Most Secret War

by R.V. Jones

It was the 22nd of March and the Victory Parade of the Brigade of Guards. My mother and I were standing somewhere in the great crowd near Hyde Park Corner, and I had my first experience of an individual perceiving a truth that was staring the crowd in the face, and yet all the rest failing to see it until it was spelled out for them. As Company after Company came by, the crowd burst into cheer after cheer. And then there came a company that was different—all its men were in civilian clothes. The cheering died away, the crowd was subdued. What were civilians doing in a parade like this? Were they recruits who had joined in time to miss the war? I shared the disappointment that these drab men should interlope among the splendid Guardsmen. And then the hush was broken by the indignant voice of a woman crying ‘Cheer the men in civvies—they were the men who went first’. It was absolutely true, for these were the survivors of the ‘Old Contemptibles’, already demobilized on the rule of ‘first in, first out’. The shamed crowd apologized with thundering cheers. Although I have not spoken of it in the fifty years since, I remember because the voice had been my own mother’s. And one of the men in civvies, marching unmistakably as a Guardsman even though, thanks to Festubert, his left arm was three inches short, was my father.