e tired well nigh to death in
body, mind and soul. The battle of the Somme still grumbled night and
day behind them. But for those who emerged a certain amount of leave was
opened.

It was like a plunge into forgotten days. War seemed to end at the
French quayside. Staff officers, brigadier-generals, captains, privates
and lance-corporals--they were all just Englishmen off to their homes.
They jostled one another up the gangway--I never heard a rough word in
that dense crowd. They lay side by side outside the saloon of the
Channel turbine steamer. A corporal with his head half in the doorway,
too seasick to know that it was fair in the path of a major-general's
boots; a general Staff officer and a French captain with their backs
propped against the oak panelling and their ribs against somebody else's
baggage; a subaltern of engineers with his head upon their feet; a
hundred others packed on the stairs and up to the deck; and a horrible
groaning from the direction of the lavatories--it was truly the happiest
moment in all their lives.

The crossing passed like a dream--scarcely noticed. Seven weeks of
strain can leave you too tired almost to think. A journey in a
comfortable railway compartment through prim, hazy English fields, the
carriage blue with smoke from the pipes of its inhabitants (a Canadian,
three or four Englishmen and a couple of Australians), has gone almost
unremembered. As the custom is in England, they were mostly ensconced
behind their newspapers, although there is more geniality in an English
railway carriage to-day than was usual before the war. But most people
in that train, I think, were too tired for conversation.

It was the coming into London that left such an impression as some of us
will never forget. Some of us knew London well before the war. It is
the one great city in the world where you never saw the least trace of
corporate emotion. It divides itself off into districts for the rich and
districts for the poor, and districts for all the grades in between the
two, which are the separate layers in the big, frowning edifice of
British society; they may have had some sort of feeling for their class
or their profession--the lawyer proud of his Inns of Court and of the
tradition of the London Bar, the doctor proud of London schools of
medicine, and the Thames engineer even proud of the work that is turned
out upon the Thames. But there was no more common feeling or activity in
the people of L