The recovered memory of that gesture of careless confidence would be a mirror in which he could see reflected the significance of the last two years. He would see himself two years earlier, eager and exuberant, tired of army life, anxious for a return to freedom, proudly assured of his capacity to subdue the future. He would remember how his one idea in those days had been to rush away from camp. For the sake of eleven hours in town he had caught a five o’clock train from Grantham on Sunday morning and had not got back to bed till three o’clock. The journey had cost him twenty-seven shillings. His first question on joining a new unit had been, “What chance of leave?” No matter how far from town, how long, how expensive, how uncomfortable the journey--he had been prepared to make it: anything to get back to civil life. And he would see himself now in this aftermath of turmoil, indifferent, passive, dumbly satisfied. He had hardly considered the question of leave. It would cost him over a pound to get to town; it wasn’t worth it. There would be very little for him to do when he got there. A theatre, a dance, a dinner. It was pleasanter on the whole to sit and read _Blackwood’s_ in the mess and play bridge and walk across the cliffs to Folkestone. He had nothing in particular that he wanted to do. He was well enough where he was. The old zest for life had gone, pilfered from him by two years of frustration and disappointment and foiled endeavour. And the realisation of it would be brought to him by the discovery of a crumpled memo., a thing intrinsically worthless, but the focus, the rallying-point of much hard circumstance. And thus, indeed, it was that, to one at least of many thousands, was brought fully and bitterly the significance of that post-war period, of those treacherous, deceiving years that had glittered so bravely on the horizon, that had looked so warm and hospitable, that had promised so much and had brought so little. 1919 was the year of disillusion, not merely of a political disillusion, of disgust at broken faith and forgotten promises and personal treacheries, but of a profounder, subtler disenchantment, of an awakened sense of life’s deception.