TRAFALGAR-SQUARE FETE

“Buy a flower of England for the wounded of France.” There in ten words is the sum of it; and, to quote a parody of a once popular song, “if you want to buy them go to Trafalgar-square.” You won’t find the “old man sitting on a chair” of whom the parody speaks, but you will find “sweet dreaming faces” which were the theme of the original. Their “dream is a fair one – of silver and gold in shining heaps out of which shall come succour and comfort borne by British hands to the wounded of our brave Ally France, and at the time as they dream they work to realise their dream. You can help them here. Empty as many flower-trays and fill as many collection boxes as you can during Flower Fair Week; the more trays you empty, the more boxes you fill, the more will the British Motor Ambulance Committee benefit, and the more the committee benefits the more will the lives of gallant Frenchmen be spared and their pain assuaged. All this is for those who do not dine in fashionable restaurants and hotels. For these “special facilities are to be provided.” Lest they should not come to the square the square is coming to them. It came to them yesterday in the person of Mlles. Odette Myrtil, Alice O’brien, Edmee Dormeuil, Lucieune Dervyle, Mrs. André Charlot, and others, who, making “a sudden sally” from Trafalgar-square, appeared in the lunch hour at various places, crying out in French the sentence, with which this account begins. No scheduled hotel or restaurant is immune, and during Flower Fair Week there will be no “raidless day.” One rubbed one’s eyes yesterday when one saw the square. Gone were the silent spaces, for the fountains had put off their pre-occupations and were playing again. At their base were water lilies, and near by was a Japanese water-garden, with the pigmy trees of Japan, venerable in years and veritable in form, but to lay Western eyes obstinately unreal. Besides this, all down the north side of the square in massed array, and elsewhere, in outposts of cheerful friendly stalls, that beckoned, there was “the glory of the garden.”