“We had South Africa and Japan to warn us!” he interrupted. “The next generation . . . George, I promise you that, unless you get your new heaven and your new earth functioning at once, you’ll drift back to the only kind of life a nation knows. Fear and arrogance; insane hatred and colossal stupidity. Periodically the world will panic into war, which is the only final solution known to history.” . . .
“The only one we’ve tried; and it’s a solution of nothing,” I answered. “My God, if I didn’t believe this was really a war to end war . . .”
I paused as Hornbeck was called to the telephone. He listened for a moment, nodded to me and took down his coat and cap. Even he could work no longer; and, as I walked home alone, I tried to understand that the “war to end war” had itself ended. In four years I had forgotten how London looked before the lamps were shrouded and the hoardings placarded with patriotic appeals. Their purpose was accomplished; a uniform would soon be as rare as civilian clothes were now; the hospitals would empty; the blue coats and red ties of the convalescents would disappear.
The city was very silent; but at eleven o’clock, I imagined, there would be such a silence as would make men think that the earth was halting in her course. Out there, over the water, some would adventure amicably into the enemy’s lines; some would drift back to their base; most would wait dumbly for orders; and one man would be the last to die in the Great War.
At the top of Waterloo Place I found a policeman flashing his lantern on the doors and shutters of the shops.
“I think you’d like to know that the Germans have accepted the armistice,” I said.
“Thank you, sir,” he answered with a salute.
A taxi crawled westward across Piccadilly Circus; and I told the driver.
“They ’ave, ’ave they?,” he muttered in perplexity. “Oh, they ’ave. . . . Well . . .”
I hesitated long before reckoning the number of those for whom peace came too late. In ’14 my generation was of an age to be called for the hottest and the longest of the fighting. Sam Dainton had escaped with a flesh wound, Jack Waring with a split head and a broken nerve, David O’Rane with the loss of his sight; these, with the five or six who had failed to pass the doctors or had been tied to a mission abroad, were all that remained of the friends who had said good-bye to their schools in the last years of the nineteenth century.