“Only about six of us survived,” I answered. “And we’re all scattered. We’re tired, too. The war went on too long.” Though I was almost too exhausted to think, I remembered a far-away debate at Melton on the first anniversary of the war, when the greatest headmaster and the wisest man that I have met warned me that a long war would be followed by an even longer moral reaction: a bruised world, said old Burgess, would go back to the ways it knew and to the fleshpots it loved. “We shall be useless for years,” I said. “I wonder if it was worth it,” Barbara mused. “That depends on what you expected or wanted. We’ve secured our terms. And, if it’s not too rhetorical, I believe that every man who voluntarily offered his life, at a time when we thought we were degenerating, has to a great extent saved his soul. This country has been spared invasion.” Barbara parted the curtains in her room and looked down on the silent street. “The first night of peace since Jim’s last party at Loring Castle,” she murmured. “We . . . Well, I suppose we go on from that?” “If we want to.” “Well, don’t you? For the last four years we haven’t been able to call our souls our own.” “I wonder whether we ever shall again,” I said, as I filled my final pipe. That last night of peace lingered more vividly in my memory than any since. War was certain. We had read Grey’s speech; and I walked with O’Rane up and down the valley-terrace, trying to decide what we were fighting to preserve. “We want something more than the _status quo_,” I told Barbara. “That night . . . There was no question, then, of a general levy: the war must be over in a few months, and only the regular army would fight. Well, we’d seen Jack Summertown and a car-load of officers driving off the night before: they were a small minority who were quite clearly going to risk their skins for the rest of us. Were we worth it? I told Raney that I’d like to shew something that was better worth fighting for.” “And haven’t we? When you think how every one has worked and fought . . .” “But now that it’s all over?,” I persisted. “Raney said that people couldn’t come back from the war to take up the old futility; you couldn’t set up social barriers between men who had undertaken the same charge. It was unthinkable to save a country from invasion in order to perpetuate things like sweated labour. I wonder.” . . . “What a long time ago it all seems!” There was no cynicism in Barbara’s voice; but, if anybody spoke nowadays of a new world, his words were dismissed as Fleet Street rhetoric or Downing Street claptrap; and, though not one man of all the thousands who would be returning in the next few days was likely to say that he had risked his life to perpetuate sweated labour, I could not imagine that many would exert themselves to abolish it.