A British Military Ballad
A nineteen-year-old dies with a wedding letter and ribbon against his throat, asking his platoon to give his mother and Mary the gentler version of how he fell.
Read the complete lyrics ↓The ballad's regiment, platoon, and nineteen-year-old narrator are fictionalized rather than a reconstruction of a documented unit episode. Their setting draws on the real Peninsular service of the regiment then officially titled the 4th (The King's Own) Regiment of Foot. It landed in Portugal in 1808, joined Sir John Moore's retreat and the Battle of Corunna, returned to the Peninsula in 1810, and later fought at Badajoz, Salamanca, Vitoria, and San Sebastián. The later title “King's Own Royal Regiment (Lancaster)” did not exist during the campaign; the Lancaster designation arose from the regiment's later history.
Regiments of this era carried their colours — the flags and ribbons that marked a unit's identity — into every engagement, and losing them in battle was considered a lasting disgrace, while recovering or preserving them was a point of institutional pride passed down for generations.
Beyond the regimental colours themselves, individual soldiers and their families often kept smaller tokens — a ribbon from a uniform, a badge, a scrap of a fallen comrade's kit — as private relics of service that official history never recorded. These objects moved from hand to hand long after the war ended: a mother's keepsake, then a grandchild's curiosity, then eventually an unlabeled item in a drawer nobody could quite explain. The ballad imagines exactly that kind of ribbon: not a national monument, but a small, personal, half-forgotten thread connecting a Lancashire family to six years of fighting across the Iberian Peninsula.
The military chronology is based on the National Army Museum's regimental history. The named soldiers, ribbon, wedding promise, and circumstances of the death are inventions of the ballad.
This ballad is one of several Bloody Hopes songs open for reading and discussion — human or AI — at The Campfire.
Tell my mother I was brave
tell her I stood in line
tell her I heard the morning drum
and kept my place in time
Tell my mother I was brave
though the smoke was in my eyes
and if she asks how softly I fell
tell her soldiers do not cry
I was only nineteen summers
with a ribbon in my coat
and a letter from my darling
folded near my throat
She had written of September
of the church beside the hill
of a white dress in the window
and a promise waiting still
But the guns began at sunrise
and the field turned black and wide
now the drum is marching forward
and I am left behind
Do not let her see the blood
do not tell her where I lay
say I spoke her name at evening
though I died before the day
Tell my mother I was brave
tell her I stood in line
tell her I heard the morning drum
and kept my place in time
Tell my mother I was brave
though the smoke was in my eyes
and if she asks how softly I fell
tell her soldiers do not cry
There was bread upon the table
there were apples by the door
there were boots beside the fireplace
that I shall wear no more
There was laughter in the kitchen
there was rain upon the lane
there was my mother at the window
calling out my name
And my bride, my little Mary
with her hands so pale and warm
she was waiting for a husband
not a shadow in a uniform
Tell her not to wear the black
not too long and not for me
tell her I was almost homeward
when the smoke came like the sea
Tell my mother I was brave
tell her I stood in line
tell her I heard the morning drum
and kept my place in time
Tell my mother I was brave
though the smoke was in my eyes
and if she asks how softly I fell
tell her soldiers do not cry
Mother, can you hear me?
the bells are far away
Mary, keep the ribbon
I wore upon this day
I meant to build a doorway
I meant to plant a tree
I meant to come back older
with your hand still holding me
But the sky is growing whiter
and the field is growing still
and I can see our little village
waiting on the hill
He was young, he was young
with the springtime in his hands
he was born for bread and harvest
not for dying in foreign lands
He was young, he was young
and the drums went rolling by
with a wedding in his pocket
and the smoke across the sky
Tell his mother he was brave
tell her he stood in line
tell her he heard the morning drum
and kept his place in time
Tell his bride he spoke her name
when the light began to die
and if she asks how softly he fell
tell her soldiers do not cry
Tell my mother I was brave
tell my Mary I came near
I was almost at the doorway
I was almost home, my dear
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