300 ENGLISHSAGA

promises and reckoning that they were in a tolerably snug hole
and in a harsh world would find no better, made no hurry to
doff their khaki and stayed where they were—so long as an
indulgent Treasury would let them. The remainder evaporated.
For four years they had placed duty and fidelity to comrades
above self: now, the bugles having sounded armistice, there was
a not unnatural reaction. Number One came first.

So the fighting man received the thanks of his country, a suit
of civilian clothes, a pair of medals and a small cash gratuity.
In the case o£ a private soldier it amounted to the equivalent
of a few weeks wages. In the case of an officer it was more liberal
and was often sufficient to purchase a small chicken farm or a
wayside garage and car.

Unless he had a disability pension—which carried with it the
inconvenience of a disability—that was all. Like the Pied Piper,
the man who, a little while before, had been acclaimed the
saviour of his country, was given a matter of something to put
in his poke and told by the Mayor and Corporation that any more
was out of the question. The sacrifice of the past belonged to the
past. It was already history.

Another history had begun—the history, as we now know, of
the twenty years between two wars. It started in exhaustion and
hope; it was to end in disillusion and disaster. The nineteen
twenties and thirties are too near to be seen as history, and all
narrative of them is still only conjecture. Surveying them from
1940 the historian is like a man looking back on a mountain
range which he has just left. The peaks which are nearest still
dominate the others: he cannot see the range in perspective nor
perhaps even glimpse at all the highest peaks of all. He must
travel farther before their true outline, so simple when viewed
. from far horizons, can be comprehended.

The soldiers who came back to the land they had defended
greeted the peace in the mood of their dream. They supposed
that they were going to devote the lives so miraculously spared
them to the rebuilding of a better England, worthy of the men
who had died for it. But they and the civilian majority to whom
they returned—who, lacking their revolutionary spiritual
experience, had never shared their vision—were almost at once
overwhelmed by the necessity of forcing a living out of the
economic system in which-they found themselves. Few of them
had any time or opportunity for political or philosophical