Can’t find a YouTube vid, but last night’s Late Junction featured Belshazzar’s Feast’s epic arrangement of Home, Lads, Home by Cicely Fox Smith. It’s been a while since the radio actually made me cry.
It was written about World War One, but it also made me think of the 43rd Wessex Division at Normandy – west country farm lads going in against the Panzers and Waffen-SS. My great-uncle (a Captain in the Somerset Light Infantry) was killed in the bitter fighting near Caen. He would never return to his beloved Quantock Hills.
Dead lads and shadowy horses, I see them all the same,
I see them and I know them and I call them each by name,
Riding down from harvest, when all the west’s aglow
And the lads all sitting sideways and singing as they go
Home lads, home, with the sunset on their faces
Home, lads home, to those quiet, happy places,
For there’s rest for horse and man when the longest day is done
And they’ll all go home together at the setting of the sun.
