I had known Susy and her set in the old days. They were the minor intellectuals of London, and I had portrayed some of them in a novel called “Intellectual Mansions,” which they did not like, though I loved them all. They wrote little poems, painted little pictures, produced little plays, and talked about all subjects under heaven, with light-hearted humour, an arrogance towards popular ideas, and a quick acceptance of the new, the unusual and the revolutionary, in art and thought. Into their way of life war crashed suddenly with its thunder notes of terror. All that they had lived for seemed to be destroyed, and all their ideals overthrown. They had believed in beauty, and it was flung into the mud and bespattered with blood, and buried beneath the ugly monsters of war’s idolatry. They had been devotees of liberty, and were made slaves of the drill-sergeant and other instruments of martial law. They had been enemies of brutality, cruelty, violence, but all human effort now was for the slaughter of men, and the hero was he who killed most, with bayonet or bomb. Their pretty verses were made of no account. Their impressionistic paintings were not so useful as the camouflage of tin huts. Their little plays were but feeble drama to that which now was played out on the world’s stage to the roar of guns and the march of armies. They went into the tumult and fury of it all, and were lost. I met some of them, like Fortune and Brand, in odd places. Many of them died in the dirty ditches. Some of them wrote poems before they died, stronger than their work before the war, with a noble despair, or the exaltation of sacrifice. Others gave no sign of their previous life, and were just absorbed into the ranks--ants in these legions of soldier-ants. Now those who had escaped with life were coming back to their old haunts, trying to pick up old threads, getting back, if they could, to the old ways of work, hoping for a new inspiration out of immense experience, but not yet finding it. In Susy Whincop’s flat some of them had gathered when I went there, and when I looked round upon them, seeing here and there vaguely-remembered faces, I was conscious of a change that had overtaken them, and, with a shock, wondered whether I too had altered so much in those five years. I recognised Peter Hallam, whom I had known as a boy just down from Oxford, with a genius (in a small way) for satirical verse, and a talent for passionate lyrics of a morbid and erotic type. Yes, it was certainly Peter, though his face had hardened and he had cropped his hair short and walked with one leg stiff. He was talking to a girl with bobbed hair--it was Jennie Southcombe, who had been one of the heroines of the Serbian retreat, according to accounts of newspaper-correspondents. “My battery,” said Peter, “plugged into old Fritz with open sights for four hours. We just mowed ’em down.”