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. Romance on Wheels When normal London folk have gone home to bed the coffee-stalls come trundling out of the mysterious dark to stay at street corners and bridge-heads till the dawn. Ask your friends if they have ever sought refreshment at a coffee-stall. I wager that perhaps only the Bad Boy of the Family or Dance Club Jane have experienced the happiness of sausages at 3 A.M. in this temple of romance. The coffee-stall at the street corner is the only thing left in our modern world that approximates to the mediæval inn or guest-house. Hotels are graded and standardized, and you know exactly the kind of people you will find in them. Good hotels are so much alike that patrons often have to ask the hall porter whether they are in London or Rome. But the little coffee-stall, set netwise at street corners to catch queer fish, is dramatic. If ever I write a play the first act will take place round a coffee-stall; but I am told that this has been done; and no wonder. Here it is that you, like some traveller in the old days before the last dragon died, will meet varlets and squires, knights on some bright errantry, damsels in distress, and many a wandering fool: all the old characters of Romance like moths round a flame, dropping in out of the night to snatch a sausage and then off, mysterious, elusive, into the night.