Now no one can pretend that this sacred union has really survived the War. The extraordinary contrast between the disunity with which we finish war and the unity with which we begin it, is a disturbing thought when we recollect that the country cannot always be at war, if only because peace is necessary as a preparation for war, for the creation of things for war to destroy. It becomes still more disturbing when we add to this post-war change another even more remarkable, which will be dealt with presently: the objects for which at the beginning of a war we are ready to die--ideals like democracy, freedom from military regimentation and the suppression of military terrorism, the rights of small nations--are things about which at the end of the War we are utterly indifferent. It would seem either that these are not the things that really stirred us--that our feelings had some other unsuspected origin--or that war has destroyed our feeling for them. Note this juxtaposition of events. We have had in Europe millions of men in every belligerent country showing unfathomable capacity for disinterested service. Millions of youngsters--just ordinary folk--gave the final and greatest sacrifice without hesitation and without question. They faced agony, hardship, death, with no hope or promise of reward save that of duty discharged. And, very rightly, we acclaim them as heroes. They have shown without any sort of doubt that they are ready to die for their country's cause or for some even greater cause--human freedom, the rights of a small nation, democracy, or the principle of nationality, or to resist a barbarous morality which can tolerate the making of unprovoked war for a monarchy's ambition or the greed of an autocratic clique. And, indeed, whatever our final conclusion, the spectacle of vast sacrifices so readily made is, in its ultimate meaning one of infinite inspiration and hope. But the War's immediate sequel puts certain questions to us that we cannot shirk. For note what follows. After some years the men who could thus sacrifice themselves, return home--to Italy, or France, or Britain--and exchange khaki for the miner's overall or the railway worker's uniform. And it would then seem that at that moment their attitude to their country and their country's attitude to them undergo a wonderful change. They are ready--so at least we are told by a Press which for five years had spoken of them daily as heroes, saints, and gentlemen--through their miners' or railway Unions to make war upon, instead of for, that community which yesterday they served so devotedly. Within a few months of the close of this War which was to unify the nation as it had never been unified before (the story is the same whichever belligerent you may choose) there appear divisions and fissures, disruptions and revolutions, more disturbing than have been revealed for generations.