h the Devonshire lanes, had felt that
everything proclaimed its Englishness and hers, making them and her part
of each other, so he, looking out of the window across the fields, felt
something inside him insisting, "You're Irish. You must be proud! You're
Irish! You must be proud!..."

He remembered very vividly how his father had led him to this very
window once and, pointing towards the fields, had said, "That's land,
Henry! _My_ land!..."

And because he had been proud of his land, had been part of it, as it
had been part of him, he had been willing to spend himself on it. There
seemed to Henry to be in that, all that there was in patriotism.
Irrationally, impulsively, unaccountably one loved one's country. The
air of it and the earth of it, the winds that blew over it and the seas
that encircled it, all these had been mingled to make men, so that when
there was danger and threat to a man's country, some native thing in him
stirred and compelled him to say, "This is my body! This is my blood!"
and sent him out, irrationally, impulsively, unaccountably, to die in
its defence. There was here no question of birth or possessions: the
slum-man felt this stirring in his nature as strongly as the landlord.
In that sudden, swift rising of young men when war was declared, each
man instinctively hurrying to the place of enlistment, there were men
from slums and men from mansions, all of them, in an instant, made
corporate, given unity, brought to communion, partaking of a sacrament,
becoming at that moment a sacrament themselves....

4

But if this stirring in one's nature made a man both a sacrament and a
partaker of a sacrament, was there not yet something horrible in this
spilling of blood, this breaking of bodies? Was this sacrament only to
be consummated by the butcher? Was there no healing sacrament which,
when a man partook of it, gave him life and more life! Was there not an
honourable rivalry among nations, each to be better than the other, to
replace this brawling about boundaries, this pettifogging with
frontiers? Was there to be no end to this killing and preparing for
killing? Would men, from now on, set themselves to the devisal of
murderous and more murderous weapons of war until at last an indignant,
disgusted God, sick of the smell of blood, threw the earth from Him,
caring nothing what happened to it, so that it was out of His
consciousness?...

While he looked out of the window, the dusk settled down