THE PROTESTERS.

Marchers converged on Times Square from every direction on Thursday afternoon. From the Farley Post Office, on Eighth Avenue, came New Yorkers Say No to War, Peace Initiative Turkey, and Code Pink: Women for Peace. The War Resisters League marched in from Bryant Park, Jews Against the Occupation from the New York Public Library, United for Peace and Justice from farther west on Forty-second Street. And up at Columbus Circle it was Youth Bloc and Carnival Bloc and Reclaim the Streets, gathered in freezing, slanting rain--a sodden mass of a few hundred people chanting and beating on homemade drums in, it seemed safe to surmise, a desperate effort both to stay warm and to raise their own spirits the day after American missiles started pounding Baghdad. "Drop Bush, Not Bombs!"they yelled. A mild-looking woman in a fishing cap held a poster up to the traffic peeling around the circle. On the poster was a picture of Pope John Paul II and, in vivid print, a creative rendition of the Vatican's stand: "This War Is Illegal, Immoral, Unjust."When I asked whether she belonged to any of the protest groups, the woman, her glasses streaked with rain, politely said that she did not, but that her daughter--she indicated the rocking mass--was in Youth Bloc.

It was time to march. Setting off down Broadway, past drawn-up lines of wet, unhappy-looking police, Emma Roderick, a fresh-faced senior at Hunter College High School and a Youth Bloc activist, said, "We don't think this will get them to pull out of Iraq or anything. But we hope we can help minimize civilian casualties, maybe discourage them from using nuclear weapons. Generally, they just need to be aware that there are still a lot of people against this war, even though it's started.”

The foul-weather gear of choice seemed to be black Hefty bags; the favored noisemaker was an empty five-gallon plastic bucket slung from the neck and rhythmically thrashed with drumsticks. Past the Mony Group and the new headquarters of Random House, the ragged boa of protest shuffle-danced into the gloomy depths of midtown. Ahead lay the blazing lights of Times Square, first among them a vast white sign advertising, of all things, a Department of Homeland Security Web site--www.ready.gov--with the slogan "The Fight Against Terrorism Begins at Home.”

The police steered the column east on Forty-eighth Street, then through several tight turns between blue barricades onto Seventh Avenue. There was shoving, and two marchers were quickly on the ground, faces on asphalt, with several police officers kneeling on their backs, slowly tying their wrists together with plastic restraints. "Arrest them all,"a brave, possibly drunk bystander shouted.

Times Square was a canyon of sirens. Police cars and vans were parked ...