THE MID-DAY PAUSE.

Hokitika Guardian, 23 October 1918, Page 4

THE MID-DAY PAUSE.

CAPETOWN’S SILENT PRAYER

“D,” writing in “The Cape” says in the course of an impressive article: I was walking along the western pavement of Adderley street, talking to a friend of I forget what, when a street clock overhead began to utter its twelve strokes. Before it had done striking —at its fourth or fifth stroke—the boom of the Signal Hill gun came and a bugle from Cartwright’s balcony began to sound tlio “Last Post.” And immediately everybody and everything in the street and all around, and in the side streets, stood still, quite still. , Stood absolutely still!, If you have not ! seen it, you can hardly imagine it. Think of it! The whole life, movement and action of this busy little world of Adderley street suspended, stopped, stricken dump, petrified. The sudden and solemn unanimity of this pause in the very midst of the city'day gets a queer grip of your emotions, nets somehow down deep inside you. From an almost undistinguishable' group, high up at the corner of the upper balcony of Mansion House Chambersbers building, there come the strains of “The Last Post,’’ trumpeted over the heads of a- silent and motionless city. The proud melancholy, the gallant, triumphant sadness of those last, wailing silvery notes seemed to find an echo in the very depths of vour heart. You feel a curious lump in your throat, and you had an idea that in the intense stillness and silence everybody around you was aware of it. Your hand fidgetted with the hat you held in it. . . .Rut then you perceived that nobody was paying any attention to vou—that everybody was absorbed in his own emotions of these silent minutes. . . . They seem like a thousand. I wonder, as I stand here, one of a big mass of humanity carved out of stone, when it is going to end! Two minutes!—it seems like twenty ! But I think that what to me most emphasised the solemn stillness of the ocoation was that while I stood in the roadway, midway in the “pause,” there came from some shop or office behind, tile ringing of a telephone bell. Ibis telephone bell was plainly audible to tin* motionless crowds in the centre of Adderley street.' It rang and rang ami rang, with a faint, distinct tinkle; hut there was no one to answer it ; for oven in the shops and offices the clerks and attendants and the cutomers were standing rigid in communion with the heroic and distant dead. And these arc my feeble impressions of the midday pause—feeble, because written or printed words can convey no real sense of the beautiful sense of no real sense of the beautiful simplicity and brevity of the ceremony, its unrehearsed, spontaneous order and decorum, its complete and most reverent silence—a sharp, clear-cut interruption in the day’s traffic of the city. Not easy, indeed to convey the true idea of ' how swiftly, how instantaneously the ritual of the pause gripped the 1 city like a spell flung over it from the balcony where the soldier stood with his bugle. I can’t even now tell—so suddenly upon the hour came the silence—whether the bnre-lieaded pause began with the boom of the gun, or the first note of the bugle. I only remember that the clock was still chiming twelve when the first notes of the “Last Post” rang out like a call from, the hills and fields and woods of France for the thoughts and prayers of the living that the brave dead might rest for over in the Perpetual Light.