By a damnable irony, the men had chosen for their collapse a moment when Brook Street offered a tantalizing blend of warm, savoury smells. I, who had never known the meaning of hunger, found my appetite quickening. “They’re tired out and _hungry_,” I said. So far as I am a judge of accents, some of these boys had come from the Black Country, others from Lancashire, others again from Northumberland. “I live near here. Is it any good trying to raise some soup . . .?” The constable shrugged his shoulders and waited while an old man, who had fainted, was lifted on to an ambulance. “If once you begin, sir, you’ll have the whole lot of them at your door. It’s more than one man can tackle.” I walked on to Seymour Street with a growing sense of despair. All this had been prophesied to Griffiths in forcible language ten days before; but my meagre powers of imagination and description never came within miles of actuality. I had not realized the dishonour to humanity which a man commits when he no longer hides a broken spirit; I had forgotten the disfigurements of starvation and the sickly stench of neglect. The policeman was entirely right: half these fellows were only boys; and I felt the blood mounting to my head when I thought of the way they were victimized and their ignorance exploited. During the war I had seen them and their elder brothers trotting obediently to the slaughter-house and bemusedly offering their lives for a cause that was never explained and for objects that they never understood. Now, no less obediently, they trotted in answer to a voice that promised them a quick millennium. I should have caught some hope, for all my denunciation of violence, if they had torn Griffiths limb from limb; but the patient credulity that collected them under his leadership accepted uncomplainingly the fate to which he led them. Griffiths, as he had boasted to me, could look after himself; providence, the police or the devil might look after his followers, who sprawled about the misty streets like slumbering cattle. If I had expected to find Barbara sharing my own anxiety, I might have known better than to expect any sign of it. She greeted me with faint surprise because I had not warned her that I should be lunching at home; then the surprise turned to relief as she recollected that she was a man short. “It’s a family party,” she explained. “Father and mother and Charles. I asked the O’Ranes; but David can’t get away, so you must take his place. . . . You’re not ill or anything are you, George?” “Oh, no, thanks. _Depressed_, if you like. London’s a horrible sight with all these hunger-marchers dropping down on every side from sheer exhaustion. I don’t know what’s to be done about them. I only hope there won’t be a scrap.” Barbara looked out of window; but the fog was now so thick that she could not see across the street. “Was that why you came back?,” she asked with her head averted. “I wanted to see that you were all right.”