Then all was still, and the picture was complete, framing in that coffin, where the steel hat and the King's sword lay upon the flag which draped it. The soul of the nation at its best, purified at this moment by this emotion, was there, in silence, about the dust of that Unknown.

Guns were being fired somewhere in the distance. They were not loud, but like the distant thumping of the guns on a misty day in Flanders when there was "nothing to report," though on such a day, perhaps, this man had died.

Presently there was a far-off wailing, like the cry of a banshee. It was a siren giving the warning of silence in some place by the river. The deep notes of Big Ben struck 11, and then the King turned quickly to the lever behind him, touched it, and let fall the great flags which had draped it. A grim, hard thing, like a pagan altar, as it seems to me, the cenotaph stood revealed, utterly austere, except for three standards, with their gilt wreaths.

It was a time of silence. What thoughts were in the minds of all the people only God knows, as they stood there for those two minutes, which were very long. There was a dead stillness in Whitehall, only broken here and there by the coughing of a man or a woman, quickly hushed.

The Unknown Warrior! Was it young Jack, perhaps, who had never been found? Was it one of those fellows in the battalion that moved up through Ypres before the height of the battle in the bogs? Men were smoking, this side of Ypres. One could see the glow of their cigarette ends as they were halted round the old mill house at Vlamertinghe. It rained after that, beating sharply on the tin hats, pouring in spouts down waterproof capes. They went out through Menin Gate. The shelling began along the duckboards by Westhoek Ridge, gas shelling, every old thing. Fellows dropped into shell holes, full of water. They had their packs on, all their fighting kit. Some of them lay there in the pits, where the water was reddish.

There were a lot of unknown warriors in the bogs by Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse. They lay by upturned tanks and sank in the slime. Queer how the fellows used to drop and never give a sound, so that their pals passed on without knowing. In all sorts of places the unknown warrior lay down and was not quickly found. In Bourlon Wood they were lying after the battle among the river trees. On the fields of the Somme they lay in the churned-up earth, in High Wood and Delville Wood and this side of Loupart Wood. It was queer, one day, how the sun shone on Loupart Wood, which was red with autumn tints. The old Boche was there then, and the wood seemed to have a thousand eyes staring at our lines, newly dug. An airplane came through the fleecy sky, wonderfully careless of the black shrapnel bursting about it. Wonderful chaps, those airmen! For a man afoot it wasn't good to stumble in that ground. Barbed wire tore one's hands damnably. There was a boy lying in a tangle of barbed wire. He looked as though he were asleep, but he was dead, all right. The airplane passed overhead with a loud humming song.

What is this long silence, all this crowd in London streets, two years after the armistice and peace? Yes, those were the old dreams that have passed, old ghosts passing down Whitehall among the living.

The silence ended. Some word rang out; the bugles were blowing. They were sounding the "Last Post" to the Unknown Warrior of the great war in which many men died without record or renown. Farther than Whitehall sounded the "Last Post" to the dead. Did the whole army of the dead hear that call to them from the living? In the crowd below me women were weeping quietly. It was the cry from their hearts that was heard farthest, perhaps. The men's faces were hard, like masks, hiding all they thought and felt.

The King stepped forward again and took the wreath from Lord Haig and laid it at the base of the cenotaph. It was the first of the world of flowers brought as a tribute of living hearts to this altar of the dead. Admirals and Generals and statesmen