The reaction against military discipline between the Armistice and the signing of peace delighted Siegfried and myself. Siegfried had taken a prominent part in the General Election which Lloyd George forced immediately after the Armistice, asking for a warrant for hanging the Kaiser and making a stern peace. He had been supporting Philip Snowden’s candidature on a pacifist platform and had faced a threatening civilian crowd, trusting that his three wound stripes and the mauve and white ribbon of his military cross would give him a privileged hearing. Snowden and Ramsay McDonald were perhaps the two most unpopular men in England at the end of the war. We now half hoped that there would be a general rising of ex-service men against the Coalition Government, but it was not to be. Once back in England the men were content to have a roof over their heads, civilian food, beer that was at least better than French beer, and enough blankets at night. They might find overcrowding in their homes, but this could be nothing to what they had been accustomed to; in France a derelict four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men. They had won the war and they were satisfied. They left the rest to Lloyd George. The only serious outbreak was at Rhyl, where there was a two days’ mutiny of Canadians with much destruction and several deaths. The signal for the outbreak was the cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks.’ When I was well enough to travel, Nancy, I and the baby went up to Harlech, where Nicholson had lent us his house to live in. We were there for a year. I discarded my uniform, having worn nothing else for four and a half years, and looked into my school trunk to see what I had to wear. There was only one suit that was not school uniform and I had grown out of that. I found it difficult to believe that the war was over. When I had last been a civilian I had been still at school, so I had no experience of independent civilian life. The Harlech villagers treated me with the greatest respect. At the Peace Day celebrations in the castle I was asked, as the senior of the officers present who had served overseas, to make a speech about the glorious dead. I have forgotten what I said, but it was in commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and was loudly cheered. I was still mentally and nervously organized for war; shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight even when Nancy was sharing it with me; strangers in day-time would assume the faces of friends who had been killed. When I was strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country I found that I could only see it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out tactical problems, planning how I would hold the Northern Artro valley against an attack from the sea, or where I would put a Lewis-gun if I were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog farm from the brow of the hill, and what would be the best position for the rifle-grenade section. I still