Duty With Honour

It's odd, the kind of things that one reflects on as one heads deeper into one's middle years. I slept awkwardly, awoke, realised it was yet too early to be awake, and found myself thinking about the oddest thing — the familiar soldier's triad, 'Duty, Honour, Country'.

And in what odd way was I thinking about these things? Perhaps the strangest thing was that for a few moments, I was seeing in my mind two pairs of quatrains from A E Housman. The first pair was his Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries:

These, in the day when heaven was falling
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

So paltry, it seems, that men might die simply because they were paid to do so. Such a tattered thing, honour might seem, when it is paid for in gold (or silver) and not in some more abstract, more noble coin of the spirit. But that is not the tenor of the epitaph at all — rather, it suggests that from base foundations something greater might spring; it suggests that salvation might come from the businesslike and mundane, not only from the spiritual and divine.

The other two quatrains are the last two of Housman's Jubilee poem, 1887:

'God save the Queen' we living sing,
From height to height 'tis heard;
And with the rest your voices ring,
Lads of the Fifty-Third.

Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
Be you the men you've been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen.

The dead in this poem are as dead as those in the first. The only difference is that Housman speaks of them as "...friends of ours/Who shared the work with God." How unalike the mercenaries in the other poem! Their rest seems more sacred, more remembered. Yet, in both poems, one sees that both kinds have done the work of God — a deliberately absent hand in the former, a partner in the latter — and both have some kind of memorial.

So what of 'Duty, Honour, Country'? One is often tempted to go with Wilfred Owen and say, "... that old lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." Still, amid the cynicism and the human unbelief, there is a place for heroism, whether as a duty or an honour — and some might add, whether for God or for country.

I have no idea why one wakes in the middle of the night with such thoughts echoing in one's head, like beacons casting the sight of flame from one dark hill to another. Like a soldier, one awakes, does one's duty, and returns to rest. How odd.