had flamed the glory and splendour of a
divine heroism!

Small wonder that some of these men, tingling with the consciousness of
powers of which these busy, engaged people of the streets and shops
knew nothing, turned with disdain from the petty, paltry, many of them
non-manly tasks that men pursued solely that they might live. Live! For
these last terrible, great and glorious fifty months they had schooled
themselves to the notion that the main business of life was not to live.
There had been for them a thing to do infinitely more worth while than
to live. Indeed, had they been determined at all costs to live, then
they had become to themselves, to their comrades, and indeed to all the
world, the most despicable of all living things, deserving and winning
the infinite contempt of all true men.

While the "gratuity money" lasted life went merrily enough, but when
the last cheque had been cashed, and the grim reality that rations had
ceased and Q. M. Stores were not longer available thrust itself vividly
into the face of the demobilised veteran, and when after experiencing
in job hunting varying degrees of humiliation the same veteran made
the startling and painful discovery that for his wares of heroic
self-immolation, of dogged endurance done up in khaki, there was no
demand in the bloodless but none the less strenuous conflict of living;
and that other discovery, more disconcerting, that he was not the man
he had been in pre-war days and thought himself still to be, but quite
another, then he was ready for one of two alternatives, to surrender to
the inevitable dictum that after all life was really not worth a fight,
more particularly if it could be sustained without one, or, to fling his
hat into the Bolshevist ring, ready for the old thing, war--war against
the enemies of civilisation and his own enemies, against those
who possessed things which he very much desired but which for some
inexplicable cause he was prevented from obtaining.

The former class, to a greater or less degree, Jack Maitland
represented; the latter, Tony Perrotte. From their war experience they
were now knit together in bonds that ran into life issues. Together
they had faced war's ultimate horror, together they had emerged with
imperishable memories of sheer heroic manhood mutually revealed in hours
of desperate need.

At Jack's request Tony had been given the position of a Junior Foreman
in one of the planing mill departments, with the pr