Were you there?
Were you one atom in that whirling stream of laughing and rejoicing people that surged and circled and broke and re-formed again about the steps of the Pavilion and the fountain in Piccadilly Circus? Did you fly before those organized rushes of the Australians through the mêlée? did you ride on motor-drays driven by R.A.F. cadets who had adorned themselves with nurses' bonnets and cloaks? did you laugh helplessly over the antics of those young and uplifted Naval officers who, correctly uniformed but for their smashed-in bowler hats, were pressing coin and tobacco and vows of eternal friendship upon their taxi-driver while the surrounding group applauded wildly? School-boyish—yes, the Forces were a crowd of schoolboys let loose that night, and hadn't they deserved it, the right to make holiday and to rejoice in England's way, which is behind a laughing mask and a tin trumpet?
* * * * * * *
And behind that again; ah, what?
Not all the cheers and merry nonsense talked could drown the undersong of Victory-week.
Boys who fell to buy that Victory, day after day of that four years' struggle! Boys who sold their budding lives, this one working his gun, that one on his ship, that other darling in his downward crashing 'plane! Sons, brothers, lovers, sweet young cousins and boy-friends of ours! All day the thought of these had burned with a proud and steady flame at every British woman's heart. All day there had been on our lips the names, the familiar home-names, of those who would not come home ... "If He—if They were only here ..."
Hard to believe that they were not! Far, far beyond that hubbub one seemed to catch echoes of dear exultant voices we shall hear no more with these our earthly ears, calling "cheerio! ... I say! ... Can't you hear? it's US! So long!" And, beyond the thronging faces under the blaze of the street-lamps, Memory and Love could raise a cloud of other faces: laughing, care-free faces of youths for whom there would be no Tomorrow of difficulties and sordid struggles and the anti-climax of growing old.
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"Yes! Thank Heaven that Jack and the rest of them will never have lived to that——!"
"That" was a sight of which I got a glimpse as a taxi steered its way inch by inch from the dense throng about the entrance to the Berkeley. I spoke aloud in the crowd where I found myself, arms linked with my Dick on one side of me and with Elizabeth's young husband on the other. The happy four of us (two men in war-worn khaki, two girls in breeches and new smocks) had come up to town together on the Wednesday after that glorious Monday.