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176 The song over, we turned back to our unfinished meal and the commoner tasks of the moment, become just common people—waiters, doormen, clerks, writers, vagrants and gentlemen—once again.

Crescendo

It is evening.

The long line still passing the Cenotaph, dropping flowers and tears, has thinned.

The gates of the abbey have been closed and the great nave is dark and faintly sweet from the tear-stained heap of flowers, covering the grave of the Unknown Soldier.

The Unknown Soldier! What emotions, what fancies, what speculations, he stirs!... Perhaps the spirit of the Unknown Soldier has gone to rest overweary from the weight of many glories laid upon his ever-tender wounds, this new Armistice Day, troubled by those tears that fell about him like the soft rain of his familiar London autumn-tide, by a thousand sighs that stirred the ancient abbey dust far above him like whispering zephyrs of his England's springtime, by the sorrow placed like myrrh, after the manner of the Egyptians, a bitter cup beside his tomb.

But come—the war—even its sorrows—are over!

This may be Armistice Night, but never that