Tonight, a song about a grave. A young soldier from 1916, and a man who stops to talk to him.
Learn from Songs · The Green Fields of France · B2
The Green Fields of France
A song for Remembrance Day: a man talks to the grave of a young soldier who died in 1916. Past simple questions, indirect questions (I wonder whether…), I hope + past, can’t help + -ing, and the vocabulary of war and memory, with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and the ancient Greeks who also wrote about young men who died in war.
SOPHIA
DEMETRIA
Talk to a grave? He can’t answer.
SOPHIA
No. That is why the whole song is questions. And they are some of the most important questions anyone ever asked about war.
PHILO
The Greeks asked them too, I think.
Before you listen: 1916
The Western Front, France and Belgium
From 1914 to 1918, the armies of Europe faced each other across France and Belgium in long lines of trenches: deep ditches in the mud, protected by barbed wire. The land between the two lines, full of holes, wire and dead bodies, was called no man’s land.
In 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, almost twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on the first day alone. Many of them were very young: some had lied about their age to enlist. Many had been told that this would be the war to end all wars.
After the war, the fields were ploughed again, and red poppies grew in them. Today, the dead lie in cemeteries with rows and rows of white crosses. At funerals and on Remembrance Day, a bugle plays the Last Post, and in Scotland the bagpipes play a lament called The Flowers of the Forest.
In 1976, the Scottish-Australian singer Eric Bogle visited one of these cemeteries in France, and wrote this song. A few years later, the Irish folk group The Fureys and Davey Arthur recorded it as “The Green Fields of France”, and it went to number one in Ireland.
Did they really know why they died?
Listen: the questions in the song
MARCOS
He asks the soldier so many questions! How he died, what music they played…
SOPHIA
Listen once for the story: who the soldier was, how old he was, and what the singer sees around him. Then listen again for the questions he asks, and answer Section A.
🌺 Listen to the song: “The Green Fields of France” (Eric Bogle, 1976), sung by The Fureys and Davey Arthur.Watch the official video →
📜 Read the words while you listen: “The Green Fields of France”, The Fureys and Davey Arthur.Read the lyrics →
Asking about the past
DEMETRIA
Did they play the Last Post? Did you leave someone behind? Were you afraid?
SOPHIA
Direct questions about the past: Did + subject + base verb? (Did they play…? not Did they played…?) With be: Was / Were + subject…?
PHILO
And then: I wonder whether he knew why he died. I hope it was quick.
SOPHIA
Indirect questions use statement word order: I wonder whether / if he knew… (not did he know). I hope + past for something already finished: I hope he didn’t suffer. And: I can’t help wondering / I can’t help but wonder = I can’t stop myself wondering.
War and memory
MARCOS
Trenches, barbed wire, no man’s land. And now, graves and white crosses.
SOPHIA
enlist (join the army), the front, trench, barbed wire, shell, gas; grave / gravestone, cemetery, memorial, the fallen (soldiers killed in war), to remember / to commemorate, and the phrase in vain = for nothing.
Sophia’s comparison: the Greeks
SOPHIA
At Thermopylae, three hundred Spartans died holding the pass. The poet Simonides wrote their epitaph: “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here, obedient to their laws.”
PHILO
And in the Iliad, Glaucus says the generations of men are like leaves: the wind scatters them on the ground, and the forest grows new ones in spring.
DEMETRIA
But the Spartans knew why they were there. The song asks if Willie McBride did.
MARCOS
And the Roman poet Horace said it is sweet and fitting to die for your country. Dulce et decorum est.
SOPHIA
Yes, Marcos. And in 1917, a young British officer called Wilfred Owen, who fought in those trenches, wrote a poem that answered Horace. He called it “the old Lie”. He was killed a week before the war ended. Read it, and listen to it.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country” (Horace, Odes 3.2).
🎙️ Listen to the poem on the Trivium Home School YouTube channel.Watch the video →
Words in the poem
bent double: bent forward at the waist
sack: a big bag
hag: an ugly old woman
curse: swear, say bad words
sludge: thick, wet mud
flare: a bright light fired into the sky
trudge: walk slowly and heavily
limp: walk badly because of an injury
blood-shod: with blood instead of shoes
lame: unable to walk well
fumbling: moving the hands clumsily
stumble: almost fall
flounder: move wildly, struggling
lime: a burning white chemical
pane: a piece of glass (here, the gas mask’s window)
plunge: throw yourself forward
gutter: flicker, like a dying candle
smother: be unable to breathe
fling (flung): throw roughly
writhe: twist in pain
jolt: a sudden shake
froth: bubbles, foam
cud: food a cow chews again
zest: enthusiasm
ardent: very eager
Sophia’s summary
| Words and forms | Use | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Did + subject + base verb?; Was / Were…? | direct questions about the past | Did they play the Last Post? |
| I wonder whether / if + statement | indirect questions | I wonder whether he knew why he died. |
| I hope + past | hopes about something finished | I hope it was quick. |
| can’t help + -ing / can’t help but + verb | not able to stop yourself | I can’t help wondering. |
| trench, no man’s land, the fallen, in vain | war and remembrance | They died in vain. |
Practice
Listen to the song for Section A, then do the rest. Press “Check my answers” at the end. You can try again as many times as you like.
A · Listen: the song
Listen to the song and choose the best answer.
1. Where is the singer?
2. How old was Willie McBride when he died?
3. When did he die?
4. What does the singer wonder about Willie’s life at home?
5. What does he see around him in the fields today?
6. What is his final, bitter thought?
B · Questions and vocabulary
Write the missing word.
7. they play the Last Post at his funeral? (question)
8. I wonder whether he why he died. (know)
9. I hope he suffer. (negative)
10. I can’t help about all those young men. (think)
11. He was killed in no man’s .
12. Millions died in : the war did not end all wars.
C · Right or wrong?
Is the sentence correct English?
13. “I wonder why did he join the army.”
14. “Did they bury him with music?”
15. “I can’t help to think about him.”
16. “I hope he had a quick death.”
Talk and write
Discussion and writing
Compare. The song and Owen’s poem both answer the idea that it is “sweet and fitting” to die for your country. How is the song different? (Who speaks? To whom? How angry is each one?)
Discuss. 1. Why do you think the singer asks so many questions? 2. Simonides’ Spartans and Willie McBride: what is the same, and what is different? 3. Why do we still remember the dead of the First World War? 4. Is it ever right to call a war “the war to end all wars”?
Write (150–180 words). Choose one: a letter from Willie McBride to someone at home, written in 1916, the night before a battle; or the answers Willie would give to the singer’s questions. Use past simple questions, I wonder whether… and I hope….
Listen to the song again, now that you know the history behind it.Watch the official video →