BOOK THREE: BUILDERS OF PEACE
I
Those of us who had been in exile during the years
of war and now returned to peace found that England
had changed in our absence. We did not know
this new England. We did not understand its spirit or
its people. Nor did they understand the men who came
back from the many fronts of war, by hundreds of
thousands, now that demobilisation had become a spate
after murmurings that were loud with the menace of
revolt from men who had been long patient.
These "revenants," the men who came back out of the Terror, were so many Rip van Winkles (of a youthful kind, looking round for the companions of their boyhood, going to old places, touching old stones, sitting by the same fireside, but with a sense of ghostliness. A new generation had arrived since 1914. The children had become boys and girls, the girls had grown into womanhood precociously. There were legions of "flappers" in London and other big cities, earning good wages in Government offices and factories, spending most of their money on the adornment of their prettiness, self-reliant, audacious, out for the fun of life, and finding it. The tragedy of the war had not touched them. It had been a great "lark" to them. They accepted the slaughter of their brothers or their fathers light-heartedly, after a few bursts of tears and a period of sentiment in which
