the pipes play? And then the question the whole song turns on: did the men who sent him, and the men who followed him into the next war, learn anything? Bogle's generation watched another war being prepared while the first one's survivors were still alive, and the anger is quiet because it does not need to be loud.
It belongs on a short shelf of songs that keep named dead men from being forgotten. Our post on The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is about the same job done for twenty-nine sailors on Lake Superior. And the generation Willie McBride belonged to had two roads out of poverty: emigration and enlistment. Thousands Are Sailing sings about the ones who took the boat.
From Irish No. 1 to Dropkick Murphys
The Fureys & Davey Arthur took the song to No. 1 in Ireland from their 1979 album The Green Fields of France, and that is largely how it became Ireland's song. In 2005 Irish-American band Dropkick Murphys recorded it, carrying it back across the Atlantic. In the United States it is heard in November, around Veterans Day — November 11 was Armistice Day, marking the end of the First World War, before it was renamed Veterans Day in 1954 and widened to honour all who served.
The Irish Family Detective's research on Willie McBride is the best single read on the identity question. Dublin's Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge is a place readers can visit, and the Irish War Memorial Records on Google Arts & Culture lets you search for a family name. Inside Irish Music's Truth Behind Ireland's Most Famous Anti-War Song is worth watching, and History Ireland's Armistice Day essay covers the forgetting and the remembering.
— hear us play it live (video above).