After the Armistice

THE MONTHS THAT followed the signing of the Armistice were the
darkest in Gilbert Chesterton's life. Nothing but the immense natural
high spirits of the _New Witness_ group could have carried them
through the many years in which they cried their unheeded warnings to
England. But now as the war drew to an end a new note of optimism had
become audible. The Prussian menace was almost conquered. Our
soldiers would return and would bring with them the courage and
confidence of victors. They might overthrow the governing plutocracy
and build again an England of freedom and sanity. But one soldier did
not return--the one to whom this group looked for comradeship and
inspiration. On December 6, 1918, Cecil Chesterton died in hospital
in France.

"His courage was heroic, native, positive and equal," wrote Belloc,
"always at the highest potentiality of courage. . . ."

Gilbert wrote:

He lived long enough to march to the victory which was for him a
supreme vision of liberty and the light. The work which he put first
he did before he died. The work which he put second, but very near to
the other, he left for us to do. There are many of us who will
abandon many other things, and recognize no greater duty than to do
it.

This second work was the fight at home against corruption and for
freedom for the English people. It is impossible to remember Gilbert
Chesterton vividly and to write the word bitterness. It was rather
with a profound and burning indignation that he thought of his fellow
Englishmen who had fought and died--and then looked up and saw
"Marconi George" and "Marconi Isaacs," still rulers of the fate of
his country. Thus meditating he wrote an "Elegy in a Country
Churchyard."

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet.*

[* _Collected Poems_, p. 65.]

Strange irony of Cecil Chesterton's last weeks: his old enemy Godfrey
Isaacs brought an action for perjury against Sir Charles Hobhouse.
Both men's Counsel agreed and the judge stressed that perjury lay on
one side or the other. The case was given against Isaacs. He appealed
and his appea