his car. He, too, stands at attention, hat off. The postman pauses in midstreet and lays down his leathern pouch, reverently doffing his double-peaked helmet. Even the green-grocer's boy, halfway down the street, dismounts from his bicycle delivery cart. The red bus about to pass the corner on Bayswater Road stops. Deadly quiet has fallen like a pall from the sky.
This can only happen when the poppies bloom again!
Poppies in November? In London?
Aye. London is a sea of poppies to-day! Come down Bayswater Road with me, on through Oxford Street, across Haymarket and through Trafalgar Square into Whitehall. That blur of scarlet, so reminiscent of and so much like the fresh blood from a re-opened wound, on the breast of every man, woman and child—the nursemaid and the dustman, the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady, my lord and the humblest clerk—you could not help but remark it? Didn't I tell you that the poppies had bloomed again?
Then come with me through this waving field of a million poppies to the side of yonder Cenotaph. You who think England is failing; you who say she has forgotten; you who claim she laughs at her King and pageantry; you who worry over her lack of faith in God or herself. Draw near and see what I saw, hear what I
