“Are you tired of me?” said the young wife, wistfully. “Aren’t you glad to be home?”
“It’s a dull sort of life,” said some of them.
The boys, unmarried, hung about street-corners, searched for their pals, formed clubs where they smoked incessantly, and talked in an aimless way.
Then began the search for work. Boys without training looked for jobs with wages high enough to give them a margin for amusement, after the cost of living decently had been reckoned on the scale of high prices, mounting higher and higher. Not so easy as they had expected. The girls were clinging to their jobs, would not let go of the pocket-money which they had spent on frocks. Employers favored girl labor, found it efficient and, on the whole, cheap. Young soldiers who had been very skilled with machine-guns, trench-mortars, hand-grenades, found that they were classed with the ranks of unskilled labor in civil life. That was not good enough. They had fought for their country. They had served England. Now they wanted good jobs with short hours and good wages. They meant to get them. And meanwhile prices were rising in the shops. Suits of clothes, boots, food, anything, were at double and treble the price of prewar days. The profiteers were rampant. They were out to bleed the men who had been fighting. They were defrauding the public with sheer, undisguised robbery, and the government did nothing to check them. England, they thought, was rotten all through.
Who cared for the men who had risked their lives and bore on their bodies the scars of war? The pensions doled out to blinded soldiers would not keep them alive. The consumptives, the gassed, the paralyzed, were forgotten in institutions where they lay hidden from the public eye. Before the war had been over six months “our heroes,” “our brave boys in the trenches” were without preference in the struggle for existence.
Employers of labor gave them no special consideration. In many offices they were told bluntly (as I know) that they had “wasted” three or four years in the army and could not be of the same value as boys just out of school. The officer class was hardest hit in that way. They had gone straight from the public schools and universities to the army. They had been lieutenants, captains, and majors in the air force, or infantry battalions, or tanks, or trench-mortars, and they had drawn good pay, which was their pocket-money. Now they were at a loose end, hating the idea of office-work, but ready to knuckle down to any kind of decent job with some prospect ahead. What kind of job? What knowledge had they of use in civil life? None. They scanned advertisements, answered likely invitations, were turned down by elderly men who said: “I’ve had two hundred applications. And none of you young gentlemen from the army are fit to be my office-boy.” They were the same elderly men who had said: “We’ll fight to the last ditch. If I had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the cause of liberty and justice.”
Elderly officers who had lost their businesses for their country’s sake, who with a noble devotion had given up everything to “do their bit,” paced the streets searching for work, and were shown out of every office where they applied for a post. I know one officer of good family and distinguished service who hawked round a subscription-book to private houses. It took him more courage than he had needed under shellfire to ring the bell and ask to see “the lady of the house.” He thanked God every time the maid handed back his card and said, “Not at home.” On the first week’s work he was four pounds out of pocket … Here and there an elderly officer blew out his brains. Another sucked a rubber tube fastened to the gas-jet … It would have been better if they had fallen on the field of honor.
Where was the nation’s gratitude for the men who had fought and died, or fought and lived? Was it for this reward in peace that nearly a million of our men gave up their lives? That question is not my question. It is the question that was asked by millions of men in England in the months that followed the armistice, and it was answered in their own brains by a bitterness and indignation out of which may be lit the fires of the revolutionary spirit.
At street-corners, in tramway cars, in teashops where young men talked at the table next to mine I listened to conversations not meant for my ears, which made me hear in imagination and afar off (yet not very far, perhaps) the dreadful rumble of revolution, the violence of mobs led by fanatics. It was the talk, mostly, of demobilized soldiers. They asked one another, “What did we fight for?” and then other questions such as, “Wasn’t this a war for liberty?” or, “We fought for the land, didn’t we? Then why shouldn’t we share the land?” Or, “Why should we be bled white by profiteers?”
They mentioned the government, and then laughed in a scornful way.
“The government,” said one man, “is a conspiracy against the people. All its power is used to protect those who grow fat on big jobs, big trusts, big contracts. It used us to smash the German Empire in order to strengthen and enlarge the British Empire for the sake of those who grab the oil-wells, the goldfields, the minerals, and the markets of the world.”
VIII
Out of such talk revolution is born, and revolution will not be averted by pretending that such words are not being spoken and that such thoughts are not seething among our working-classes. It will only be averted by cutting at the root of public suspicion, by cleansing our political state of its corruption and folly, and by a clear, strong call of noble-minded men to
