I have taken but this one text or label, out of a hundred such, the matter of labour and liberty; and thought it worth while to trace it from one blatant and bewildering yellow poster in the London streets to its high places in history.  But it is only one example of the way in which a thousand things grouped themselves and fell into perspective as I passed farther and farther from them, and drew near the central origins of civilisation.  I do not say that I saw the solution; but I saw the problem.  In the litter of journalism and the chatter of politics, it is too much of a puzzle even to be a problem.  For instance, a friend of mine described his book, The Path to Rome, as a journey through all Europe that the Faith had saved; and I might very well describe my own journey as one through all Europe that the War has saved.  The trail of the actual fighting, of course, was awfully apparent everywhere; the plantations of pale crosses seemed to crop up on every side like growing things; and the first French villages through which I passed had heard in the distance, day and night, the guns of the long battle-line, like the breaking of an endless exterior sea of night upon the very borderland of the world.  I felt it most as we passed the noble towers of Amiens, so near the high-water mark of the high tide of barbarism, in that night of terror just before the turning of the tide.  For the truth which thus grew clearer with travel is rightly represented by the metaphor of the artillery, as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the world.  Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of something as solid as land, and sometimes as patient and inert as land, against something as unstable as water, as weak as water; but also as strong as water, as strong as water is in a cataract or a flood.  It was the resistance of form to formlessness; that version or vision of it seemed to clarify itself more and more as I went on.  It was the defence of that same ancient enclosure in which stood the broken columns of the Roman forum and the column in the Paris square, and of all other such enclosures down to the domestic enclosures of my own dog and donkey.  All had the same design, the marking out of a square for the experiment of liberty; of the old civic liberty or the later universal liberty.  I knew, to take the domestic metaphor, that the watchdog of the West had again proved too strong for the wild dogs of the Orient.  For the foes of such creative limits are chaos and old night, whether they are the Northern barbarism that pitted tribal pride and brutal drill against the civic ideal of Paris, or the Eastern barbarism that brought brigands out of the wilds of Asia to sit on the throne of Byzantium.  And as in the other case, what I saw was something simpler and larger than all the disputed details about the war and the peace.  A man may think it extraordinary, as I do, that the natural dissolution of the artificial German Empire into smaller states should have actually