The conductor had fought through the war and become a Serjeant-Major: "But that's not to say that I liked it." In reply to some patriotic platitude he burst out fiercely: "I don't see that it is my country. I don't own a thing in it."
Before they returned, the prevailing philosophy asserted that they would never return. A queer unrest would be laid on them by their experience. They would loathe and despise their old occupations. They would never settle down to weekly wage-earning in the orderly ennui of man's ordinary peaceful day. They would never be found serving ribbons to ladies in drapers' establishments, following the plough in the bleak, lonely, winter fields, tending the machines in the vast factories, adding up other men's accounts in the cellars of great city offices by the aid of artificial light. But the period of possible upheaval has passed. All these prophecies have been dispelled. The great armies have melted away like snow in summer. The fierce interest of each of the majority was not contempt for his old job, but fear lest he should be done out of it. All the experience of incredible suffering, danger and upheaval in remote States and territories has vanished like a dream. The broken ends of normal life have joined together again, as though the interval had never been. And amid those now engaged in the selling of ribbons or the speeding of the plough or the minding of machines or the work of adding and copying other men's business, are men who once held the Ypres salient, or stormed through the Hindenburg line, or marched into Bulgaria or Bagdad, or bivouacked outside Jerusalem, or, in even more remote enterprise, somewhere "beyond the stormy Hebrides" had "visited the bottom of the monstrous world."
This return of men trained in the art of war to the pursuits of peace is perhaps even more wonderful than the enlistment of untrained men of peace in the machine of war. It may be that the tranquillity is temporary only, the finding of a place of refuge from risk and discomfort, and the fear of an alternative ruin. The soldier who has
