Perl provides More Than One Way To - in a single call - spawn a child process, pause the current script until the child process has finished, and then resume interpretation of the current script. Whichever method is used, you will find that immediately afterwards, thebuilt-in scalar variable...
"Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross" + "We are impressed and engaged to fight," + "Forthwith a power of English shall we levy;" + "Whose arms were moulded in their mothers' womb" + "To chase these pagans in those holy fields" + ...