perhaps, in the imagination of the man whose dust was now being brought toward them. It was their brains that had directed his movements down the long roads which galled his feet, over ground churned up by gun-fire, up duckboards from which he slipped under his heavy pack if he were a foot-slogger, and whatever his class as a soldier, ordained at last the end of his journey, which finished in a grave marked by a metal disk—"unknown."
In life, he had looked upon these generals as terrifying in their power "for the likes of him." Sometimes, perhaps, he had saluted them as they rode past. Now they stood in Whitehall to salute him, to keep silence in his presence, to render him homage more wonderful, with deeper reverence, than any general of them all has had.
There were princes there about the cenotaph, not only of England but of the Indian Empire. These Indian rajahs, that old white-bearded, white-turbaned man with the face of an Eastern prophet—was it possible that they, too, were out to pay homage to an unknown British soldier?
There was something of the light of Flanders in Whitehall. The tattered ruins of Cloth Hall at Ypres used to shine white in a mist, suffused a little by wan sunlight, white as the walls and turrets of the War Office in this mist of London. The tower of Big Ben was dim through the mist
