There are certain words which before the war were rarely used, but which now meet the eye in the head-lines of newspapers. One of these words is "Repatriation." It is an expressive word, conjuring up a vision of the lines of grey ships which carried 100,000 New Zealanders far from their homes to the great war, of the fighting in many distant fields, and the return of our war-worn soldiers to their native land.

But this is not enough. Repatriation is only beginning when the soldier with his twenty-eight days' notice of discharge and railway pass in his pocket steps on to the wharf and wonders what it will feel like to be a civilian again. In the public mind the word includes everything undertaken by the State in fulfilment of a duty to place the returned soldier as nearly as is possible in the civil position he occupied before he was called away. In this wilder sense it will be used in this chapter.