ing flag that sweeps the world.
Follow on! Follow on!

And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;
For Freedom we will fight and die.
Follow on! Follow on!

The Procession was over a mile long.

It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge to
Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and the
Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside Cleopatra's
Needle and the Sphinxes.

Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to Northumberland
Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and Societies and Leagues,
of the trades and the professions and the arts, carrying their banners,
the purple and the blue, the black, white and gold, the green, the
orange and the scarlet and magenta.

Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady Victoria
Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense tricolour
standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them. Behind the
prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of young girls
dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying a pole with the
olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the obviousness of extreme
innocence, the peace that follows victory. They were led by Veronica.

She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because of her
youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought that the Union
had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged to Dorothea.

From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the big red,
white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady Victoria
Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria, white and tense,
would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation, hardly knowing where
she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would go in pride, and in disdain
for the proceedings in which her honour forced her to take part; she
would have an awful knowledge of what she was doing and of where she
was; she would drink every drop of the dreadful cup she had poured out
for herself, hating it.

Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she thought
that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But she did not
hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful and too big to
hate, and her part in it was too little.

She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the Procession.
She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements, pressing closer
and closer, pushed