And again and again and again 🙏

I’m from Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 . When I was a teenager , we used to go to the local folk nights & loved it . I learned many a war song . I would write the words for my mother & sing the songs . Willie m bride was a favourite . Thank you .. politics, religion is always at the root cause . 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🙏❤️

A folk song should have 3 elements. 1. And easy to play tune. 2 An element of history to pass on and 3. A message for future generations. That's what folk songs are for from days before written history. By any measure this is one of the best folk songs ever written.

John Douglas Hancock, my grandfather, 25th August 1918 lost his life on the Western Front, buried far from home in Achiet le Grand. My mother the youngest age 20 months of four girls all under five had no memory of her father. The Great War!

Thank you Eric. My dad was in WWII, so all this means a lot to me.

Thank you, Eric, for the words that can move me to tears each time I hear them. Looking across the rows of headstones, one is struck by the waste of the great human potential laid under the grass there. And as I write this, in Ukraine it is happening again.

I always encourage anyone who is interested in military history to make an effort to visit war cemeteries and battlefields. I live in the central US, so I've never been able to visit a WW1 battlefield but I have visited a Civil War battlefield at Fort Donelson in Tennessee. I'm from the state of Illinois, and at the Fort Donelson cemetery there is a central monument with the graves of 20 soldiers from one Illinois regiment who were all killed in the battle. You can also see where they died, an open field surrounded by trees and Confederate defenses. It was a hopeless slaughter. And I couldn't help but wonder, much like "No Man's Land/Green Fields of France" wonders about Willie McBride: what kind of lives did these people leave behind? Were they remembered by their loved ones, or forgotten in the hundreds of thousands of deaths during the war? Might I be related to any of them? And the most chilling thought of all: if I were around in the 1860s, might I have been one of them? That regiment was recruited from Chicago, and I'm not too far away. It is a very humbling experience to see a place where people actually fought and died. It made me find a new appreciation for the humanity in war, and the value of a life.

Have loved the song for a long time but this is just priceless to hear the thoughts of the song writer, in his own words.

Great Song, Great Film,Great revelation of the song writers heart..... Thanks for posting this so poignant

Just stumbled across this, and oh, such a beautifully executed film, with Eric's gentle, powerful, presence and words..

Always remember the warriors.

Powerful. Moving. Heartbreaking.

Really interesting and moving! Thanks for pointing the way here Dan, much appreciated!

Not many songs depict an event as well as ' No Man's Land '. The Great War, as it was called, was supposed to be the last war; instead, it was the futile slaughter of millions for no other reason than to dominate a country, and opened the surety of another war more deadly than the first. " The countless white crosses in mute where they stand to mankind's indifference to his fellow man ". Wars are long endured when they happen, and quickly forgotten when they're over. Thank you for the song.

We never learn