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It was my turn for late duty; but, when I reached my room, I found a message:

“Captain Hornbeck’s compliments; and it will not be necessary for Commander Oakleigh to stay unless he wishes.”

Peace was not yet come, then, or Philip Hornbeck would have told me; it would come that night, or he would not have granted me leave of absence. The Admiralty, meanwhile, could not have been more silent if the old world had died in giving birth to the new.

“You got my chit?,” Hornbeck asked in an undertone, when I went to report. “Unless you want to hang about here ...”

“My taste for bureaucracy,” I answered, with a glance of loathing at his “IN”, “OUT” and “PENDING” trays, “has been cured.” How long did Barbara say the war had lasted? Since 1914? Yes, four years and three months had passed since I began to masquerade unconvincingly as an officer of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. With the actors, artists, barristers and stockbrokers who combined to make up my section of the intelligence department, I had talked a hundred times of the day when we should have taken our last undeserved salute and laid aside the latest of our comic-opera uniforms. Now it was come. “As I’m here, I may as well lend a hand. I suppose they’re bound to sign?”

Hornbeck unlocked a row of japanned boxes and glanced perfunctorily at his secret files before plunging them in the fire.

“It won’t come through in time for the morning papers, so I’m getting rid of the evidence before I’m told not to,” he chuckled. “ ‘The eleventh hour ... of the eleventh day ... of the eleventh month.’ Sounds as if a journalist had had something to do with that!” One file slipped to the floor; and I read on the faded docket “Goeben and Breslau, 1914”. It had been a very long war. “Lord! These papers are a satire on the vanity of human wishes!,” he drawled. “You can give all your people leave for the day. They won’t be in a fit state to work ... even if you had any work to give them. And I suppose you won’t have. It ... takes you some time to grasp that it’s all over,” he added, checking half way to the fire and staring bemusedly at the papers in his hands. Looking at him, I needed time to recall that he had been a young man when war broke out. “What are you and Lady Barbara going to do with yourselves?,” he asked after a pause.

“Get away to the sun,” I answered with the grim determination of a man whose vitality was spent for lack of rest and good food.

“Wonder ... what will happen ... to us,” Hornbeck pondered, punctuating his words with abrupt shrieks of rending paper. “No more wars; ... no more navies ... or armies.”

“Well, you of all men are entitled to a holiday,” I said. Four years of Whitehall had made him short-sighted and round-shouldered; his square, wooden face was pallid; and his slow speech argued a tired brain.

“Everything will seem a bit flat now,” muttered one of the most powerful men in England, who within the next few days or hours would be as inconsequential as myself. Beyond a narrow circle described round the Treasury Exchange, the name of Captain Hornbeck was unknown; the weight and cunning of his hand, however, had been felt for more than four years in Mexican revolutions, Greek coups d’état and Russian counter-revolutions. The papers which he was destroying ranged from reports on South American credit-transfers to track-charts of North Atlantic commerce-raiders. “This is what the N.O. has been training for, ever since the old Britannia days,” he went on. “Now that we’ve finished it ...”

Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he threw open the window. From force of habit, he switched off the lights before pulling up the blind; then, as the last night of the war engulfed him in a grey eddy of fog, he laughed at his own forgetfulness.

“There’s still a fair-sized mess to clean up,” I reminded him, as he raked with irresolute fingers the memoranda that constituted the Admiralty’s suggestions for the peace conference.

“Ah, I must leave that to you politicians,” he laughed. “And I don’t envy you the job. A world without war ... It’s a thing we’ve never seen, George. And when you consider that we’re all of us demoralized and most of us bankrupt ... I suppose friend Woodrow knows what he wants, but I don’t believe any one else does.... Doctor feller once told me that, when a baby’s born, it comes into the world with its fists clenched. I sometimes wonder if war isn’t a natural instinct.”

“Self-preservation is the first natural instinct,” I answered; “but it’s not consistent with modern methods of fighting.”

“Oh, I know. This war will be a friendly scrap by comparison with the next.”

“It’s stopping,” I said, “just when we were beginning to learn something of mass-production, mass-enlistment, mass-mobilization of resources, mass-destruction.”

Hornbeck strolled to a vast wall-map of the world and stared at it, with his hands dug deep into his pockets.

“In the next war, we shan’t attempt to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants,” he predicted. “The air-raids and the blockade have caught the civilian.”

