sometimes came great
stretches of tall, yellow-green grass, wheel-high, sometimes a little
green patch of returning cultivation drew nearer for an hour or so,
sometimes the blundering, toilsome passage of a torrent interrupted our
slow onward march. And constantly one saw long lines of torn and twisted
barbed wire stretching away and away, and here and there one found
archipelagoes as it were in this dry ocean of the skeletons of cattle,
and there were places where troops had halted and their scattered
ration-tins shone like diamonds in the sunshine. Occasionally I struck
talk, some returning prisoner, some group of discharged British soldiers
become carpenters or bricklayers again and making their pound a day by
the work of rebuilding; always everyone was ready to expatiate upon the
situation. Usually, however, I was alone, thinking over this immense now
vanished tornado of a war and this equally astonishing work of healing
that was following it.

I became keenly interested in all this great business, and thought at
first of remaining indefinitely in Africa. Repatriation was presently
done and finished. I had won Milner's good opinion, and he was anxious
for me to go on working in relation to the labor difficulty that rose
now more and more into prominence behind the agricultural re-settlement.
But when I faced that I found myself in the middle of a tangle
infinitely less simple than putting back an agricultural population upon
its land.

Sec. 5

For the first time in my life I was really looking at the social
fundamental of Labor.

There is something astonishingly naive in the unconsciousness with which
people of our class float over the great economic realities. All my life
I had been hearing of the Working Classes, of Industrialism, of Labor
Problems and the Organization of Labor; but it was only now in South
Africa, in this chaotic, crude illuminating period of putting a smashed
and desolated social order together again, that I perceived these
familiar phrases represented something--something stupendously real.
There were, I began to recognize, two sides to civilization; one
traditional, immemorial, universal, the side of the homestead, the side
I had been seeing and restoring; and there was another, ancient, too,
but never universal, as old at least as the mines of Syracuse and the
building of the pyramids, the side that came into view when I emerged
from the dusty station and sighted the squat shanties an