Page:Armistice Day.djvu/120

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98
ARMISTICE DAY

it admitted no other. Human hearts could hold no more than that great gladness. The dreadful past, the terrible problems of the future, were not. We lived and drew our breath only in the knowledge that "firing had ceased at eleven o'clock that morning," and that those who had fought as best they could for the Right had conquered. You saw everywhere supreme testimony to the nobility of the moment, women in black, with bits of bright-colored tricolor pinned on their long black veils, with at last a smile, the most wonderful of all smiles, in their dimmed eyes. They were marching with the others in the streets; every one was marching with every one else, arm in arm, singing:

"Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!"

The houses echoed to those words, repeated and repeated by every band of jubilant men and women and children who swept by, waving flags and shouting:

"Come, children of our country,
The Day of Glory is here!"

Every group had at its head a permissionnaire or two in field uniform who had been pounced upon as the visible emblem of victory, kissed, em-