THE ARMY OF THE LOST.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10020, 16 April 1910, Page 3

THE ARMY OF THE LOST.

The Problem of the Thames Embankment has recently become more acute than ever. Here is a penpicture of a night among cie Army of the Lost.

"Time, gentlemen, please!" is the latter-day curfew of London. At half-past twelve, when the lightß go out in the'restaurants of the West and the ghi palaces of tlie Ea&t, the great city hurries home to bed. After that, there remain out only the masterless men and rogues—and those who have no homes to which they can go. It had been raining for forty-eight hours when that modern curfew sent us forth from Fleet Street. First we went westwards, the Irishman and I. There w«s yet life in the Strand, but the Haymarkct was already deserted. The coffee stall at the Marble Arch has disappeared, and the big corner was like a place of the dead save for a policeman, in a glistening cape, standing in the lee of the Atch itself, do we went back, eastwards again. In Regent Street we met two women, fair-haired Germans, one in white, one in grey, disputing in a doorway. Leicester Square wa3 like the Marble Arch corner, save that there were two or three cabs yet on the rank. So far, we had drawn a blank; but the Irishman shcok his head as we turned down by Uharing Cross Station, "The Embankment is too ghastly," he said. i THE EMBANKMENT AT | MIDNIGHT. j He wa3 quiet right. Hungerford Bridge is very wide, but from the Underground station to Northumberland Avenue Ihsy were lying along the pavement in a row, huddled together as closely as they could get for mutual warmth. It was like a bivouac—the bivouac of the Army of the Lost.

If you want to realise the horror of London, go to Hungerford Bridge after two a.m. Ac first, in the dim yght, you may not grasp what tho3e bundles are. Then it comes home to you suddenly, and you feel sick. They are men and women, and children as well, wrapped in newspapers and old contents bills and f oul rags of sacking, with the wrecks of boots protruding from the bundles and bare flesh protruding from the boots. Most are lying very still, but every now and then one does move restlessly, throwing off his covering, and you will see one of the half-dozen watching police cover him up again, tucking the newspapers down over the rags, doing it half-sheepishly, at any rate if you are looking on. I'he police are there every night, and I am not sure but what theirs is the worst task of all. Use has not hardened them, only made them infinitely sympathetic. Round the corner, opposite the National Liberal Club, were some fifty more—all men—crouching against the wall. They were unfortunate; they had no newspapers or contents bills, and they had been too late to peg out claims under the bridge. The ram just caught them obliquely, and their teeth were chattering, as though the sight of the Cabinet Ministers driving away from a function at the club was insufficient to warm and cheer them. All those I spoke to—and we bought coffee for as many as we could—were British born; somehow tne alien seems to fare better. It used to be the correct thing to write of the outcasts "on the seats of the embankment." Today the phrase sounds absurd, for the seats would not hold one-tenth of that ghastly, dying army. All along the Embankment, In front of that splendid line of buildings—the Savoy, the Cecil, Whitehall Court, and Somerset House—every doorway, very available nook, has its occupants, shiver- ; ing, hunched up, doomed. Kound j Cleopatra's Needle they are packed like sardines, and when,, at four] o'clock, the police rouse them there, j the flame from their burning paper I blankets rises twenty feet in the air, ! licking the great obelisk, the morn- ] ing sacrifice to the God of Modern ' Progress. i HOW THE POOR HELP'THE j POOR. | " Close by the foot ef the Savoy steps you will find a coffee stall, kept by a man wearing th« China medal ribbon. He was invalided out ot the 1 Navy because of so mo patty injury —a childish reason—and for mouths sold, or tried to salt, matches in Fleet Street, starvi:';;r meanwhile. Then the police gave him a helping i hand—will tha story of palice benevolence ever be written—and now he j

s beginning to get a living . I doubt if he makes a pound a week; I am certain he gives away ten shillings a week. He lets his customers have coffee and cake nn credit. knowi n g the horror of the streets on these bitter winter nights; and then he sends his proteges along to the night watchman who is looking after the road-mending works, and the watchman stows the poor wretches in h s little hut, and himself sits in the rain. Last week that ccit'ee stall keeper spent two daj's, when he yhould have been in bed, collecting clothes for the girl-wife of a gas stoicer, who, with her husband, passed eight wet nights on the Embankment. She has pneumonia now asd she will probably die; but she would have died before this but for the food that ex-bluejacket gave her. Next week, .you may be sure, he and the night watchman will be helping two or three more, and them ■ stives going hungry in consequence. • 1 If you are tired of shams and self advertisers, philanthropist;: o.: salaries, and political Friends of the Poor, go down to t!:e Savoy steps after midnight, and t«ik to the coffee stall man and the night watchman. You will leave feeiir.g hettcr ; -though with a big lump in your i throat. I Cn Saturday nights—or, rather, I Sunday mornings to the coffee iiali man £ays, the Boy Scours ccme town, scores of them, to spend their rr:on;y on coffee and cako the Army of the Lost And that is another of the tine things of the Embankment, ore of those things which, cone in secret, ought to bd known op?nly, ■ WORSE EVER* YEAR. If you go down to the Embankment out cf curiosity, you will have to pay bitterly for iour experiences, for every night this winter, when you hear the wind whistling up the street and tha rain beating on your windowc', you will remember —.yon cannot help remembering—the Army of the Lost still cut in the wet: and the cold. If, on the other ban 1, you want to learn crude tr.iti a, qo tc the Erabankrrent, and see how the outcasts —your own fellow-countrymen, every one of them, by birch <:c-heirs with yuu in the Empire —are faring. Then glance westwards, towards the House of Commors, where law's are made with the idea of helping trie pojr, and I guarantee yen will begin to ask yourself whether, after all, legislation can accomplish anything, whether we have not let the matter go out too far already. Every year things become a little in London. Work increases, but wonld-be workers increase even more rapidly, and the weakest go to the wall—or, rather, to the Embankment—to starve, to shiver under newspaper blankets, and, in most ca3es, to end with pneumonia or phthisis.