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First Line: What is love of one's land?
Alternate Author Name(s): Hueffer, Ford Hermann; Hueffer, Ford Madox




WHAT is love of one's land? . . .
I don't know very well.
It is something that sleeps
For a year for a day
For a month something that keeps
Very hidden and quiet and still
And then takes
The quiet heart like a wave,
The quiet brain like a spell,
The quiet will
Like a tornado; and that shakes
The whole of the soul.
It is omnipotent like love;
It is deep and quiet as the grave
And it awakes
Like a flame, like a madness,
Like the great passion of your life.
The cold keenness of a tempered knife,
The great gladness of a wedding day,
The austerity of monks who wake to pray
In the dim light,
Who pray
In the darkling grove,
All these and a great belief in what we deem the right
Creeping upon us like the overwhelming sand,
Driven by a December gale,
Make up the love of one's land.
But I ask you this:
About the middle of my first Last Leave,
I stood on a kerb in the pitch of the night
Waiting for buses that didn't come
To take me home.
That was in Paddington.
The soot-black night was over one like velvet:
And one was very alone so very alone
In the velvet cloak of the night.
Like a lady's skirt,
A dim, diaphonous cone of white, the rays
Of a shaded street lamp, close at hand, existed,
And there was nothing but vileness it could show,
Vile, pallid faces drifted through, chalk white;
Vile alcoholic voices in the ear, vile fumes
From the filthy pavements . . . vileness!
And one thought:
In three days' time we enter the unknown:
And this is what we die for! "
For, mind you,
It isn't just a Tube ride, going to France!
It sets ironic unaccustomed minds
At work even in the sentimental . . .
Still
All that is in the contract.




Who of us
But has, deep down in the heart and deep in the brain
The memory of odd moments: memories
Of huge assemblies chanting in the night
At palace gates: of drafts going off in the rain
To shaken music: or the silken flutter
Of silent, ceremonial parades,
In the sunlight, when you stand so stiff to attention,
That you never see but only know they are there
The regimental colours silken, a-flutter
Azure and gold and vermilion against the sky:
The sacred finery of banded hearts
Of generations. . . .
And memories
When just for moments, landscapes out in France
Looked so like English downlands that the heart
Checked and stood still. . . .
Or then, the song and dance
Of Battalion concerts, in the shafts of light
From smoky lamps: the lines of queer, warped faces
Of men that now are dead: faces lit up
By inarticulate minds at sugary chords
From the vamping pianist beneath the bunting:
Until the boys come home! we sing. And fumes
Of wet humanity, soaked uniforms,
Wet flooring, smoking lamps, fill cubical
And wooden-walled spaces, brown, all brown,
With the light-sucking hue of the khaki. . . .
And the rain
Frets on the pitchpine of the felted roof
Like women's fingers beating on a door
Calling " Come Home " . . . " Come Home "
Down the long trail beneath the silent moon . . .
Who never shall come. . . .
And we stand up to sing
Hen wladjy nadhau. . . .
Dearest, never one
Of your caresses, dearest in the world,
Shall interpenetrate the flesh of one's flesh,
The breath of the lungs, sight of the eyes, or the heart,
Like that sad, harsh anthem in the rained-on huts
Of our own men . . .
That too is in the contract. . . .


Well, of course
One loves one's men. One takes a mort of trouble
To get them spick and span upon parades:
You straf them, slang them, mediate between
Their wives and loves, and you inspect their toe-nails
And wangle leaves for them from the Adjutant
Until your Company office is your home
And all your mind. . . .
This is the way it goes:
First your Platoon and then your Company,
Then the Battalion, then Brigade, Division,
And the whole B.E.F. in France . . . and then
Our Land, with its burden of civilians,
Who take it out of us as little dogs
Worry Newfoundlands. . . .
So, in the Flanders mud,
We bear the State upon our rain-soaked backs,
Breathe life into the State from our rattling lungs,
Anoint the State with the rivulets of sweat
From our tin helmets.
And so, in years to come
The State shall take the semblance of Britannia,
Up-borne, deep-bosomed, with anointed limbs . . .
Like the back of a penny.


For I do not think
We ever took much stock in that Britannia
On the long French roads, or even on parades,
Or thought overmuch of Nelson or of Minden,
Or even the old traditions. . . .
I don't know,
In the breathless rush that it is of parades and drills,
Of digging at the double and strafes and fatigues,
These figures grow dimned and lost:
Doubtless we too, we too, when the years have receded
Shall look like the heroes of Hellas, upon a frieze,
White-limbed and buoyant and passing the flame of the torches
From hand to hand. . . . But to-day it's mud to the knees
And khaki and khaki and khaki. . . .
And the love of one's land
Very quiet and hidden and still. . . . And again
I don't know, though I've pondered the matter for years
Since the war began. . . . But I never had much brain. . . .


