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| YOU young friskies who today | |
| Jump and fight in Father’s hay | |
| With bows and arrows and wooden spears, | |
| Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers, | |
| Happy though these hours you spend, | 5 |
| Have they warned you how games end? | |
| Boys, from the first time you prod | |
| And thrust with spears of curtain-rod, | |
| From the first time you tear and slash | |
| Your long-bows from the garden ash, | 10 |
| Or fit your shaft with a blue jay feather, | |
| Binding the split tops together, | |
| From that same hour by fate you’re bound | |
| As champions of this stony ground, | |
| Loyal and true in everything, | 15 |
| To serve your Army and your King, | |
| Prepared to starve and sweat and die | |
| Under some fierce foreign sky, | |
| If only to keep safe those joys | |
| That belong to British boys, | 20 |
| To keep young Prussians from the soft | |
| Scented hay of father’s loft, | |
| And stop young Slavs from cutting bows | |
| And bendy spears from Welsh hedgerows. | |
| Another War soon gets begun, | 25 |
| A dirtier, a more glorious one; | |
| Then, boys, you’ll have to play, all in; | |
| It’s the cruellest team will win. | |
| So hold your nose against the stink | |
| And never stop too long to think. | 30 |
| Wars don’t change except in name; | |
| The next one must go just the same, | |
| And new foul tricks unguessed before | |
| Will win and justify this War. | |
| Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage | 35 |
| Once more with pomp and greed and rage; | |
| Courtly ministers will stop | |
| At home and fight to the last drop; | |
| By the million men will die | |
| In some new horrible agony; | 40 |
| And children here will thrust and poke, | |
| Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke, | |
| With bows and arrows and wooden spears, | |
| Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers. | |
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