Page:Armistice Day.djvu/196

174 So the dustman outside cleaning the streets wears his medals to-day. So does our waiter, so does the "bobbie" of whom we inquired the way, and so does my Lord of the Big-House-Across-the-Way in Palace Court. The frozen trenches, the stern rigors of discipline, the bursting shrapnel, are only lurking memories—only the glory remained to-day. This was The Day—Der Tag—of the heroes, both alive and dead.

Cheerio! It was altogether a glad mood in which we found ourselves after that solemn vigil at the Cenotaph, but with something refined and mellow about it. The restaurant orchestra—along American jazz lines—was the deus ex machina that waked the spirit, not so much of Mars, but of Lethe. Especially when it broke into the lilt of "It's a Long Way to Tipperary,"—can you ever forget it! You could see and feel the trooping of the colors of a legion of dreams swoop down over the place....

A stubby-nosed little fellow with an encroaching baldness, sitting at the opposite table with his smaller wife, peremptorily sprang into the saddle and wheeled about face as he joined the company of horse, of which he had been sergeant, "somewhere in France"—do you recall the terrible romance of that phrase in those days!...A much older man—he was above sixty and obviously a gentleman—sitting alone; dreadfully