• Duration: 3 minutes
  • Chorus: SATB or SSAA
  • Instrumentation: Piano OR Harp & Strings
  • Published by: Novello

This is an opening movement of a larger work – The Angel of Mons – and uses words by Patrick’s brother Andrew Hawes.  The Angel of Mons is a choral work describing the apparition of an angel to British soldiers in the first battle of the First World War.

For King and Country, conveys the men relinquishing their peacetime duties and leaving their families behind to fight for their country.  It depicts the early optimism at the outbreak of the war, the soldiers’ heroism and their ‘honest wills to God and right entrusting’.


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Long expected; well prepared;
The militia men are gathering.
In every town, on every green
The yeomanry are mustering.

Ploughmen, thatchers, clerks and smiths
Their daily task relinquishing,
Are encamped throughout the land
In deadly earnest practising.

Volunteers by veterans led
Are off to fight heroically,
Their hearts of oak, their honest wills
To God and right entrusting.

Down Jack-dressed streets
Through cheering crowds they’re marching.
As England’s white cliffs sail from sight
The victory is beginning.

Words: Andrew Hawes (1954 –   )