Rosie Thomas - The White Dove

Nick carefully unlaced his boots, afraid that they might fall apart if he handled them too roughly. The sole of the left one had parted company from the upper and the two halves were bound together with rag. Yet some men didn’t even have that, and their progress had slowed to a shuffle that threatened to hold up the whole march.

He smiled suddenly. They had looked like the last tattered remnants of a defeated army long before reaching London, but the fire of spirit had burned stronger and stronger all the way. At first the sheer distance had overwhelmed them, but as the days and miles slid past they had begun to sing again, the old songs remembered from Flanders and the Somme, and the favourite hymns from the chapels in the valleys. They had talked, too, endless fiery discussions of political theory, literature, and even philosophy. Most of the men had brought books in their packs. Reading seemed to satisfy a kind of hunger when there wasn’t any food.

Nick himself had brought a fat, black volume of Paradise Lost borrowed from the Miners’ Welfare library. The magnificent, stately rhythms of the verse soothed him even though the thread of meaning was sometimes lost to him. He took the book out now, thinking that he would read a little while there was still light. But he had hardly begun when from down the crowded hall came a low, bass humming, rising and falling like the sea. Nick put his book away again. There would be singing tonight, instead.

The visiting vicar sat down on one of his wooden chairs, and the men in the kitchen stopped clanking the pans and crockery. The hall grew dark while the singing went on, and somebody brought in oil lamps flaring behind their smoky gas mantles.

The final hymn was the one that was always left until last. The singing rose and filled the hall, and drifted beyond it out into the suburban night.

Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven,

Feed me till I want no more,

want no more,

Feed me till I want no more.

There was no more, after that. The hall was just a crowded, stuffy room full of tired men turning on their thin blankets ready for sleep.

Nick was smiling when he fell asleep. Tomorrow they would do what they had come to do, and then they could go home.

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