While the song is evoked by "Willie McBride" - it's not really addressed to him. It's about a man generations later talking to himself, sharing the kind of thoughts that are inescapable for most of us when we go to visit one of the amazing war cemetaries in Flanders and around. You walk around among the rows of gravestones and look at the names and try to make some sense of it all.

There's no "hippy revisionism" in it. (The idea of Eric Bogle as a hippy is indeed bizarre...) You know that if you'd been there then you'd probably have joined up and shared the hope that it would somehow make things better - and likely enough it would be you lying there now.

The belief that this was to be "The War that will End War", so widely and generously and hopefully held at the time, turned out to be a cruel illusion. Even those few people who still see it as a justified war, "a cruel necessity" would mostly share this judgement, I would suggest.

But it just didn't end wars, it gave birth to wars. The Second World War, the Russian Revolution, the splintering of the empires in Europe and the Middle East, the Balfour Declaration and its consequences... No doubt there would have been wars since then - but the wars we have had have very largely had their root in the events of 1914-1918. That was the history that was chosen. One in which we can indeed
"shudder to think how things might have been if ... Nazi Germany had developed the bomb first".

And maybe mourn for a world in which there never was a Nazi Germany, never was a Holocaust and a Second World War... and in which those heartbreaking war graves across Northern France and Belgium, and Great War memorials in every town and village never needed to come into being.