WASHINGTON, DC — To say it was "cold" doesn’t do Saturday’s weather in the nation’s capital complete justice. It was a deceptive chill, masked in brilliant sunshine and lacking the wind to drive it through your bones. The cold crept in on you, layer by layer, slowly pinching the toes and reddening the nose until its full impact — 24 degrees that felt more like 13 — made itself known.

Despite the frigid conditions, thousands of Americans opposed to the Bush administration’s drive to war with Iraq showed up at the US Capitol. They came from all over the East Coast and the Midwest. Huddled together, they patiently endured an unending parade of speakers on the makeshift stage. Their frozen arms lifted up homemade signs for C-SPAN’s cameras to see. Backpacks clashed with the bodies behind them, but good cheer abounded.

"You are the truest patriots of this country," Representative John Conyers told the crowd. The Michigan congressman — who has been among the most vigorous critics of the Bush administration’s conduct in the war on terrorism at home and abroad — added that he thought it would be a "cold day in Washington before the country turned against this war." It was, Conyers noted, a cold day in Washington.

Thanks for reminding us.

The deep freeze was unusual for DC, but the speeches at Saturday’s mass rally had the air of same-old, same-old. International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) was the event’s main organizer — and the customary chaos and self-indulgence of the post-Vietnam left dominated. Waves of speakers — many focused on lefty pet causes such as Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal — got yet another five minutes on national TV.

Backstage, a mild frisson of celebrity-gawking reigned, as various journalists jostled to get Jessica Lange and Tyne Daly’s thoughts on the war. Patti Smith turned up well into the rally, an hour or so before she was due to sing, looking pinched and serious.

If new ground was broken on Saturday, it came in the form of a simple equation: the organizers’ myriad political and organizational flaws plus the bitter chill did not equal a dimming of the antiwar movement. Quite the opposite. The antiwar crowd proved stronger than both its organizers and the weather.

The crowd estimates for Saturday’s rally and march have been ambiguous at best. International ANSWER claimed 500,000. Various Washington, DC, law-enforcement officials set the number at 30,000 to 100,000. (My own personal estimate — having witnessed the surprising 100,000-person antiwar turnout on a glorious afternoon last October — was that Saturday’s march was slightly larger. Say 110,000 or so.)

But by any measure, it was a remarkable turnout. The crowd came in all shapes and sizes and flavors — young and old, men and women. Together, these individual voices and expressions drowned out the speeches with a simple message: the war on Iraq is wrong.

Brian Slagle — an artist from Frederick, Maryland — made gorgeous artsy signs out of natural wood and tree branches that he and a few of his friends carried to the march. One of his creations was a simple honeycomb-shaped silo with a wooden sign that read support farms, not arms.

"We have a group of artists that work together called the Blue Elephant," Slagle told me, "and a lot of our work is these kinds of materials. We thought it would be a good idea to come out and use some of our art to express the beauty of creation rather than destruction."

Others in DC on Saturday took their art to the market of the street corner. Jethro Heiko came down from Boston to hawk dark-blue T-shirts with a quote from President George W. Bush on the front (i made it clear to the world, that either you’re with us or with the enemy) and the word enemy emblazoned on the back of the shirt. The six folks vending T-shirts with Heiko in the cold could barely keep up with the demand.

"They’re selling great," enthused Heiko. "We sold a few hundred at the October protests here in DC, and on November 3, we sold about 50 at Boston protests." Heiko noted that a lot of his creativity has gone into making shirts to fight the Millennium Skyscraper and the destruction of Fenway Park, but "we’ve been doing more antiwar stuff lately."

Jonti Simmons spent four and a half hours traveling from Raleigh, North Carolina, to unveil her sign: dick and bush make love, not war. She nibbled a bit on her pierced lip when I asked her about her sign. "George Bush and Dick Cheney are creating a huge war for money," she said. "It’s an unnecessary war."

I PEE ON BUSHES — T-shirt worn by a German shepherd wandering through the January 18 rally site.

The laws of protest physics are even sharper and more clear-cut in the cold. A moving body is a warmer body. Marching beats yakking.

However, in preparing a route for the afternoon’s march, the organizers may well have outfoxed themselves. Rather than parade along the National Mall for the benefit of gawking tourists, International ANSWER plotted a course past the Capitol and the National Botanical Gardens, through a rapidly gentrifying strip of Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill and a more slowly reviving strip of business along Eighth Street SE to the city’s Navy Yard. The stated object was to pick up support along the way — yuppies grazing at Starbucks and Cos’, Saturday-afternoon customers of Eighth Street’s struggling pizza shops and Chinese take-out joints. But it appeared to have quite the opposite effect.

The march past the Capitol (and the wait in a huge bottleneck that formed at Independence Avenue SE and Washington Avenue SE) was a truly compelling sight. The street was jammed thick with protestors from the rally all the way to the crest of Capitol Hill and beyond. Drums were beating, chants were chanted. The crowd rippled with purpose and energy.

When the march finally turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue, however, things got fragmented. It was more carnival than peace march. Protestors bolted for hot coffee and snacks. Bars like the Hawk and Dove were filled up, with numerous protest signs stacked neatly outside against the wall. Counterculture met lunch counter — and the marching army scoured for grub to fill its belly.

The numbers of marchers dwindled slowly but steadily as the protest swung onto Eighth Street, past a tiny knot of 30 pro-war counter-protesters at I Street (outnumbered by the cops "protecting" them from the marchers), and then along M Street to the Navy Yard Metro stop — where a cordon of police cars and wooden barriers barred any further movement.

In addition to the numbing cold, there was a sense of anticlimax, heightened by the city’s refusal to let a sound system be erected at the Navy Yard. Nearby, private buses were revved up and ready to spirit many of the chilled marchers away. Others made a weary trudge back to the National Mall on foot in clumps of four or five, leaving a trail of discarded signs opposing the war behind them.

Earlier in the day, I talked with Allen "Boff" Whalley, guitarist and singer for the Leeds artist/anarchist collective Chumbawamba, which had an improbable 1997 hit with the bouncy anthem "Tubthumping." (Chumbawamba opened the rally with a sparkling new ditty against the impending war called "Jacob’s Ladder.")

I asked Whalley what he thought was the biggest difference between UK antiwar rallies and US antiwar rallies. "One of the main differences in Britain," he replied, "is that we have the big march — and then we have the big rally after the march."

On a day like today, that would have made a bit more sense.