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“Where are the guns?” I asked, as the mare lipped my coat-collar.

“Gone ahead long ago. They come out of their own door at the back of barracks. We don’t haul guns through traffic more than we can help…. If Belinda breathes down your neck smack her. She’ll be quiet in the streets. She loves lookin’ into the shop-windows.”

The mounted company clattered through vaulted concrete corridors in the wake of the main body, and filed out into the crowded streets.

When I looked at the townsfolk on the pavement, or in the double-decked trams, I saw that the bulk of them saluted, not grudgingly or of necessity, but in a light-hearted, even flippant fashion.

“Those are Line and Militia men,” said Pigeon. “That old chap in the top-hat by the lamp-post is an ex-Guardee. That’s why he’s saluting in slow-time. No, there’s no regulation governing these things, but we’ve all fallen into the way of it somehow. Steady, mare!”

“I don’t know whether I care about this aggressive militarism,” I began, when the company halted, and Belinda almost knocked me down. Looking forward I saw the badged cuff of a policeman upraised at a crossing, his back towards us.

“Horrid aggressive, ain’t we?” said Pigeon with a chuckle when we moved on again and overtook the main body. Here I caught the strains of the band, which Pigeon told me did not accompany the battalion on ‘heef,’ but lived in barracks and made much money by playing at parties in town.

“If we want anything more than drums and fifes on ‘heef’ we sing,” said Pigeon. “Singin’ helps the wind.”

I rejoiced to the marrow of my bones thus to be borne along on billows of surging music among magnificent men, in sunlight, through a crowded town whose people, I could feel, regarded us with comradeship, affection–and more.

“By Jove,” I said at last, watching the eyes about us, “these people are looking us over as if we were horses.”

“Why not? They know the game.”

The eyes on the pavement, in the trams, the cabs, at the upper windows, swept our lines back and forth with a weighed intensity of regard which at first seemed altogether new to me, till I recalled just such eyes, a thousand of them, at manoeuvres in the Channel when one crowded battleship drew past its sister at biscuit-toss range. Then I stared at the ground, overborne by those considering eyes.

Suddenly the music changed to the wail of the Dead March in “Saul,” and once more–we were crossing a large square–the regiment halted.

“Damn!” said Pigeon, glancing behind him at the mounted company. “I believe they save up their Saturday corpses on purpose.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“A dead Volunteer. We must play him through.” Again I looked forward and saw the top of a hearse, followed by two mourning-coaches, boring directly up the halted regiment, which opened out company by company to let it through.

“But they’ve got the whole blessed square to funeralise in!” I exclaimed. “Why don’t they go round?”

“Not so!” Pigeon replied. “In this city it’s the Volunteer’s perquisite to be played through by any corps he happens to meet on his way to the cemetery. And they make the most of it. You’ll see.”

I heard the order, “Rest on your arms,” run before the poor little procession as the men opened out. The driver pulled the black Flanders beasts into a more than funeral crawl, and in the first mourning-coach I saw the tearful face of a fat woman (his mother, doubtless), a handkerchief pressed to one eye, but the other rolling vigilantly, alight with proper pride. Last came a knot of uniformed men–privates, I took it –of the dead one’s corps.

Said a man in the crowd beside us to the girl on his arm, “There, Jenny! That’s what I’ll get if I ‘ave the luck to meet ’em when my time comes.”

“You an’ your luck,” she snapped. “‘Ow can you talk such silly nonsense?”