Excerpt from The House on the Sands The soldiers had captured London's imagina tion as completely as if they were indeed a hostile army come to take possession of the spoils of war. London thought in khaki. Nobody knew or cared how many or how few were the soldiers figures meant nothing; London was filled with soldiers, submerged in khaki. As the traffic died and people gathered in the streets and at windows, it would have been seen that all their faces were become marvellously alike. They were no longer individuals, they reflected the common mood. Wherever a man moved his feet fell in unison with the feet of the soldiers. Every sound was subordinated to the rhythmic tramp of their feet as the episodes of a great symphony are caught up and interwoven with the development of the main subject. Every man's blood beat to the measure of a marching tune; abstract man wore khaki, and every other garb was the livery of impotence. Every woman saw her lover in uniform; for the time being every woman in London, maid, wife, or widow. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.