nomy could be devised. A battleship in the north had been
completed five months under contract time. Working girls, determined to
make a record output of ammunition, persisted twenty-two hours at a
stretch, topped their machines with Union Jacks, and fainted next morning
while waiting for the factory gates to open. The spirit of the English!
What virtue there is in bread and tea! Yet we might have guessed it. And
again we might have remembered, as a corrective, how many grave speeches,
which have surprised, shocked, and directed the nation, have been made by
Great Men too soon after a noble dinner, words winged by the Press
without an accompanying and explanatory wine list.

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