But the Nobodies are light-minded, casual, and good-hearted. Their great labour over, and their sacrifices buried, they have come out this day to celebrate the occasion with hilarious and ironic gaiety. They have won the Greatest of Wars, so they ride in motor-lorries and make delirious noises with comic instruments. Their heroic thoughts are blattering through penny trumpets. They have accomplished what had been declared impossible, and now they rejoice with an inconsequential clatter on tea-trays and tin cans. Yet some of us who watched their behaviour saw the fantastic brightness in the streets on Armistice Day only as a momentary veiling of the spectres of a shadow land which now will never pass. Who that heard "Tipperary" sung by careless men marching in France in a summer which seems a century gone will hear that foolish tune again without a sudden fear that he will be unable to control his emotion? And those Nobodies of Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne, what were they? The "hungry squad," the men shut outside the factory gates, the useless surplus of the labour market so necessary for a great nation's commercial prosperity. Their need kept the wages of their neighbours at an economic level. The men of Mons were of that other old rearguard, the hope of the captains of industry when there are revolts against the common lot of our industrial cities where the death-rates of young Nobodies, casualty lists of those who fall to keep us prosperous, are as ruinous as open war; a mutilation of life, a drainage of the nation's body that is easily borne by Christian folk who are moved to grief and action at the thought of Polynesians without Bibles. Yet the Nobodies stood to it at Mons. They bore us no resentment. We will say they fought for an England that is not us, an England that is nobler than common report and common speech. Think of the contempt and anger of the better end of London just before the War, when, at the other end, the people of Dockland revolted and defied their masters! I knew one mother in that obscure host of ignorant humanity in revolt. Two of her infants were slowly fading, and she herself was dying of starvation, yet she refused the entrance of charity at her door, and dared her man to surrender. He died later at Ypres. He died because of that very quality of his which moved his masters and superiors to anger; he refused at Ypres, as he did in Dockland, like those who were with him and were of his kind, to do more than mock defeat when it faced him.