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The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March,
after urgent representations from the provisional government at
Orleans that they could be supported no longer. They seem to have
been a fairly well-behaved, but highly parasitic force
throughout, though Barnet is clearly of opinion that they did
much to suppress sporadic brigandage and maintain social order.
He came home to a famine-stricken country, and his picture of the
England of that spring is one of miserable patience and desperate
expedients. The country was suffering much more than France,
because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which it had
hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid
off. On the way thither they saw four men hanging from the
telegraph posts by the roadside, who had been hung for stealing
swedes. The labour refuges of Kent, he discovered, were feeding
their crowds of casual wanderers on bread into which clay and
sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a shortage of even
such fare as that. He himself struck across country to
Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round
London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one
of the wireless assistants at the central station and given
regular rations. The station stood in a commanding position on
the chalk hill that overlooks the town from the east....
Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless
cipher messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and
there it was that the Brissago proclamation of the end of the war
and the establishment of a world government came under his hands.
He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise
what it was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a
part of his tedious duty.
Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the
declaration that strained him very much, and in the evening when
he was relieved, he ate his scanty supper and then went out upon
the little balcony before the station, to smoke and rest his
brains after this sudden and as yet inexplicable press of duty.
It was a very beautiful, still evening. He fell talking to a
fellow operator, and for the first time, he declares, 'I began to
understand what it was all about. I began to see just what
enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four hours.
But I became incredulous after my first stimulation. "This is
some sort of Bunkum," I said very sagely.
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