mense
motor-wagon, crowded with singing girls, blowing hooters, wildly waving
flags, and followed by a trail of taxi-cabs like a gigantic wobbling
tail, each one laden with ten, twenty, and even more soldiers, charged
down a side street and urged its right of way brutally through the
crowd.

It seemed to me that the whole spirit and quality of the reveling was
summarized. A rabble of distractions sought to sway me hither and
thither. Now, I watched a company of girls dancing with young officers
to the accompaniment of a barrel organ, then a group singing, and
another group playing some round game that I did not know; now it was
some Tommies surrounded by a group of screaming girls. In one group a
woman was carrying a baby, and a tiny child dragged at the hand of
another girl, crying drearily, and no one noticed. Boys were kicking
about boardings that had been torn from the statues in Trafalgar Square.
The noise became more and more deafening.

Did anyone realize at all the colossal importance of that day? This
hour of supreme thanksgiving, the most glorious of all days in the
history of the world, was passing in a delirium of waste. For there was
no joy, only a great pretense and noise.

In this medley the sense of the present tended to disappear. Victory
Night, by some fantastic transformation, to me became terrible with
menace. All the jostling, excited people, and especially the disheveled
women and the crowds of rioting girls, appeared as tormented puppets,
moving and capering, not at all from will and desire of their own, but
agitated violently and incessantly by some hidden hand, forced into
playing parts they did not want to play, saying words they had no wish
to speak, cutting antics for which they had no aptitude or liking.
Cruelties lurked everywhere, waiting in the confused mummery. Reality
was being left and with it the practical grasp of those powerful
simplicities that alone can guide life through confusion. I felt this
with stinging certainty. Everyone seemed playing a part, goaded with the
urgency of seeking an escape from themselves.

But must life always go on in the same way? Surely our great dead point
us through all these pretenses into the future? Dead compelling hands,
insisting with irritable gestures that this failure of life should
cease, and cease forever.

A thousand serried problems seemed to be pressing on me at once. My
young son was angry at my sadness, but it was the biting conscio