 Private William McBride  Eric Bogle's song, variously called William McBride, No Man's Land and the Green Fields of France is being developed as a feature film called The Last Parade by New York film producer Ned Stuart. In the song Bogle (pictured right) visits a Western Front Cemetery, and sits by the graveside of an Irish soldier called William McBride. The song is essentially a series of questions to the soldier, who was apparently 19 when he died in 1916.It is not entirely clear whether Bogle actually saw the name McBride on a headstone, although there are two soldiers of that name buried at the Authuile Military Cemetery on the Somme. The most likely is Private William McBride of the 9th Battallion Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers who died on 22 April 1916. His parents were from Lislea in County Armagh. But he was twenty-one when he died. The second McBride in the Authuile Cemetery was a private in the 2nd Battalion of the same regiment, and is identified only by the initial W, with his age not given. He died on 10th February 1916. The third man, Rifleman William John McBride of the Royal Irish Rifles is recorded as having died on 2 July 1916 (just one day after the carnage over the first day of the Battle of the Somme) but has no known grave and is commemorated on the Thiepval memorial.So, lacking any real evidence for the man himself, the story for the proposed film is essentially a fictional version of McBride's life, in which the hero is a boy from a family of pacifists who wanted to be a boxer. Eventually he joins the army, and goes to France where he dies. And the film (if it is ever made) will end with his burial - to the sound of a drum beating slowly, a fife playing softly and the last post and chorus being played by a band - all in accordance with the original ballad. Bogle himself has apparently agreed to play a cameo role in the movie, sitting at the graveside during the final scenes. The song itself is still a powerful indictment of war, and has been recorded many times since it was written in 1975. A version by Makem and Clancey is reputedly the largest selling single in Irish history. The version by the Fureys spent many weeks in the Irish charts, and when Bogle toured Ireland there's a story that the audience in one venue almost caused a riot when he indicated that he had written the song. Apparently it was believed locally that the Fureys had written it! Speaking of the visit that inspired the song Bogle said in a radio interview: " If you walk round that area, there's graveyards from the Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian wars, the First World War, the Second World War and every sort of soldier you can think of is buried there from just all over the world, you know. "If you go to the ossuary in Verdun there's the bones of 130,000 French soldiers just behind glass, you know and they're still adding to them every year, because every year they find more bones, you know, French farmers.... So when you see the -- you read the images of the earth was soaked with blood, and you couldn't walk anywhere without standing in dead bodies, you used to sort of dismiss that as old soldier's hyperbole, until you see the battlefields and you think, "Shit, yeah, this is how it was."
The actual words sung in the different versions vary considerably, but the verses below have been transcribed from Bogle's own recording. You can listen to a midi version of the tune or alternatively to versions by Eric Bogle himself, the Fureys or June Tabor.
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