Then he saw himself, by his own actions, condemned to sit and watch, an inactive spectator of the great drama. His loneliness fell upon him like a doom. He realized the uselessness of his age. He had as much place in modern London as any chance inhabitant of Mars. He who had dared the untrodden recesses of the Far Eastern world, haughtily asserting his sympathetic right of citizenship, felt, after a day or two, a terror of modern London. It was too vast, too unknown, too strange: a city at war, unlike any city he had ever seen. Youth, in civilian attire, had disappeared from its face. The unfamiliar dirty brown uniform filled the streets. He had read of khaki, was vaguely aware of it as the service uniform of the British Army; he had come across the tropical drill material which had clothed the troops in Hong Kong, but his mind preoccupied with interests remote from military affairs had barely registered the impression. His traditional and therefore instinctive conception of the soldier in the London streets was a thing in swaggering scarlet. He missed the scarlet. It took him some time to accommodate his mental vision to the military reality of the dun-coloured hordes of men that thronged the Strand, Whitehall, and Piccadilly. Soldiers, too, slopped about in an extraordinary kit of blue jean and red ties. He did not grasp the fact that these were wounded men wearing hospital uniform, until he passed the Westminster Hospital and saw some of them taking the air on the terrace. After the first day’s wanderings he dined at his crowded hotel, a bewildered man. In London itself he had beheld an army. Scarcely a table in the vast restaurant showed no man in uniform among its occupants. He contrasted the place with his last pre-war impression. Then every man, young or old, had been impeccably attired in the white tie and white waistcoat of high convention. Not a woman then who was not gowned as for some royal festival. Now the outward and visible signs of gilded youth had vanished. Even elderly bucks wore plain dinner-jackets and black ties—his own sloppily fitting, ready made dress suit seemed ultra ceremonious. Here and there were exquisitely dressed women; but here and there, too, were dowdy ladies unblushing under obviously cheap hats. And men with bandaged heads came in, and legless men on crutches; and at the next table a one-armed man depended for the cutting up of his food on the ministrations of a girl. And away over the other side of the room he saw a man, his breast covered with ribbons, carried pick-a-back by a brother officer to his appointed place. No one seemed to take notice of the unusual. Scarcely a casual glance lingered on the pair. At no table visible was there a break in the talk and the laughter. Baltazar leaned back in his chair and gasped at the realization that the incident was a commonplace of modern life.