British farmers' emotions run high, virus destroys decades of work.

Byline: Ray Moseley

GRASMERE, England_Nearly 200 years ago the poet William Wordsworth, in a letter written at his cottage here to a political leader in London, observed that he wrote poetry "to show that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."

He was referring to the farmers of the Lake District all around him. Today their descendants here and throughout Britain are indeed feeling deeply. The emotions run from grief to depression to blazing anger as farmers watch herds they have nurtured for years disappear before their eyes_or wait for the death knell_as foot-and-mouth disease ravages the nation.

"It's like a bereavement," said Les Armstrong, 55, who has lost 500 head of cattle and 1,300 sheep on his farm near Kirkoswald, a village outside the Lake District but in the county of Cumbria that embraces it. "It just stuns you really. You go into mourning. But then you get over it."

Not everyone does. Peter Allen, the National Farmers Union representative for upland farmers throughout Cumbria, gets calls from distraught colleagues every day, his phone ringing almost continuously from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.

"Hearing fully grown men crying down the phone is the hardest thing I've ever had to face in my life," he said. "I've broken down myself after I put the phone down, but you can't do that when they are talking to you and looking to you for support."

Laurence Harwood, chairman…