the plash of the weir. A tiny village settled in a crook of the hill,
and its church-tower sounded seven with a curiously sweet chime.
Otherwise there was no noise but the twitter of small birds and the
night wind in the tops of the beeches.

In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what
I had been fighting for, what we all were fighting for. It was peace,
deep and holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace
which would endure when all our swords were hammered into
ploughshares. It was more; for in that hour England first took hold
of me. Before my country had been South Africa, and when I
thought of home it had been the wide sun-steeped spaces of the
veld or some scented glen of the Berg. But now I realized that I
had a new home. I understood what a precious thing this little
England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly
worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of her soil was cheaply
bought by the blood of the best of us. I knew what it meant to be a
poet, though for the life of me I could not have made a line of
verse. For in that hour I had a prospect as if from a hilltop which
made all the present troubles of the road seem of no account. I saw
not only victory after war, but a new and happier world after
victory, when I should inherit something of this English peace and
wrap myself in it till the end of my days.

Very humbly and quietly, like a man walking through a cathedral,
I went down the hill to the Manor lodge, and came to a door in an
old red-brick facade, smothered in magnolias which smelt like hot
lemons in the June dusk. The car from the inn had brought on my
baggage, and presently I was dressing in a room which looked out
on a water-garden. For the first time for more than a year I put on