THE BOER WAR

    Ye people of Ireland I hope you will draw near
    And if your feeling so incline about the War you'll hear,
Between John Bull and Kruger, where the cannons they do roar,
And thousands of soldiers daily are being killed by the Boers.

Now if you wre in Queenstown and to stand on the quay
Some darling young fellows you would see going away,
Some darling fine young fellows you'd see leaving their home,
And every mother weeping and missing her own.

Good-bye to old Ireland, we are now going away,
To fight the brave Boers in South Africa,
To fight those poor farmers we don't feel inclined,
God be with you old Ireland we are leaving behind.

Now the Boers can't be blamed as you might understand,
They were only just trying to free their own native land,
Where they toil night and day by the sweat of their brow,
Like the farmers in Ireland that follow the plough.

The Boers they are coming, O dear, O dear,
Such roaring of cannon you never did hear,
Since the time of Napoleon I'll tell you quite plain
There was never such slaughter by land or by main.

The brave Connaught Rangers were first on the field.
The true loyal heart that never would yield,
And brave Connaught Rangers on them she did call
And they were the first to fall down by powder & ball.

And so to conclude & finish my song,
I hope you won't say that my verses were long,
But before I have finished I have one word to say,
There was more killed & wounded than in Crimea.

Note from transcriber: punctuation, alignment and spelling as
in original.  In the upper right hand corner, the numbers 59 and 47
were hand written.