Three weeks later a trade dispute brought England nearer to revolution than it had been for a hundred years. The regular reserve was recalled to the colours and Evan Miller found himself at Shorncliffe reporting at orderly room his existence and unimportance; curiously easy, he would discover, the re-adoption, after an absence of two years, of the formalities of military life; curious, too, how stabilising became, after the casual nature of town engagements, the fixed routine of the parade-ground and the mess. But that would be personal and incidental. The significance, the universally applicable significance of that six weeks’ return to uniform would lie in the chance discovery in the pocket of an old tunic of a piece of paper, placed there hurriedly and forgotten, two years before. There would be nothing romantic about that piece of paper. A memo, from battalion dated the 17th of February 1919. “Please note,” it said, “that you were passed fit for active service by the Medical Board at Dover, the 3rd of December 1918.” Formal enough: to anyone but himself, meaningless enough. The sort of thing with which a dug-out would have become quickly littered had he not possessed a servant. But its discovery would be, for him, that inevitable, that unpremeditated moment, at which every story-teller is aiming and so rarely reaching. He would stand in the centre of the room, the piece of paper in his hand, and before his eyes, and before his brain, the details of the circumstances under which he had last seen it. In the early spring of 1919 a couple of months’ leave had been granted to all regular officers, and a very great number of them had taken advantage of that leave to file their application for transference to the reserve of officers. It was on the last morning before his leave that he had found waiting for him in the ante-room that memo. from battalion correcting a mistake he had made in his application for leave. He had laughed gaily, confidently. They could send their memos. if they liked, he had told himself. To-morrow he would be in London, and if, during two months, he could achieve no compromise with the Whitehall mandarins he had no right to call himself a soldier. And he pushed the note away into his pocket.