Like Ancient Gaul, time is nowadays divided into three parts, before,
during and after the war. The lives of most men are split into these three
hard and fast sections. And the men who have sojourned in the Valley of the
Shadow of Death have emerged, for all their phlegm, their philosophy, their
passionate carelessness and according to their several temperaments, not
the same as when they entered. They have taken human life, they have
performed deeds of steadfast and reckless heroism unimagined even in the
war-like daydreams of their early childhood. They have endured want and
misery and pain inconceivable. They have witnessed scenes of horror one of
which, in their former existence, would have provided months of shuddering
nightmare. They have made instant decisions affecting the life or death of
their fellows. They have conquered fear. They have seen the scale of values
upon which their civilized life was so carefully based swept away and
replaced by another strange and grim to which their minds must rigidly
conform. They return to the world of rest where humanity is still
struggling to maintain the old scale. The instinct born of generations of
tradition compels a facile reacceptance. They think: "The blood and mud and
the hell's delight of the war are things of the past. We take up life where
we left it five years ago; we come back to plough, lathe, counter, bank,
office, and we shall carry on as though a Sleeping Beauty spell had been
cast on the world and we were awakening, at the kiss of the Fairy Prince of
peace, to our suspended tasks."

Are they right or are they wrong in their surmise, these millions of
men, who have passed through the Valley of the Shadow, haunted by their
memories, tempered by their plunge into the elemental, illumined by the
self-knowledge gained in the fierce school of war?