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For a month we remained meeting trains, escorting parties to camps, sorting clothing, and driving herds of the demobilised through the intricacies of a machine called the 'Delouser, until the arriving trainloads decreased, dwindled, and finally stopped.

It is to be hoped that when the troops are demobilised, and the Small Holdings Acts are put into fuller operation, the number of small holdings will be increased. A population of independent yeomen is the best reservoir of the manhood of any country. No finer race has existed than the statesmen who cultivated the small farms among the hills of Cumberland and Westmorland.

In March several large drafts of officers and men, to replace all those who had been, or would be, demobilised, joined the Battalion, which, after a pause at Le Tréport and some leave, sailed for Egypt. Thither my story does not follow it. When peace was signed, the cadre of the Battalion had not returned to Oxford.

In 1587 Drake succeeded in stopping the Spanish invasion by such a counter-attack on the Cadiz division of the Armada while it was still unmobilised. In 1667 the Dutch achieved a similar success against our Chatham division when it was demobilised and undefended, and thereby probably secured rather more favourable terms of peace.

While the "gratuity money" lasted life went merrily enough, but when the last cheque had been cashed, and the grim reality that rations had ceased and Q. M. Stores were not longer available thrust itself vividly into the face of the demobilised veteran, and when after experiencing in job hunting varying degrees of humiliation the same veteran made the startling and painful discovery that for his wares of heroic self-immolation, of dogged endurance done up in khaki, there was no demand in the bloodless but none the less strenuous conflict of living; and that other discovery, more disconcerting, that he was not the man he had been in pre-war days and thought himself still to be, but quite another, then he was ready for one of two alternatives, to surrender to the inevitable dictum that after all life was really not worth a fight, more particularly if it could be sustained without one, or, to fling his hat into the Bolshevist ring, ready for the old thing, war war against the enemies of civilisation and his own enemies, against those who possessed things which he very much desired but which for some inexplicable cause he was prevented from obtaining.

Our duties were now threefold to clean up France, to get demobilised, and to amuse ourselves in our spare time. Cleaning up was a gigantic and not very pleasant task, for it meant filling up shell holes, collecting empty bully-beef tins, and generally becoming scavengers.

Do you want to be demobilised?" he asked humorously. "That's about the size of it," said Crewe. "I don't want to be in anything fresh, and I certainly don't want to be in this " "What?" "In this Maisie White business," said Crewe doggedly. "Let Pinto do his own dirty work." "My dirty work too," said the colonel. "But I reckon you've overlooked one important fact."

He was a fresh, stoutish young Englishman in khaki, Julia's husband, Robert Cunningham, a lieutenant about to be demobilised, when he would become a sculptor once more. He drank red wine in large throatfuls, and his eyes grew a little moist. The room was hot and subdued, everyone was silent. "I say," said Robert suddenly, from the rear "anybody have a drink? Don't you find it rather hot?"

And I will add a last touch, within my personal knowledge, when in January, at Montreuil, in a room at G.H.Q., an officer of A. described to me how he had recently interviewed a gathering of women belonging to Queen Mary's Auxiliary Army Corps, and had asked them whether they wished to be immediately demobilised. Almost without exception the answer came: "Not while we can be useful to the Army."

Juke was demobilised early too, commenced clergyman again, got a job as curate in a central London parish, and lived in rooms in a slummy street. He and I saw a good deal of each other. One day in March, Juke and I were lunching together at the 1917 Club, when Johnny came in and joined us. He looked rather queer, and amused too. He didn't tell us anything till we were having coffee.