Your King and Country need you, men.
Kitchener, glaring in full kit.
Khaki is the color of the day
and everyone must do their bit.
A mighty Empire girds for war
yet unprepared to bleed and die.
Then bands still played patriotic airs;
We cheered them as they marched away.
Belle France’s fields were soon entrenched;
protected with barbed wire fence.
A generation sent to war
will lie forever beneath those fields.
This was the cost too few foresaw
of this war to end all wars.
A cost paid many times since then;
paid in young lives by bad old men.