CHAPTER  X
Way of Redemption
*In the city set upon slime and loam
They cry in their parliament   Who goes home**
And there comes no answer in arch or dome.
For none in the city of graves goes home.
Yet these shall perish and understand,
For God has pity on this great land.
Men^that are men again; who goes home?
Tocsin and trumpeter! Who goes home?
For there's blood on the field and blood on the foam
And blood on the body when Man goes home.
And a voice valedictory . . . Who is for Victory?
Who is for Liberty? Who goes home?
£. JL Chesterton.
_b
ut what, puzzled men with long but hazy memories
asked, had happened? Why had the soldier who had over-
come so much failed after the peace to achieve those simple
and elementary hopes for which the dead had died? The things
he wanted in those far days in the trenches had seemed so reason-
able, and for a rich country so easy. A tithe of the effort and
cost which Britain had expended in defeating Germany could
have made her a,different land, offering good homes for all,
ample pleasant places unsullied by the wastage of competitive
industry, an assurance to every man of work in which he could
take pleasure and pride and by which he could earn a modest
but secure livelihood.
All over tortured Europe other men who had suffered and
bled had asked the same things. They also had had their dream,
conceived in an hour of blinding and agonising revelation-
Frenchmen and Italians; vanquished Russians, Germans and
Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Turks; Serbs, Belgians,
Romanians, Greeks, Jews, Poles and Czechs, They too had
wanted, each in the form dictated by their racial and national
pasts, the same elemental human satisfaction: the home of their
own, the craft of their choice, the bit of land—status, security,
creation and continuity. God who had made man in His own
3*5