The maroons that in the bad nights of the past beat like blows on the drum of Fate gave the news to London at eleven o╒clock this morning, and sounded the overture of rejoicing.
This idea of using the maroons came right out of the humorous mind of London, and the once-terrible sound was like a huge cockney chuckle of delight. The guns boomed over the heavy grey sky, and everybody knew that the last guns had been fired on the home front.
Before the sound had died away innumerable people everywhere rushed into the streets from house, factory, and workshop and children helter-skelter from the schools crying ╥The war is over.╙ In a few minutes all over London the little boys in red with the bugles, who used to send us to bed when the Gothas had gone, were starting out blowing the cheery ╥All clear╙ for the war. These chubby little angels of goodwill were greeted everywhere with affectionate laughter as they blew away the four years╒ nightmare and all its horrors. The trains on all the lines carried on the note with a wheezy shriek of delight. The fat tugs on the river tried to play a tune on one note, and with all these noises mingled the first thin wail of cheers that in a very short time grew loud enough to drown the maroons.
The Summons of the Bells.
Then the church bells, that we have never dared to ring but once on any great day of war, burst into a confident ringing. Big Ben over all, letting themselves go, like all London below them. The bells acted like a beaten tin summoning a swarm of bees.
Looking from a Fleet Street window it was curious to see how instantaneously the swarm rushed out. The crowd gathered momentum in a most extraordinary way. In five minutes there was not an office window without a glaring new flag, till the street looked as if prepared for a mediaeval pageant. Hawkers appeared as from trap-doors with armfuls of hand-banners. The school children each had one in a twinkling, and went singing and dancing westward, leading a long procession from east to west that went on getting busier and more cheerful all day. Like magic the buses converted themselves into moving grandstands for the show. Within ten minutes I saw on the hood of a bus over the drive an officer, a private, a Wren, and a W.A.A.C. dancing a peace dance. Nobody paid any fares ╤ indeed very soon the conductresses gave up hope of collecting them.
Motor-cars in a steady stream came along, with people sticking to every inch of them like flies on treacle. Inside might be a small selection of the Allies, some dark Italian officer with cameo face, a blonde English staff officer, a land girl on the bonnet, all mixed up with accretions of Australians wearing Union Jacks instead of their slouch hats, a gorgeous Indian in a turban, and perhaps a bright blue Frenchman. A little later the munition workers joined the throng, doing the solemn East End dance down the Strand or clustered in the heavy army waggons, and all this motley mob went shouting, waving, in complete abandonment, down towards Whitehall, wounded soldiers with flags draped over their hospital blue stumping cheerily after.
