They were coming back. The Mother-City of the Empire woke, silent of traffic, decked for a day that knew no sufficient parallel, the day when the thousands of her sons—those who had gone in their ones and twos, their single battalions—should march back from vast adventure in the full majesty of their corporate soldier-life. The London Divisions were coming back from the War, were marching for the last time at full strength. And the London streets were tunnels of gay flags, walled with black masses of citizens kept clear from the sanded roadways. From every steeple the bells tossed out their exuberant rejoicing. In every breast of the millions there congregated was a surge of emotion that exhaled in one sustained murmur of the gladness for which there are no words but which fills the eyes and chokes the throat.
They were coming! The thrilling blare of instruments of brass; the heart-stirring tap and roll and beat of the drums; the intoxicating rhythmic swinging lilt and crash; the brave gay runs of melody, sublimely simple, that bring the tears; the solid, even tramp of thousands who march as one—and the leading files were passing in a storm of cheers, a madness of waving hands. For the last time they passed shoulder to shoulder in the familiar ranks, marching as they had marched for all the years of exile, marching as they had marched down the fatal roads to Loos and Gommecourt, Guillemont and all those rubble heaps where the bravest and the dearest of the greatest city of the world died for the fragment of a village and for England. Rifles at the slope, bare bayonets asserting the ancient privileges that they had won, O so dearly, the right to flaunt, the heavy weather-stained pack on the sturdy shoulders, the steel helmets awry with the tilt of long-familiar use, the brown strong faces gleaming with their smiles—so they marched, not any more under the thunder of the guns, but in a frenzy of voices where the madly rioting bells were lost.
Battalion by battalion—all the glorious names, London's own—the London Scottish, first in the fray in the long ago, the Queen's Westminsters, the Kensingtons, the London Rifle Brigade, the H.A.C., the numberless battalions of the London Regiment—they came, each with its aura of the deathless dead. They came from the interminable purgatory of the endless trenches, terminated at last, from the unimaginable inferno of Hill 60, from the hopeless dying of May the Ninth, from the fierce hopes, the bitter strife of Loos, from the massacre of Gommecourt and the bloody fights of Guillemont, of Vimy Ridge, of Messines, of a thousand places that were humble and are henceforth names of splendour. Miraculously strong, happy, pregnant with vivid life they emerged from that distant whelm of peril. And the eyes that had looked so long at death in the bare fields pocked hideously with the disease of war, looked up now at the ranked tall buildings, so familiar and yet so strange, so impressively permanent after timeless æons of destruction. Behind those windows—could it be?—they had sat at desk through months and years. Between them and that past was a curtain of fire, of emotions that had transformed, of the intensity of life which has persisted in the face of death. And rank by rank, battalion after battalion, swinging with powerful stride, they marched back into the past that had seemed for ever gone.
And those who watched the level ranks flowing in their endless stream, cheering with throats now incapable of aught but the inarticulate cry, perceiving them mistily through a blur of tears, saw more than the men who marched, treading once again the asphalt of the London streets. They saw the ghosts of ranks, doubling—more than doubling—the ranks of living men, the ghosts of those who had looked as these looked, brown-faced, strong-limbed, the incarnation of living will, and were now no more than the wind blowing over the desolate countrysides where they had ceased to be. Yet were they present, the men who had died that England might live. The stir of their souls was in the skirling pipes, the wail and feverish beat of the fifes and drums, the maddening purposeful blare and thud of the brass bands. They looked out of the eyes of those who marched—the soul unconquerable, the living spirit of the English race. And a divine afflatus swept over the waving, cheering crowds, swept them to a wilder intoxication. One, whose faculty of speech was not yet overwhelmed, cried: "Three cheers for the boys who are left behind! Hurrah! Hurrah!—--" and could not finish. And a woman who stood, tensely pallid, staring at the so-familiar badges of the troops who passed, stared at utter strangeness, and fell as dead.
The next battalion followed on, singing, carrying on a tune caught up far back along the route, the farewell song of Kitchener's Army of 1915, sung now as an instinctive antistrophe to that old chorale when they had marched to war:
"Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away, they dream of home,
There's a silver lining
Through the dark cloud shining,
Turn your dark clouds inside out
Till the boys come home."
They passed in a roar of voices that drowned the band.
So the long, long columns of the London Divisions tramped through the heart of the Mother-City, under the fluttering of countless flags, under the surge and resurge of joy-bells from every steeple, under great banners that proclaimed the gratitude of the city. Rank after rank they lifted their eyes to the laurel-green inscription that spanned the street at Temple Bar: "Shall We Forget?—Never!"
Rank by rank they passed under the promise—the thousands of men welded in the fires of war to a wondrous miracle of collective soul—passed onward for the last time as one living unit, ere they should lay down their arms, fall out—and disperse, individuals that were fragments of a sacred memory, the shreds of a battle-flag distributed.