I came back to England at last when I was twenty-six. After the peace of Vereeniging I worked under the Commission which controlled the distribution of returning prisoners and concentrated population to their homes; for the most part I was distributing stock and grain, and presently manœuvring a sort of ploughing flying column that the of horses and oxen made necessary, work that was certainly as hard as if far less exciting than war. That particular work of replanting the country with human beings took hold of my imagination, and for a time at least seemed quite and understandable. The comfort of ceasing to destroy!  
No one has written anything that really conveys the quality of that repatriation process; the queer business of bringing these suspicious, , people back to their desolated homes, reuniting swarthy fathers and stockish mothers, witnessing their inexpressive encounters, doing what one could to put heart into their resumption. Memories come back to me of great littered heaps of luggage, bundles, blankets, rough boxes, piled newly purchased stores, ready-made doors, window sashes heaped ready for the , slow-moving, figures sitting and eating, an infernal squawking of parrots, sometimes a of babies. Repatriation went on to a parrot obligato, and I never hear a parrot squawk without a flash of South Africa across my mind. All the prisoners, I believe, brought back parrots—some two or three. I had to spread these people out, over a country still grassless, with teams of war-worn oxen, and horses that died by the dozen on my hands. The end of each individual instance was a handshake, and one went on, leaving the children one had deposited behind one already playing with old ration-tins or hunting about for cartridge-cases, while adults stared at the work they had to do.
 
There was something elementary in all that redistribution. I felt at times like a child playing in a nursery and putting out its bricks and soldiers on the floor. There was a kind of greatness too about the process, a quality of atonement. And the people I was taking back, the men anyhow, were for the most part charming and wonderful people, very simple and emotional, so that once a big bearded man, when I wanted him in the face of an to abandon about half-a-dozen ............