The senior general need not have feared. The generous youth of the war, when England could carry, with no air of burlesque, the flag of St. George, was pretty well gone. The authentic flame might still flicker on in the minds of a few tired soldiers and disregarded civilians. Otherwise it was as dead as the half-million of good fellows whom it had fired four years ago, whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating under so many shining and streaming square miles of wet Flanders and Picardy. They gone, their war had lived into a kind of dotage ruled by mean fears and desires. At home our places of honour were brown with shirkers masquerading in the dead men's clothes and licensed by careless authorities to shelter themselves from all danger under the titles of Colonel, Major, and Captain. Nimble politicians were rushing already to coin into votes for themselves--"the men who won the war"--the golden memory of the dead before the living could come home and make themselves heard. Sounds of a general election, the yells of political cheap-jacks, the bawling of some shabby promise, capped by some shabbier bawl, made their way out to Cologne. "This way, gents, for the right sort of whip to give Germans!" "Rats, gentlemen, rats! Don't listen to _him_. Leave it to me and I'll chastise 'em with scorpions." "I'll devise the brave punishments for them." "Ah, but I'll sweat you more money out of the swine." That was the gist of the din that most of the gramophones of the home press gave out on the Rhine. Each little demagogue had got his little pots of pitch and sulphur on sale for the proper giving of hell to the enemy whom he had not faced. Germany lay at our feet, a world's wonder of downfall, a very Lucifer, fallen, broken, bereaved beyond all the retributive griefs which Greek tragedy shows you afflicting the great who were insolent, wilful, and proud. But it was not enough for our small epicures of revenge. They wanted to twist the enemy's wrists, where he lay bound, and to run pins into his eyes. And they had the upper hand of us now. The soldiers could only look on while the scurvy performance dragged itself out till the meanest of treaties was signed at Versailles. "Fatal Versailles!" as General Sir Ian Hamilton said for us all; "Not a line--not one line in your treaty to show that those boys (our friends who were dead) had been any better than the emperors; not one line to stand for the kindliness of England; not one word to bring back some memory of the generosity of her sons!"