f the approach of winter.
It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent
nomads to realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance
existed no longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently
they held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when the
first snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
story grows grimmer....

If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to England, it
is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of fear-embittered
householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery, driving the starving
wanderers from every faltering place upon the roads lest they should
die inconveniently and reproachfully on the doorsteps of those who had
failed to urge them onward....

The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March, after
urgent representations from the provisional government at Orleans that
they could be supported no longer. They seem to have been a fairly
well-behaved, but highly parasitic force throughout, though Barnet is
clearly of opinion that they did much to suppress sporadic brigandage
and maintain social order. He came home to a famine-stricken country,
and his picture of the England of that spring is one of miserable
patience and desperate expedients. The country was suffering much more
than France, because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which
it had hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid off. On
the way thither they saw four men hanging from the telegraph posts by
the roadside, who had been hung for stealing swedes. The labour refuges
of Kent, he discovered, were feeding their crowds of casual wanderers on
bread into which clay and sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a
shortage of even such fare as that. He himself struck across country to
Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round London,
and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one of the wireless
assistants at the central station and given regular rations. The station
stood in a commanding position on the chalk hill that overlooks the town
from the east....

Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless cipher
messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and there it was that
the Brissago proclamation of the end of the war and the establishment of
a world government c