From ‘Comrades of the great war’, The Spectator, 1 December 1917: Eventually all will be over, even the shouting; and some five million heroes will become to the general eye merely plain men with their living to earn… The real force, we are convinced, that will carry the ex-sailor and ex-soldier with ease and content back to civil life is possessed by the men themselves, in that bond of comradeship which, even more than discipline and esprit de corps, has brought them through ordeals endured only, endurable only, because no man was in that pit alone; which has prompted glorious...

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