The procession opened with the advance of military bands, followed by a detachment of artillery. Then came Lord Cadogan, the devoted Quartermaster-General who had prepared for the Duke so many of his fields, and with him eight General Officers, veterans who had fought under their great Chief on the Danube and in Flanders. Among these was Munden, the hero who had led the forlorn hope at Marlborough's first great action of the Schellenberg, and had brought back with him but twenty out of eighty men. Then followed a vast cavalcade of heralds, officers-at-arms and mourners, with all the circumstance and ceremony of an age when pomp was lavished on the least illustrious of the dead; and in the midst, encircled by a forest of banners, rolled an open car, bearing the coffin.[11] Upon the coffin lay a complete suit of gilt armour, above it was a gorgeous canopy, around it military trophies, heraldic devices, symbolic presentations of the victories that the dead man had won and of the towns which he had captured, strange contrast to the still white face, serene beyond even the invincible serenity of life, that slept within. As the car passed by there rang out to company after company of the silent Guards a new word of command. "Reverse your arms." "Rest on your arms reversed." The officers lowered their pikes, the ensigns struck their colours, and every soldier turned the muzzle of his musket to the ground and bent his head over the butt "in a melancholy posture." The procession moved slowly on, and the troops, still with arms reversed, formed up in its rear and marched with it. Fifty-two years before, John Churchill, the unknown ensign of the First Guards, had marched in procession behind the coffin of George Monk, Duke of Albemarle; now he too was faring on to share Monk's resting-place. At the Horse Guards the Guards wheeled into St. James's Park and formed up on the parade-ground, where the artillery with twenty guns was already formed up before them. The car crept on to the western door of the Abbey, and then rose up for the first time that music which will ever be heard so long as England shall bury her heroes with the rites of her national Church. Within the Abbey the gray old walls were draped with black, and nave and choir and transept were ablaze with tapers and flambeaux. Of England's greatest all were there, the living and the dead. The helmet of Harry the Fifth, still dinted with the blows of Agincourt, hung dim above his tomb, looking down on the stolid German who now sat upon King Harry's throne, and on his heir the Prince of Wales, who had won his spurs at Oudenarde. And at the organ, humble and unnoticed, sat William Croft, little dreaming that he too had done immortal work, but content to listen to the beautiful music which he had made, and to wait till the last sound of the voices should have died away.[12]