CHAPTER NINE
Crumbling Heritage

If England was what England seems,
An' not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass an' paint,
S0w quick we'd chuck 'Er! But she aidt\

Kipling.

the war ended the simple fighting men who had
won it thought that a new world was about to be built
on the ruins of the old. They looked across a desolate
landscape of charred ruins and ghostly tree trunks—the very
field of Golgotha and dead-men's skulls. Between them and the
life they had known before the war was an unbridgeable gulf of
scalding tears and the blood of dead comrades and of incommuni-
cable agony.

They had no clear idea of the exact form the world they felt
they had earned should take. It was a romantic rather than a
concrete conception, and one that, unspoken, had sometimes
floated through the smoky air of battalion concerts when some
prosaic enough looking singer regaled his comrades with "A
Long Long Trail" or "Roses are blooming in Picardy," homely
tunes which no one who heard them in that setting ever heard
again without a forewarning of tears. But being an English
dream, it was curious how it reverted to ideas of roses round the
door and nightingales singing and the sound of the rooster

a-----the one that used 'ter

Wake me up at four a.m."

For most of the rough, hard-tried men who listened'approv-
ingly and in the choruses sent their very souls humming into the
rafters, hailed from scenes fax removed from the rustic para-
phernalia of their imaginary heaven. In the remote days of 1914
before they joined up, they would certainly not have thanked
any Utopian visionary who had shifted them from the crowded,
noisy life of the street corner and planted them down in a country
cottage or woo3land glade. But somehow after four years of

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