drinking that was said to obtain in English high-places could be matched by the drugging that was reported to be corrupting Austrian society. I was assured, without calling for proof, that there was little to choose for courage and endurance between the best troops of any two countries; and, when the public morale broke, any one class in its own way cut as sorry a figure as any other. If I despaired of the populace that believed the grotesque stories in the Pemberton-Billing case, I despaired more profoundly of Lady Dainton when she told me that Prince Louis of Battenberg had been executed in the Tower for treason. “The moral is,” I told Violet Loring, “that, under an abnormal strain, the sublime and the dastardly go hand-in-hand. Five years ago, we didn’t know the meaning of danger or suffering. To face it without breaking, we called up the primitive beast that lies inside all of us: he was a very brave beast, but he was also very treacherous, savage, credulous.” . . . As Violet turned my pages, I looked through a palisade of palm-trees to the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean and filled my lungs with warm, scented air. Cannes, after London, was like the open street after an opium-den; and, in thinking of the strange shapes seen in the long, mad half-light of the war, I almost fancied that I had been dreaming. The political intrigue and chicanery that began with the high-explosive controversy in 1915 and continued until the 1918 election was incredible unless one likened it to a panic on board a burning ship. If Violet had told me four years earlier that one common acquaintance would be imprisoned for trafficking in cocaine and that another would commit suicide to avoid prosecution for forgery, I should not have believed her. I could now hardly believe my own certain knowledge until I remembered that every war has claimed its civil casualties. “How long does it take to chain up your primitive beast?,” Violet asked. “I mean, . . . these are the people that the war has left us to live with and work with.” . . . To that I had no answer ready. It was easier to say that Sonia O’Rane would not have run away from her husband before the war than to be certain she would not run away again. And it seemed idle to talk of international conferences and a reconstructed world, of a new spirit and a ‘will to peace’ while the passions of the war were still unfettered. 4 My triptych, displaying—in its centre—the war and—on either side—the peace that preceded and should follow the war, spared no space for dividing or linking frame-work: though I was working in the transition-period between full war and full peace, I made little attempt to describe the condition in which we all found ourselves at the moment when a truce was called.