considerable optimism to profound depression. I have met and talked to
quite a number of young men in khaki--ex-engineers, ex-lawyers,
ex-schoolmasters, ex-business men of all sorts--and the net result of
these interviews has been a buoyant belief that there is in Great
Britain the pluck, the will, the intelligence to do anything, however
arduous and difficult, in the way of national reconstruction. And on the
other hand there is a certain stretch of road between Dunmow and
Coggeshall....

That stretch of road is continually jarring with my optimistic
thoughts. It is a strongly pro-German piece of road. It supports
allegations against Great Britain, as, for instance, that the British
are quite unfit to control their own affairs, let alone those of an
empire; that they are an incompetent people, a pig-headedly stupid
people, a wasteful people, a people incapable of realising that a man
who tills his field badly is a traitor and a weakness to his country....

Let me place the case of this high road through Braintree (Bocking
intervening) before the reader. It is, you will say perhaps, very small
beer. But a straw shows the way the wind blows. It is a trivial matter
of road metal, mud, and water-pipes, but it is also diagnostic of the
essential difficulties in the way of the smooth and rapid reconstruction
of Great Britain--and very probably of the reconstruction of all
Europe--after the war. The Braintree high road, I will confess, becomes
at times an image of the world for me. It is a poor, spiritless-looking
bit of road, with raw stones on one side of it. It is also, I perceive,
the high destiny of man in conflict with mankind. It is the way to
Harwich, Holland, Russia, China, and the whole wide world.

Even at the first glance it impresses one as not being the road that