- Forty years on, when afar and asunder
- Parted are those who are singing today,
- When you look back, and forgetfully wonder
- What you were like in your work and your play,
- Then, it may be, there will often come o'er you,
- Glimpses of notes like the catch of a song -
- Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,
- Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along,
- Chorus
- Follow up! Follow up! Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!
- Till the field ring again and again,
- With the tramp of the twenty-two men.
- Follow up! Follow up!
- Routs and discomfitures, rushes and rallies,
- Bases attempted, and rescued, and won,
- Strife without anger, and art without malice, -
- How will it seem to you, forty years on?
- Then, you will say, not a feverish minute
- Strained the weak heart and the wavering knee,
- Never the battle raged hottest, but in it,
- Neither the last nor the faintest, were we!
- Chorus
- O the great days, in the distance enchanted,
- Days of fresh air, in the rain and the sun,
- How we rejoiced as we struggled and panted -
- Hardly believable, forty years on!
- How we discoursed of them, one with another,
- Auguring triumph, or balancing fate,
- Loved the ally with the heart of a brother,
- Hated the foe with a playing at hate!
- Chorus
- Forty years on, growing older and older,
- Shorter in wind, as in memory long,
- Feeble of foot, and rheumatic of shoulder,
- What will it help you that once you were strong?
- God give us bases to guard or beleaguer,
- Games to play out, whether earnest or fun;
- Fights for the fearless, and goals for the eager,
- Twenty, and thirty, and forty years on!
- Chorus
(written for sir Winston Churchill's ninetieth birthday and first sung 28th November 1964)
- Blazoned in honour! For each generation
- You kindled courage to stand and to stay;
- You led our fathers to fight for the nation,
- Called "Follow up" and yourself showed the way.
- We who were born in the calm after thunder
- Cherish our freedom to think and to do;
- If in our turn we forgetfully wonder,
- Yet we'll remember we owe it to you.
Special Verses and Variants:(Written for Sir Winston Churchill, 12th November 1954.)
- Sixty years on - though in time growing older,
- Younger at heart you return to the Hill:
- You, who in days of defeat ever bolder,
- Led us to Victory, serve Britain still.
- Still there are bases to guard or beleaguer,
- Still must the battle for Freedom be won:
- Long may you fight, Sir, who fearless and eager
- Look back to-day more than sixty years on.
E. V. C. Plumptre
Source and notation etc....