It was like a plunge into forgotten days.  War seemed to end at the French quayside.  Staff officers, brigadier-generals, captains, privates and lance-corporals—­they were all just Englishmen off to their homes.  They jostled one another up the gangway—­I never heard a rough word in that dense crowd.  They lay side by side outside the saloon of the Channel turbine steamer.  A corporal with his head half in the doorway, too seasick to know that it was fair in the path of a major-general’s boots; a general Staff officer and a French captain with their backs propped against the oak panelling and their ribs against somebody else’s baggage; a subaltern of engineers with his head upon their feet; a hundred others packed on the stairs and up to the deck; and a horrible groaning from the direction of the lavatories—­it was truly the happiest moment in all their lives.

The crossing passed like a dream—­scarcely noticed.  Seven weeks of strain can leave you too tired almost to think.  A journey in a comfortable railway compartment through prim, hazy English fields, the carriage blue with smoke from the pipes of its inhabitants (a Canadian, three or four Englishmen and a couple of Australians), has gone almost unremembered.  As the custom is in England, they were mostly ensconced behind their newspapers, although there is more geniality in an English railway carriage to-day than was usual before the war.  But most people in that train, I think, were too tired for conversation.

It was the coming into London that left such an impression as some of us will never forget.  Some of us knew London well before the war.  It is the one great city in the world where you never saw the least trace of corporate emotion.  It divides itself off into districts for the rich and districts for the poor, and districts for all the grades in between the two, which are the separate layers in the big, frowning edifice of British society; they may have had some sort of feeling for their class or their profession—­the lawyer proud of his Inns of Court and of the tradition of the London Bar, the doctor proud of London schools of medicine, and the Thames engineer even proud of the work that is turned out upon the Thames.  But there was no more common feeling or activity in the people of London than there would be common energy in a heap of sand grains.  They would have looked upon it as sheer weakness to exhibit any interest in the doings even of their neighbours.

The battle of the Somme had begun about nine weeks before when this particular train, carrying the daily instalment of men on leave from it, began to wind its way in past the endless back-gardens and yellow brick houses, every one the replica of the next, and the numberless villa chimneys and chimney-pots which fence the southern approaches of the great capital.  They are tight, compact little fortresses, those English villas, each jealously defended against its neighbour and the whole world by the sentiment within, even more than by the high brick wall around it.  But if they were all rigidly separate from each other, there was one thing that bound them all together just for that moment.