He had been always perhaps a little "queer," as we are most of us
"queer" somewhere, and the horrors of that horrible war undoubtedly
affected him. Finally he lost, just a week before the armistice, one of
his best friends, Ross McLean, a loss from which he certainly never
recovered.
I have now, I think, brought together all the incidents that can throw
any kind of light upon the final scene. In the middle of 1919 he
retired from the army, and it was from this time to his death that I
saw something of him. He went back to his old home at Horton's in Duke
street, and as I was living at that time in Marlborough Chambers in
Jermyn street we were in easy reach of one another. The early part of
1920 was a "queer time." People had become, I imagine, pretty well
accustomed to realizing that those two wonderful hours of Armistice day
had not ushered in the millennium any more than those first marvellous
moments of the Russian revolution produced it.
Every one has always hoped for the millennium, but the trouble since
the days of Adam and Eve has always been that people have such
different ideas as to what exactly that millennium shall be. The plain
facts of the matter simply were that during 1919 and 1920 the world
changed from a war of nations to a war of classes, that inevitable
change that history has always shown follows on great wars.
As no one ever reads history, it was natural enough that there should
be a great deal of disappointment and a great deal of astonishment. Men
at the head of affairs who ought to have known better cried aloud, "How
ungrateful these people are, after all we've done for them!" and the
people underneath shouted that everything had been muddled and spoiled
and that they would have done much better had they been at the head of
affairs, an assertion for which there was no sort of justification.
Wilbraham, being a sentimentalist and an idealist, suffered more from
this general disappointment than most people. He had had wonderful
relations with the men under him throughout the war. He had never tired
of recounting how marvelously they had behaved, what heroes they were,
and that it was they who would pull the country together.
At the same time he had a naive horror of bolshevism and anything
unconstitutional, and he watched the transformation of his "brave lads"
into discontented and idle workmen with dismay and deep distress. He
used sometimes to come around to my rooms and talk to me; he had the
bewildered air of a man walking in his sleep.
He made the fatal mistake of reading all the papers, and he took in the
Daily Herald in order that he might see "what it was these fellows had
to say for themselves."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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