England -- Fiction; Experimental fiction; Psychological fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- England -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn,
and the empty sitting-room and the sitting-room with fifty people in it
are liable at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps are
more excitable than men. It is seldom that any one says anything about
it, and to see the hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stop
to Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the
drums and trumpets. Only, should you turn aside into one of those little
bays on Waterloo Bridge to think the matter over, it will probably seem
to you all a muddle--all a mystery.
They cross the Bridge incessantly. Sometimes in the midst of carts and
omnibuses a lorry will appear with great forest trees chained to it.
Then, perhaps, a mason's van with newly lettered tombstones recording
how some one loved some one who is buried at Putney. Then the motor car
in front jerks forward, and the tombstones pass too quick for you to
read more. All the time the stream of people never ceases passing from
the Surrey side to the Strand; from the Strand to the Surrey side. It
seems as if the poor had gone raiding the town, and now trapesed back to
their own quarters, like beetles scurrying to their holes, for that old
woman fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a shiny bag, as if she
had been out into the light and now made off with some scraped chicken
bones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the wind is
rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in
hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are
hatless. They triumph.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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