280	JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS
never looked, never waited to hear if he were alive,
but walked steadily away down the hill to the school
and shut himself tearlessly in a lavatory. Someone
went and found him there, there were no locks on
any lavatory doors, nowhere where you could be
alone.
Major Grant said, "And in a cupboard they keep
birches. . . ."
The lorries drove up and down the day of the
General Strike loaded with armed men. The cafe
had been turned into a dressing station and a squad
of Garde Mobile moved down the wide boulevard
that runs from Combat to Menilmontant searching
everyone on the pavement for arms. The whole of
Paris was packed with troops; every corner, every
high building sheltered a troop, they clustered along
the walls in their blue steel helmets like wood-
lice. The road of the Revolution from Vincennes to
the Place de la Concorde was lined with guns and
cavalry. No breaking out here, no return to some-
thing earlier, something communal, something
primitive.
More police were coming up to get their pickings
beneath the wall. Vande and Amah were being
persuaded towards the wooden station. I thought of
Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long
gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai; I remembered
they had never had the goat to guard them from the
elephants. It wouldn't have been any use now. We
were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and
I thought rebelliously: I am glad, for here is iced
beer antf a wireless set which will pick up the Empire
programme from Daventry, and after all it is-honjte,