The men, once again, did not put it in that way. They did not miss anything that most of them could have described. They only felt a vacancy, an unspecified void, like the want of some unknown great thing in their generals' minds and in the characters of their rulers at home. The chaplain's tobacco was all to the good; so was the civil tongue that he kept in his head; so were all the good turns that he did. But, when it came to religion, were these things "all there was to it"? Had the churches really not "got hold of something," with all their enormous deposits of stone and mortar and clerical consequence? So, in his own way, the army chaplain, too, became a tributary brook feeding the general reservoir of disappointment and mistrust that was steadily filled by the surface drainage of all the higher ground of our British social landscape under the dirty weather of the war. CHAPTER VI 'WARE POLITICIANS I When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pay, his food, his place and mode of living were fixed from on high. He might not even decide whether he should remain a soldier or be turned, say, into a miner. If the wisdom that sat up aloft put him down for a draft to a tunnelling company, to earth he went. He had ceased to be Economic Man, the being whom we were brought up to regard as causing the world to go round by making a bee-line to the best pay available. Now he was ex-Economic Man, or Economic Man popped off all the hooks that had fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who least admire it. No one was left to say of a job any longer that you might "take it or leave it," for leaving was barred. You could not be called a wage-slave, for you got no wages to speak of. You had become a true "proletarian" under a pretty big-fisted dictatorship. It might not be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about as sweet by one name as another when it levers you out of bed before dawn or ties you up to the wheel of a gun for cutting a job that irks you. Dr. Johnson declined to attempt to settle degrees of precedence between a flea and a louse. It is as hard to decide between the charms of a "sanitary fatigue" when done for our War Office and when done for Mr. Lenin.