 Here, a paragraph about the return of a soldier following World War I, relating his stories to an older advocate of the war who stayed at home.Occasionally the facts seem to need to be spoken plainly, and Herbert is not completely averse to rants by his characters, but these are few and far between.The following rant given with only minimal irony, on behalf of the Officer in Charge of the Native Compound seems worth reproducing, given that it mirrors closely many of the circumstances of the country of Australia 70 years later (remember Capricornia is a fictional nation, and some small discrepancies are likely, even without the gap of 70 years since the novel was written)