At 11 a.m. France fell silent for one minute to mark the end of World War I on the Western Front. It’s a solemn day — nearly 1.4 million French soldiers died in the conflict and the northeastern part of the country was devastated by four years of warfare — marked by military parades and the laying of a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.
In 1954 the United States changed the name and meaning to honor veterans rather than the end of hostilities, despite the fact that Memorial Day already existed. (The official explanation is that Memorial Day is for those killed while Veterans Day is for all veterans.)
The US didn’t enter the war until its final year, and American troops didn’t engage in battle until six months before the armistice, but more than 117,000 Americans died and 200,000 were wounded. Most of the carnage occurred in the final battle on the Western Front, the Meuse-Argonne offensive. My wife’s grandfather was machine-gunned in that engagement and had a lung removed in a field hospital. He somehow survived.
American losses paled compared to those of other combatants. Officially, 750,000 British troops died, but the records don’t break out how many were Irish. In 1976, Scottish-born Australian folk singer Eric Bogle, who had already written “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” about the slaughter of Australians at Gallipoli, toured the military cemeteries of Northern France.
He decided to give his everyman-soldier an Irish name to counter the anti-Irish sentiment prevalent in England at the time, and chose McBride because it rhymed with “graveside.” He didn’t realize how apt his choice was. History buffs later combed the official records and determined that at least 10 William McBrides served as privates in the war, and three fell in battle. Two died in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, where 19,000 British troops were killed on the first day alone in an ill-conceived assault on German trenches.
The best-known version of the song was released by The Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur in 1984, who released it under the name “The Green Fields of France” rather than its official title, “No Man’s Land.” Many others have covered the song, in several languages, but most have altered the lyrics — Bogle himself changed them over the years. This is the original.
This cover by the Dropkick Murphys, for example, changes one line in the chorus, from “Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered ye down?” to “Did they sound the death march…,” a change first made in the Furey Brothers version.
