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 pride was strongest. They had grown up to the belief that a soldier is generally killed or wounded, and that he is glad to take the risk, or, if not, ought to be, as part of the most exciting and enjoyable game of war. Women had filled many of the jobs which formerly were the exclusive possession of men, and the men coming back looked at these legions of women clerks, tram conductors, ticket collectors, munition workers, plough-girls, and motor drivers with the brooding thought that they, the men, had been ousted from their places. A new class had arisen out of the whirlpool of social upheaval. The profiteers, in a large way of business, had prospered exceedingly out of the supply and demand of massacre. The profiteer’s wife clothed herself in furs and jewels. The profiteer’s daughters were dancing by night and sleeping by day. The farmers and the shopkeepers had made a good thing out of war. They liked war so long as they were untouched by air-raids or not afflicted by boys who came back blind or crippled. They had always been optimists. They were optimists now, and claimed a share in the merit of the victory that had been won by the glorious watchword of “business as usual.” They hoped the terms of peace would be merciless upon the enemy, and they demanded the Kaiser’s head as a pleasant sacrifice adding spice to the great banquet of victory celebrations.

Outwardly, England was gay and prosperous and light-spirited. It was only by getting away from the seething crowds in the streets, from the dancing crowds, and the theatre crowds, and the shopping crowds, that men came face to face with private and hidden tragedy. In small houses or big, there were women who had lost their men and were listless and joyless, the mothers of only sons who did not come back with the demobilised tide, and the sweethearts of boys who would never fulfil the promise that had given hope in life to lonely girlhood. There was a new rich, but there was also a new poor, and people on small fixed incomes or with little nest-eggs of capital on which they scraped out life found themselves reduced to desperate straits by the soaring of prices and the burden of taxation. Underneath the surface joy of a victorious people there was bitterness to which victory was a mockery and a haggard grief at the cost of war in precious blood. But the bitterness smouldered without any flame of passion, and grief nagged at people’s hearts silently.

Many of the men who came back were in a strange mood—restless, morbid, neurotic. Their own people did not understand them. They could not understand themselves. They had hated war, most of them, but this peace seemed flat and unprofitable to their souls. All purpose and meaning seemed suddenly to have gone out of life. Perhaps it was the narrowness of English home-life. Men who had travelled to far places of the world, who had seen the ways of foreign people, and had been part of a great drama, found themselves back again in a little house, closed in and isolated by the traditions of English individualism, so that often the next-door neighbour is a stranger. They had a sense of being suffocated. They could not stay indoors with the old pleasure in a pipe or a book by the fireside or a chat with mother or wife. Often they would wander out on the chance of meeting some of the “old pals,” or, after a heavy sigh, say, “Oh, God!... let’s go to a theatre or a ‘movie’ show!” The theatres were crammed with men seeking distraction, yet bored with their pleasures and relapsing into a deeper moodiness afterwards. Wives complained that their husbands had “changed.” Their characters had hardened and their tempers were frayed, so that they were strangely irritable and given to storms of rage about nothing at all. It was frightening.... There was an epidemic of violence and of horrible sensual crimes with women victims, ending often in suicide. There were mob riots by demobilised soldiers or soldiers still waiting in camps for demobilisation. Police stations were stormed and wrecked and policemen killed by bodies of men who had been heroes in the war and now fought like savages against their fellow-citizens. Some of them pleaded guilty in court and made queer statements about an utter ignorance of their own actions after the disorder had begun. It seemed as though they had returned to the psychology of that war when men, doped with rum, or drunk with excitement, had leapt over the parapet and remembered nothing more of a battle until they found themselves panting in an enemy trench or lying wounded on a stretcher. It was a dangerous kind of psychology in civil life.

Labourers back at work in factories or mines or railway stations or dockyards, after months or years of the soldier-life, did not return to their old conditions or their old pay with diligence and thankfulness. They demanded higher wages to meet the higher cost of life and after that a margin for pleasure, and after that shorter hours for higher pay and less work in shorter hours. If their demands were not granted they downed tools and said: “What about it?” Strikes became frequent and general, and at a time when the cost of war was being added up to frightful totals of debt which could only be reduced by immense production the worker slacked off, or suspended his labours, and said: “Who gets the profits of my sweat?... I want a larger share.” He was not frightened of a spectre that was scaring all people of property and morality in the Western world. The spectre of Bolshevism, red-eyed, dripping with blood, proclaiming anarchy as the new gospel, did not cause a shiver to the English working man. He said, “What has Russia to do with me? I’m English. I have fought this war to save England, I have done the job; now then, where’s my reward?”

Men who looked round for a living while they lived on an unemployment dole that was not good enough for their new desires became sullen when they returned home night after night with the same old story of “Nothing doing.” The women were still clinging to their jobs. They had earned their independence by good work in war-time. They hated the thought of going back to little homes to be household drudges, dependent for pocket-money on father and brothers. They had not only tasted liberty; they had made themselves free of the large world. They had proved their quality and strength. They were as good as men, and mostly better. Why should they slink back to the little narrow rut of life? But the men said, “Get out. Give us back our jobs.”

It was hard on the officer boys—hardest of all on them. They had gone straight from school to the war, and had commanded men twice as old as themselves and drawn good pay for pocket-money as first lieutenants, captains, even majors of air squadrons and tank battalions. They had gained immense experience in the arts and crafts of war, and that experience was utterly useless in peace.

“My dear young man,” said the heads of prosperous businesses who had been out to “beat the Boche,” even though they sacrificed their only sons or all their sons (with heroic courage!), “you have been wasting your time. You have no qualifications whatever for a junior clerkship in this office. On the contrary, you have probably contracted habits of idleness and inaccuracy which would cause a lot of trouble. This vacancy is being filled by a lad who has not been vitiated by military life, and has nothing to unlearn. Good-morning!”

And the young officers, after a statement like that, went home with swear-words learnt in Flanders, and said: “That’s the reward of patriotism, eh? Well, we seem to have been fooled pretty badly. Next time we shan’t be so keen to strew the fields of death with our fresh little corpses.”

These words, all this murmur from below, did not reach those who sat in high places. They were wonderfully complacent, except when outbreaks of violence or the cessation of labour shocked them with a sense of danger. They arranged peace celebrations before the peace, victory marches when the fruits of victory were as bitter as Dead Sea fruit in the mouths of those who saw the ruin of the world; and round a council table in Paris statesmen of Europe abandoned all the ideals for which the war had been fought by humble men and killed the hopes of all those who had looked to them as the founders of a new era of humanity and common sense.