* * *
In a dream I see those old mad days ten years ago. How the wind fingers the flags....
I remember how, only a few weeks ago, as a train thundered through France, a woman sitting opposite to me in the dining car said, "The English!" I looked through the window over the green fields, and saw row on row, sharply white against the green, rising with the hill and dropping again into the hollows—keeping a firm line as they had been taught to do—a battalion on its last parade.
The Cenotaph and no one there? That can never be.
* * *
Look! Near the mottled white and black of the War Office far up Whitehall is a platoon of Guardsmen marching. As they come near I see that they are men of the Irish Guards. They swing their arms and stride out, carrying their rifles at a perfect "slope." They are very young, the "eighteen-year-olds" we used to call them in 1918 when they were called up to form the "young soldiers' battalions." I remember how frightened some of them were at this thing that had happened to them, and how often, when one was orderly officer padding round at night, a boy soldier would be crying like a child in the darkness at some harshness or in a wave of homesickness.
The old recipe has worked with the Guards! On they come, a platoon of tough Irish soldiers, their solemn faces grim and set under their peaked caps, their belts snow white with pipeclay.
They approach the Cenotaph:
"Platoon!" roars the sergeant. "Eyes—right!"
He slaps his rifle butt, and the heads swing round.