Free Occasional Prose by Mary McCarthy Page B

whole scene, especially since they were under orders not to intervene when they could avoid doing so. Cheerfully lacking authority, they could look on the crowd as equals. This absence of ill-feeling, on both sides, among those on the periphery of the sporadic actual fighting was much commented upon. Example: a young demonstrator standing with a cigarette between his lips, in the crush of bodies could not get his hands free to light it; a bobby, observing this, reached forward and politely struck flame from his lighter. The famous example, which many people could hardly credit, was the police joining the demonstrators in singing “Auld Lang Syne” as they all prepared to call it a night.
    The high points of the afternoon were the magical escape of the young black man and the lowering of the Stars and Stripes at sundown. Both drew loud clapping and laughter. The slow hauling down of the U.S. colors was interpreted by the crowd as a symbolic surrender; it was what they wished to bring about, and they laughed as at an inadvertent pun. The low points were, first, the sudden apparition of the wounded, carried or assisted back from the front lines; second, the pushing and shoving and squeezing, which occurred whenever a charge of demonstrators was driven back into the square or into South Audley Street or when the police, having yielded ground, surged forward in a double wedge. At those moments I was conscious of a fear, for us all, of being crushed or trampled, but not, pace the sergeant, at any time of B.O.
    So what did the demonstration accomplish, besides giving Whitehall the jitters? Any side-effects, such as heightening English national pride or training demonstrators in field maneuvers with the police, are beside the point, which is, did it give the U.S. a push toward withdrawal from Vietnam? I do not think it can be claimed with any assurance that it did. But there is another way of looking at the question. Try turning it upside down. What would not demonstrating have accomplished? And the answer is clear: nothing. So, given the choice between a problematical nothing and a certain nothing, maybe it was best to demonstrate after all.
    It might also be asked whether the demonstration was counter-productive. That is, did it gain adherents for Harold Wilson’s policy of loyal support to the U.S. State Department? Surely not, for people who were repelled by the march, by the rhythmic chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” (the fee-fie-fo-fum of the youth ogre), by the slogans (“Smash the System,” “We are all Foreign Scum”), by the flags, beards, and strange dress, do not make a connection between these phenomena and foreign policy. The fact that the main issue, Vietnam, was obscured by local issues, above all those of propriety and decorum (“Is this the right way to make your protest? Why don’t you write a letter to the Times ?”) has its compensations.
    Nobody who shuddered at the demonstration from his luxury-flat balcony would be moved to demand that the British immediately send troops to Vietnam or issue a statement of full confidence in the Pentagon. People like that might be moved in other ways, to demand a ban on all such marches or the exclusion of foreign troublemakers from the country or even to subscribe, out of curiosity, to the Black Dwarf , which they would not read after the first issue. One of their chief aims in life is to appear knowledgeable, like the party I listened to in the dining-room of my hotel the night after the march: an Englishman was explaining to a silvery blonde American woman that the “moderate” demonstrators who went to Downing Street and Hyde Park were O.K., in the best British tradition, whether you agreed with them or not, but that those who went to Grosvenor Square were quite another pair of gloves: “The thugs went to Grosvenor Square. Only the thugs.” “I see ,” she said, thoughtfully nodding. “I see.”
    He spoke in tones of vindictive triumph. Yet the model