There are no contemporary letters, diaries or personal recollections that could indicate Moeran's state of mind as he was faced with the task of re-adjusting to civilian life, and the biographer must again resort to reasonable speculation. Moeran had spent the previous four and a half years in the army, participating in the hitherto most significant and destructive event in human history. He had witnessed death and injury as a matter of course on a scale unimaginable to those fortunate enough to be living one hundred years later. Almost all his Uppingham friends and many of his Royal College of Music classmates and colleagues had been killed, and the obvious question is whether these experiences had led to some form of post traumatic stress disorder. It is tempting to assert that this must have been the case. Although Moeran's early war years were spent safely in Norfolk, they were punctuated by news of the deaths of his friends, and when he eventually went into action in France, he saw friends and colleagues being killed or injured alongside him, and he was himself shot at and wounded under the worst circumstances of a poorly planned and ineptly executed large-scale military operation.

Much of Moeran's life since September 1914 had been circumscribed by his military service, with his daily activities constrained within a rigid framework of army discipline, and this had been removed abruptly. In 1919, there was no training or counselling for ex-soldiers in how to adapt to civilian life: men were just expected to return home and get on with it. All that can be suggested in Moeran's case is that the finality of having been discharged from the army may have established a boundary behind which his wartime experiences could be confined, providing the possibility of disconnecting that life from whatever was to come. It is probable that he initially found himself with some sense of lacking in purpose, and it is apparent that music, as it would be on so many occasions throughout his life, was the familiar domain to which he resorted.