But I did not recognize them. Many were elderly men who were displaying proud tunics of volunteer regiments as old as Hyde Park Parades by Queen Victoria. One looked then for the sections from the local lodges of the Druids, Oddfellows, Buffaloes, and the He-Goats. There was the band of the local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys' music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? Most of our triumphant display followed this figure. If our illusions go, what is left to us? Ah, our memories of the Somme! That young officer who turned away when he saw Triumph approaching acted on a right instinct. There is a hilltop near us. It looks to other hills over a great space of southern England, and at night on the far promontories of the Downs bonfires were to be lighted. I have no doubt signals flared from them when the Romans were baffled. Again to-night they would signal that the latest enemy had been vanquished. It was raining gently, and from our own crest the lower and outer night was void. A touch of distant phosphorescence that waned, and intensified again to a strong white glow, presently gave the void one far and lonely hilltop. A cloud elsewhere appeared out of nothing, and persisted, a lenticular spectre of dull fire. These aerial spectres became a host; some were so far away that they were faint smears of orange, and others so near and great that they pulsed and revealed the shapes of the clouds. It was all impersonal, it was England itself that was reflected, the hills that had awakened. It was the emanation of a worthy tradition, older than ourselves, that was re-kindled and was glowing, and that would be here when we are not. It was so receptive, it was so spacious, that our gravest memories could abide there, as if night were kind to the secrets we dare not voice, and understood folly and remorse, and could protect our better visions, and had sanctuary and consolation for that grief which looks to what might have been, but now can never be.