Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/45

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Soldier Poets
27

a hold on this or that one of them, and the two go off crying and laughing together. I have seen the wounded coming out from those stations and men among the patient crowd without standing bareheaded or stirred to sudden cheering as they passed, and women who stepped into the road to fling flowers upon the bandaged, recumbent figures inside the ambulances. And I have a vivid memory of seeing a regiment of Scots Guards tramping along Cannon Street from the Tower to Waterloo Station, in the days when the war was still new and strange to us. A sturdy, martial body of men, they marched with their band playing, rank after rank, four deep, and in such numbers that the band had gone on beyond hearing in the traffic before the last of them went by me; and most vividly of all it comes back to me of how at intervals a wife, a sweetheart, a mother, or a friend marched with certain of the soldiers. Particularly I remember one bronzed guardsman, a handsome, well-set-up fellow, who went a little out of the line to make room betwixt himself and