...
The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March, after
urgent representations from the provisional government at Orleans that
they could be supported no longer. They seem to have been a fairly
well-behaved, but highly parasitic force throughout, though Barnet is
clearly of opinion that they did much to suppress sporadic brigandage
and maintain social order. He came home to a famine-stricken country,
and his picture of the England of that spring is one of miserable
patience and desperate expedients. The country was suffering much more
than France, because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which
it had hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid off. On
the way thither they saw four men hanging from the telegraph posts by
the roadside, who had been hung for stealing swedes. The labour refuges
of Kent, he discovered, were feeding their crowds of casual wanderers on
bread into which clay and sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a
shortage of even such fare as that. He himself struck across country to
Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round London,
and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one of the wireless
assistants at the central station and given regular rations.
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