The rest of that morning I spent in Fetter Lane, reviewing the achievements of the peace-administration. The only visible traces of the war, when I walked down to Westminster, were the cenotaph in Whitehall and the long army of unemployed that was trying to get past it to the precincts of parliament. While I waited for the crowd to disperse, I heard a familiar voice asking my neighbour what was happening.
“Raney! Here, you’d better let me see you home,” I said. “There’s an appalling mob everywhere.”
“Thanks, I’ve had to acquire a sixth sense,” he answered. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking on and thinking of that week-end in August when the Anti-Intervention people pursued me down to Loring Castle. I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t have done better to keep out of the war at all costs.”
“We should have been dishonoured if we’d let Belgium down,” he answered.
“If we’d told the Germans we would stop the moment Belgium was evacuated, the war would have been over in ’14. And we shouldn’t have an unemployed army marching through London to-day,” I added savagely.
We squeezed our way forward till a sudden thinning of the crowd enabled us to escape into the park.
“I think we’re individually the better for the sacrifices we all of us made,” he answered slowly. “For one moment there was a real spirit of fraternity; and, when the reaction has run its course, I hope to see that again. I’m recruiting people now, with quite fair success: reminding them what they did once and asking them to give up everything for one month or six or a year for the service of their country. I’m only asking them to do what I’ve done myself. I tell them, as I tell you, that’s the new idea that we must capture from the war. Fraternity . . .”
“Your new idea is at least as old as Christ and Buddha,” I objected. “Will you succeed where they failed?”
“Had they ever such a chance as we have? We’ve seen the quality of modern war. We know that, if there’s another, it will bury civilization under a sea of lava. Men, women, sheep, cattle, the very blades of grass. Another war is synonymous with the end of the world.”