Verse 1

A man naturally longs to be home if he happens to be working in another country. He still wants to go back to his home and home and for the food that his wife prepares so lovingly. He looks forward to happy hours when he will be sitting placidly on his front steps, enjoying the setting sun as he watches his grandson play with the neighbor’s children in the dust in front of his house. The soldier anticipates going through these pleasurable experiences once he is safely home after the war is over.

Verse 2

The soldier was lucky to survive the war, although he had many battle scars on his body. The memories of the war and his comrades-in-arms who came from another country, who fought far from his homeland like him, are fresh in his mind. These memories flood his psyche whenever he sits and talks with people, apart from the hot or cold weather of his country. It is true that the men he met in foreign places were foreigners, but they were not foreigners in the sense that they shared the common purpose of fighting a common enemy.

stanza 3

A soldier cannot stay in his country or die there. His destiny may lead him to fight a battle in a distant land. A land that is home to one is exile to another. However, the country where a soldier gives his life fighting becomes his homeland, while the land of his birth becomes a foreign land for him. The poet hopes that the soldier’s compatriots will appreciate the legitimacy of this abstraction.

stanza 4

As he thinks of the dead Indian soldier, it occurs to the poet that Africa, where Indian and British soldiers came to engage in battle, belonged to neither of them. Some of the English soldiers came from the Midlands in England and some of the Indian soldiers belonged to the land of the five rivers (Punjab), but those who died in the war will be buried in the same cemetery in Africa, so far from their country native. Only soldiers who return alive from war will narrate the great saga of their dead comrades to their brothers when they get home. The sublime sacrifice they made in a foreign land for a common cause will kindle the same great spirit in other men for years to come, the poet hopes. We must realize that selfless action never goes without its own reward.

© Somnath Mitra 2010: All rights reserved