On 16 October 1922, "The Criterion" published T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land", with a procession of the dead in London: "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. " Ten days later, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published Virginia Woolf's novel "Jacob's Room", with another such procession: "Has this procession from the Surrey side to the Strand gone on for ever?" These images of the dead crossing bridges are timeless (and connected to many earlier such images), but they are also very much of their time, in works responding to the losses of the recently ended Great War. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 October 2025)

But what century have we reached? Has this procession from the Surrey side to the Strand gone on for ever? That old man has been crossing the Bridge these six hundred years, with the rabble of little boys at his heels, for he is drunk, or blind with misery, and tied round with old clouts of clothing such as pilgrims might have worn. He shuffles on. No one stands still. (Virginia Woolf, "Jacob's Room", 1922)

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
(T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", 1922)