“And no country will be allowed to remain neutral,” I added, “any more than Luxemburg and Greece in this war.”

“Until, at the end, when the human population of the earth has been destroyed with typhoid-germs and poison-gas, you’ll be left with two submersible flying-tanks chasing each other among the ice of the North Pole.”

He stirred the fire to a blaze and began once more to feed it with the papers from his private safe. I might have helped him; but this news of approaching peace seemed to relax all my muscles. For the first time in more than four years I could look beyond the work of the moment and see myself as an individual. When I was less tired, I could go back to the old life; and, for a man with a competence, life in England had been more than tolerable until the fourth of August, 1914.

“Don’t let’s talk about the next war,” I said. “Unless we can find a substitute ...”

“People talked like that after Waterloo,” Hornbeck murmured.

“I expect they talked like that after the siege of Troy; but they always sowed their peace with the seeds of the next war.”

The night air was chilling the room; and Hornbeck interrupted his task of destruction to shut the window.

“Well, what kind of peace do you want now?,” he asked, with a smile half mocking, half wistful playing over his tired face. “This war followed inevitably on the war of ’70, which followed inevitably on the nationalist wars, which followed inevitably on Napoleon’s conquests. Will you divide the world now according to nationalities? I’m afraid you’ll have new wars in Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, Austria, Turkey; not to mention Egypt and India. People talk about a United States of the World; but, when you’ve been getting the last ounce out of national spirit for all these years, you won’t persuade white men to take their orders from an international committee of dagos.”

I turned from the wall-map to the official estimates of casualties in all countries.

“When people remember what a bloody business war is ...” I began.

“We had South Africa and Japan to warn us!” he interrupted. “The next generation ... George, I promise you that, unless you get your new heaven and your new earth functioning at once, you’ll drift back to the only kind of life a nation knows. Fear and arrogance; insane hatred and colossal stupidity. Periodically the world will panic into war, which is the only final solution known to history.” ...

“The only one we’ve tried; and it’s a solution of nothing,” I answered. “My God, if I didn’t believe this was really a war to end war ...”

I paused as Hornbeck was called to the telephone. He listened for a moment, nodded to me and took down his coat and cap. Even he could work no longer; and, as I walked home alone, I tried to understand that the “war to end war” had itself ended. In four years I had forgotten how London looked before the lamps were shrouded and the hoardings placarded with patriotic appeals. Their purpose was accomplished; a uniform would soon be as rare as civilian clothes were now; the hospitals would empty; the blue coats and red ties of the convalescents would disappear.

The city was very silent; but at eleven o’clock, I imagined, there would be such a silence as would make men think that the earth was halting in her course. Out there, over the water, some would adventure amicably into the enemy’s lines; some would drift back to their base; most would wait dumbly for orders; and one man would be the last to die in the Great War.

At the top of Waterloo Place I found a policeman flashing his lantern on the doors and shutters of the shops.

“I think you’d like to know that the Germans have accepted the armistice,” I said.

“Thank you, sir,” he answered with a salute.

A taxi crawled westward across Piccadilly Circus; and I told the driver.

“They ’ave, ’ave they?,” he muttered in perplexity. “Oh, they ’ave.... Well ...”

I hesitated long before reckoning the number of those for whom peace came too late. In ’14 my generation was of an age to be called for the hottest and the longest of the fighting. Sam Dainton had escaped with a flesh wound, Jack Waring with a split head and a broken nerve, David O’Rane with the loss of his sight; these, with the five or six who had failed to pass the doctors or had been tied to a mission abroad, were all that remained of the friends who had said good-bye to their schools in the last years of the nineteenth century.

A lifetime had passed since we all talked of what we would do “on the day peace is signed”; and yet, when we spoke of “last summer”, we always meant “the summer before the war”. It was, at the same time, an eternity and an episode.

“So,” I reflected at the door of my house in Seymour Street, “one school of political thought in France looked upon the Revolution and the Empire.”

From force of habit, I headed for the hot milk in my dressing-room and rang to have my bath prepared. Then I recollected that I need never again work by night and sleep by day.

“I’ll breakfast first,” I told Barbara’s maid. “And I shan’t go to bed this morning. The armistice has been signed.” The girl tried to speak, but could only turn away with a sob that sounded like “dad”. “Has her ladyship been called?,” I asked.

Still unable to speak, the girl shook her head and nodded in the direction of a breakfast-tray.