Ten-thirty A.M. in Whitehall on a cold, grey February morning.
There is expectancy at the Horse Guards, where two living statues
draped in scarlet cloaks sit their patient chargers. A group of
sightseers wait at the gates for the high note of a silver cavalry
trumpet for the click of hoofs on the cobbles and a shining cavalcade
beneath an arch, the pageantry that precedes that silent ceremony of
changing a guard that "turns out" for no man but the King.
Laden omnibuses go down to Westminster or up to Charing Cross, and as
they pass every passenger looks at the two Life Guards in their
scarlet glory, for they are one of the sights of London that never
grows stale. Taxicabs and limousines spin smoothly left and right,
men and women enter and leave Government offices: a Whitehall morning
is moving easily, leisurely, elegantly, if you like, towards noon.
I walk on to Westminster, and in the centre of the road,
cream-coloured, dominant, stands the Cenotaph.
* * *
More than six years ago the last shot was fired. Six years. It is
long enough for a heart to become convalescent. Sharp agonies which
at the time of their happening seem incapable of healing have a
merciful habit of mending in six years. A broken love-affair that
turned the world into a pointless waste of Time has ended in a happy
marriage in six years. A death that left so much unspoken, so much
regret, so much to atone for, falls in six years into its pathetic
perspective a little nearer Nineveh and Tyre.
I look up at the Cenotaph. A parcels delivery boy riding a tricycle
van takes off his worn cap. An omnibus goes by. The men lift their
hats. Men passing with papers and documents under their arms,
attaché and despatch cases in their hands--all the business of
life--bare their heads as they hurry by.
Six years have made no difference here. The Cenotaph--that mass of
national emotion frozen in stone--is holy to this generation.
Although I have seen it so many times on that day once a year when it
comes alive to an accompaniment of pomp as simple and as beautiful as
church ritual, I think that I like it best just standing here in a
grey morning, with its feet in flowers and ordinary folk going by,
remembering.
* * *
I look up to Charing Cross and down to Westminster. On one side
Whitehall narrows to a slit, against which rises the thin, black
pencil of the Nelson column; on the other Westminster Abbey, grey and
devoid of detail, seems etched in smoke against the sky, rising up
like a mirage from the silhouette of bare trees.
The wind comes down Whitehall and pulls the flags, exposing a little
more of their red, white, and blue, as if invisible fingers were
playing with them. The plinth is vacant. The constant changing
trickle of a crowd that later in the day will stand here for a few
moments has not arrived. There is no one here.
No one? I look, but not with my eyes, and I see that the Empire is
here: England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India
... here--springing in glory from our London soil.
* * *
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.
"Eyes--front!"
* * *
The Cenotaph stands there with a wind pulling ... pulling like
fingers touching the Flag.