“I think they were too tired, poor devils, to feel anything. If it hadn’t been for the bobbies, you might have thought it was another retreat from Moscow. I believe there was some plain speaking when they found their Napoleon had left them, but I hear he’s only gone to see about billets. The police are helping him all they can. That’s the way we stop revolutions in England,” he chuckled.
I was reminded again of the day now long distant when O’Rane and I had stood in a crowd of many thousands to watch the body of Terence McSwiney drawing through the respectfully silent streets of London. The English, I felt, behaved sometimes like characters in a comic opera: consistent only in their inconsistency, they could not rise to a revolution. With a longer leap into the past, my memory fastened on a moment in O’Rane’s first year at Melton, when he watched a half-hearted attempt at a May Day demonstration and, in disgust at the apathy of the demonstrators, instructed them in the Marseillaise. I wondered if he recalled that day, which was also nearly his last as a scholar of Melton. I wondered if he and Hornbeck were right in discounting this threat of revolution.
Then I thought of the weary crowds that were pouring into London.
“If you’d put a spoke in his wheel at the beginning . . .,” I began.
“You can’t stop peaceful pedestrians from walking along the king’s highway,” Hornbeck rejoined, “and Griffiths arranged that the armies should only become armies when they were too big to turn back.”
5
I had intended to lunch at the Eclectic in the hopes of hearing what steps the government was taking to house and feed the hunger-marchers, but, when I was halfway to St. James’ Street, I turned north and walked home with a vague feeling that I must see how Barbara was getting on.
When Spence-Atkins asked me point-blank if I thought there would be any outbreak, I had replied with conviction that I did not. That, however, was in the office; and, as I walked west, I was disquieted by the sight of these silent columns, marching aimlessly, halting and dissolving into little knots of stragglers too weary to march longer. In Waterloo Place and Regent Street, the police imposed an order which the men themselves had been unable to maintain; but from Hanover Square to Park Lane the army split into its elements. Through the settling fog I saw men sitting on the kerbs and clustering on the island-refuges; they dropped in a shapeless heap on the first convenient doorstep; and the good-humoured constables who said “Now then, you must move along” found themselves addressing ears that were already deaf with sleep.
“Half of them are no more than boys, sir,” one policeman pointed out to me. “Tired out, that’s what they are. They don’t mean no harm.”
By a damnable irony, the men had chosen for their collapse a moment when Brook Street offered a tantalizing blend of warm, savoury smells. I, who had never known the meaning of hunger, found my appetite quickening.