no noise but the twitter
of small birds and the night wind in the tops of the beeches.

In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had
been fighting for, what we all were fighting for. It was peace, deep
and holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which
would endure when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares. It
was more; for in that hour England first took hold of me. Before my
country had been South Africa, and when I thought of home it had been
the wide sun-steeped spaces of the veld or some scented glen of the
Berg. But now I realized that I had a new home. I understood what a
precious thing this little England was, how old and kindly and
comforting, how wholly worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of
her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us. I knew what
it meant to be a poet, though for the life of me I could not have made
a line of verse. For in that hour I had a prospect as if from a hilltop
which made all the present troubles of the road seem of no account. I
saw not only victory after war, but a new and happier world after
victory, when I should inherit something of this English peace and wrap
myself in it till the end of my days.

Very humbly and quietly, like a man walking through a cathedral, I went
down the hill to the Manor lodge, and came to a door in an old
red-brick facade, smothered in magnolias which smelt like hot lemons in
the June dusk. The car from the inn had brought on my baggage, and
presently I was dressing in a room which looked out on a water-garden.
For the first time for more than a year I put on a starched shirt and a
dinner-jacket, and as I dressed I could have sung from pure
lightheartedness. I was in for some arduous job, and sometime that
evening in that place I should get my marching orders. Someone would
arrive--perhaps Bullivant--and read me the riddle. But whatever it was,
I was ready for it, for my whole being had found a new purpose. Living
in the trenches, you are apt to get your horizon narrowed down to the
front line of enemy barbed wire on one side and the nearest rest
billets on the other. But now I seemed to see beyond the fog to a happy
country.

High-pitched voices greeted my ears as I came down the broad staircase,
voices which scarcely accorded with the panelled walls and the austere
family portraits; and when I found my hostesses in the hall I thought
their looks still less in keeping with t