‘Boom, boom, boom’, resounds the huge drum, and the windows of nearby houses tremble.

The trombone players are a pitiful sight, their eyes about to pop out with the strain.

One bleats the droning tune of a hymn; another shouts out in meaningless combinations: ‘repent’… ‘save yourselves’… ‘doom is nigh’… ‘eternity’… ‘the Lord’…; another, in a fit of some kind of frenzy, points to the skies, menacingly demanding something from the public.

The people gaze at the cold, foggy sky, see nothing there, and slowly turn away from the speaker.

It starts to rain. Dirty jets of water begin drumming on the horn players’ instruments. Umbrellas rise like innumerable scales over this whole clamorous, agitated, crazed mass of humanity – and soon it seems as if some huge, unknown beast is roaring and raging and howling, ready to fly in powerless fury at anyone calm and indifferent, who passes by at a steady pace…

I come nearer. The men's faces are feverish, red from the vodka, the yelling, the ecstatic gestures… They are dressed in ordinary soldiers’ uniforms with braid, epaulettes and chevrons.

The women – flat-chested, sallow, with billowing, dishevelled hair – do not lack for military distinctions either. Encircling their black hats is a red ribbon with the words:

‘The Salvation Army!’

Yes, these strange people, decked out like jesters, with the antics and gambols of holy fools, with the deafening clangour of their drums, pretend to the role of saviours and leaders of errant humanity. Drums and salvation! Clownish buffoonery and the holy tears of repentance! Military ranks and appeals to the God of equality and justice! What a wild combination of ideas! What blasphemy! Try to imagine more jarring, more mutually exclusive extremes! You couldn’t.

Such absurd conjunctions of the exalted and the offensively sordid, of worship and clowning, are not possible anywhere except the country of Darwin, Mill and Ruskin. Only the English are capable of this kind of cynicism: the cynicism that is entailed in the union of repentance – that most intimate, most bashful of spiritual acts – with theatrical gestures and military chevrons.