I don't know if you know the i.io train
From Cardiff:
Well, fourteen of us together
Went up from Cardiff in the summer weather
At the time of the July push.
It's a very good train;
It runs with hardly a jar and never a stop
After Newport, until you get down
In London Town.
It goes with a solemn, smooth rush
Across the counties and over the shires,
Right over England past farmsteads and byres;
It bubbles with conversation,
Being the West going to the East:
The pick of the rich of the West in a bunch,
Half of the wealth of the Nation,
With heads together, buzzing of local topics,
Of bankrupts and strikes, divorces and marriages;
And, after Newport, you get your lunch,
In the long, light, gently swaying carriages
As the miles flash by,
And fields and flowers
Flash by
Under the high sky
Where the great cloud towers
Above the tranquil downs
And the tranquil towns.




And the corks pop
And the wines of France
Bring in radiance;
And spice from the tropics
Flavours fowl from the Steppes
And meat from the States,
And the talk buzzes on like bees round the skeps,
And the potentates
Of the mines and the docks
Drink delicate hocks . . .
Ah, proud and generous civilisation. . . .




For me, going out to France
Is like the exhaustion of dawn
After a dance. . . .
You have rushed around to get your money,
To get your revolver, complete your equipment;
You have had your moments, sweeter ah, sweeter than honey;
You have got your valise all ready for shipment:
You have gone to confession and wangled your blessing,
You have bought your air-pillow and sewn in your coat
A pocket to hold your first field-dressing,
And you've paid the leech who bled you, the vampire . . .
And you've been to the Theatre and the Empire,
And you've bidden good-bye to the band and the goat . . .
And, like a ship that floats free of her berth,
There's nothing that holds you now to the earth,
And you're near enough to a yawn. . . .
Good luck and "Good-bye" it has been, and
So long, old chap
Cheerio: you'll be back in a month
You'll have driven the Huns off the map.
And one little pressure of the hand
From the thing you love next to the love of the land,
Since you leave her, out of love of your land. . . .
But that little, long, gentle and eloquent pressure
Shall go with you under the whine of the shells,
Into the mire and the stress,
Into the seven hundred hells,
Until you come down on your stretcher
To the C.C.S. . . .
And back to Blighty again
Or until you go under the sod.
But, in the i.io train,
Running between the green and the grain,
Something like the peace of God
Descended over the hum and the drone
Of the wheels and the wine and the buzz of the talk,
And one thought:
In two days' time we enter the Unknown,
And this is what we die for! "
And thro' the square
Of glass
At my elbow, as limpid as air,
I watched our England pass . . .
The great downs moving slowly,
Far away,
The farmsteads quiet and lowly,
Passing away;
The fields newly mown
With the swathes of hay.
And the wheat just beginning to brown,
Whirling away. . . .
And I thought:
In two days' time we enter the Unknown,
But this is what we die for. ... As we ought. . . ."
For it is for the sake of the wolds and the wealds
That we die,
And for the sake of the quiet fields,
And the path through the stackyard gate . . .
That these may be inviolate,
And know no tread save those of the herds and the hinds,
And that the south-west winds
Blow on no forehead save of those that toil
On our suave and hallowed soil,
And that deep peace may rest
Upon that quiet breast. . . .
It is because our land is beautiful and green and
comely,
Because our farms are quiet and thatched and homely,
Because the trout stream dimples by the willow,
Because the water-lilies float upon the ponds,
And on Eston Hill the delicate, waving fronds
Of the bracken put forth, where the white clouds are flying,
That we shall endure the swift, sharp torture of dying,
Or the humiliation of not dying,
Where the gas cloud wanders
Over the fields of Flanders,
Or the sun squanders
His radiance
And the midges dance
Their day-long life away-
Over the green and the grey
Of the fields of France. . . .
And maybe we shall never again
Plod thro' our mire and the rain
Of the winter gloaming,
And maybe we shall never again
See the long, white, foaming
Breakers pour up our strand. . . .
But we have been borne across this land,
And we have felt this spell. . . .
And, for the rest.


L'ENVOI


What is love of one's land?
Ah, we know very well
It is something that sleeps for a year, for a day,
For a month, something that keeps
Very hidden and quiet and still,
And then takes
The quiet heart like a wave,
The quiet brain like a spell,
The quiet will
Like a tornado, and that shakes
The whole being and soul . . .
Aye, the whole of the soul.






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