The open space under my window had filled so rapidly that it was hardly possible for any one to move. Typists from the government offices, in short skirts and transparent blouses, were standing on tiptoe, bare-headed in the biting cold, staring bright-eyed over the shoulders of those in front. There were soldiers, in uniform and in their hospital undress; sailors; nurses; government messengers with battered red boxes; a park-keeper; two clergymen; some errand-boys; and a thousand nondescripts. At one moment they were very silent; at another, they broke into feverish conversation with unknown neighbours, occasionally shaking hands and cheering a foreign uniform.
“Five minutes to eleven,” muttered a voice which I could not identify.
4
The emotions of the crowd were reacting on us. Behind me, I could hear murmurs like the soughing of wind, rising and falling with the murmurs of the crowd. When hands were excitedly shaken below us, I felt Barbara’s fingers gripping my wrist and saw Violet bending to kiss the silken curls of her child’s head.
Out there, over the water, the ‘cease-fire’ must be travelling down the unending shambles of the two opposing lines. The shadow that had darkened the world for more than four years had at last been driven away; and no one was going to be mutilated or killed any more. All—more than all—that we set out to do in 1914 had been accomplished; and the bound heads and empty sleeves of the survivors, the black dresses of those with no survivors to welcome, testified to the cost. Of the uniforms below us, some had first been donned in Tasmania, some in Natal, others on the Alaskan border. Belgium and Servia, Russia and France, Portugal and Japan, Italy and Rumania: all had joined hands with our English-speaking peoples to hem in the wild beast. Throughout the night, the news had crackled from Poldhu to the Azores, from Arlington to Seattle, that the wild beast was subdued. It had flashed to lonely patrols through the frost of the North Sea and the fire of the Persian Gulf; two hundred million men were now standing silent, with their eyes on their watches; and I fancied again the unearthly hush that must drop on the world when the last war ended.
In spite of Bertrand, in spite of Lucien de Grammont, in spite of Hornbeck I believed that it was the last war.
Burp! . . . Burp! . . . Burp! The maroons were like the rending of colossal drums. Burp! . . . Burp! . . . Burp! Sandy turned wide eyes of alarm upon us and buried his face in Violet’s bosom. Burp! Burp! Burp!
“Eleven o’clock,” muttered Roger Dainton in a quavering voice.
My secretary collapsed into a chair, murmuring “Air-raid”; and, though I knew that air-raids had now passed into history, I imagined for a moment that the last ‘scrap of paper’ had followed the first and that London and Paris were to be laid in ruins.
Burp! . . . Burp! Burp!