I

On Saturday afternoon we made a short train journey and then marched four easy miles to a village called La Chaussée. Twenty-four hours’ rest and a shave had worked the usual miracle with the troops (psychological recovery was a problem which no one had time to recognize as existent) and now we were away from the Line for at least a fortnight. It was a dusty golden evening, and the road led us through quiet green country. Delusively harmonious, perhaps, is that retrospective picture of the Battalion marching at ease along an unfrequented road, at the end of a July afternoon, with Colonel Kinjack riding rather absentmindedly in front, or pulling up to watch us go past him⁠—his face thoughtful and indulgent and expressing something of the pride and satisfaction which he felt.

So it will go on, I thought; in and out, in and out, till something happens to me. We had come along the same road last January. Only five officers of that lot were with us now: not many of them had been killed, but they had “faded away” somehow or other, and my awareness of this created a deceptive sense of “the good old days.” Yesterday afternoon I’d heard that Cromlech had been killed up at High Wood. This piece of news had stupefied me, but the pain hadn’t begun to make itself felt yet, and there was no spare time for personal grief when the Battalion was getting ready to move back to Divisional Rest. To have thought about Cromlech would have been calamitous. “Rotten business about poor old ‘Longneck,’ ” was the only comment that Durley, Dottrell and the others allowed themselves. And after all he wasn’t the only one who’d gone west lately. It was queer how the men seemed to take their victimization for granted. In and out; in and out; singing and whistling, the column swayed in front of me, much the same length as usual, for we’d had less than a hundred casualties up at Bazentin. But it was a case of every man for himself, and the corporate effect was optimistic and untroubled. A London editor driving along the road in a Staff car would have remarked that the spirit of the troops was amazing. And so it was. But somehow the newspaper men always kept the horrifying realities of the War out of their articles, for it was unpatriotic to be bitter, and the dead were assumed to be gloriously happy. However, it was no use worrying about all that; I was part of the Battalion, and now I’d got to see about getting the men settled into billets.

Some Australians had been in the billets at La Chaussée, and (if they will pardon me for saying so) had left them in a very bad state. Sanitation had been neglected, and the inhabitants were complaining furiously that their furniture had been used for firewood. Did the Australians leave anything else behind them, I wonder? For some of them had been in Gallipoli, and it is possible that dysentery germs were part of the legacy they left us.

The fact remains that I awoke on Monday morning feeling far from well and, after a mechanical effort to go on parade in a glare of sunlight, took refuge in the cavernous bedroom which I occupied alone. Feeling worse and worse, in the evening I remembered that I possessed a thermometer, which had been handed over to me when I was Transport Officer. I had never taken the temperatures of any of the horses, but I now experimented shakily on myself. When I saw that it indicated 105° I decided that the thing was out of order; but next morning I was confusedly aware that Flook had fetched the doctor, and by the afternoon I was unbelievably at the New Zealand Hospital, which was in a substantial old building in the middle of Amiens.

The advantages of being ill were only too obvious. Lying awake in the large lofty ward on my fourth night, I was aware that I was feeling rather run down, but much better⁠—almost too well, in fact. That evening my temperature had been normal, which reminded me that this change from active service to invalidism was an acute psychological experience. The door to safety was half open, and though an impartial New Zealand doctor decided one’s destiny, there was a not unnatural impulse to fight for one’s own life instead of against the Germans. Less than two weeks ago I’d been sitting in a tent thinking noble thoughts about sharing the adversities of my fellow Fusiliers. But that emotional defence wouldn’t work now, and the unutterable words “wangle my way home” forced their way obstinately to the foreground, supported by a crowd of smug-faced excuses.

Durley and the Adjutant had visited me that afternoon; they’d joked with me about how well I was looking. While they were with me I had talked about coming back in a few days, and I’d genuinely felt as if I wanted to. But they took my fortitude away with them, and now I was foreseeing that another night’s rest would make me look indecently healthy for a man in a hospital. “I suppose they’ll all think I’m swinging the lead,” I thought. Turning the last few months over in my mind, I argued with myself that I had done all that was expected of me. “Oh God,” I prayed, “do get me sent down to the Base!” (How often was that petition whispered during the War?) Today I had seen young Allgood’s name in the Roll of Honour⁠—a bit of news which had slammed the door on my four weeks at the Army School and provided me with a secondary sorrow, for I was already feeling sufficiently miserable about my friend Cromlech. I sympathized with myself about Allgood, for I had been fond of him. But he was only one among thousands of promising young men who had gone west since the 1st of July. Sooner or later I should probably get killed too. A breath of wind stirred the curtains, blowing them inward from the tall windows with a rustling sigh. The wind came from the direction of the Somme, and I could hear the remote thudding of the guns. Everyone in the ward seemed to be asleep except the boy whose bed had screens round it. The screens were red and a light glowed through them. Ever since he was brought in he’d been continually calling to the nurse on duty. Throughout the day this had gradually got on everyone’s nerves, for the ward was already full of uncontrollable gasps and groans. Once I had caught a glimpse of his white face and miserable eyes. Whatever sort of wound he’d got, he was making the most of it, had been the opinion of the man next to me (who had himself got more than he wanted, in both legs). But he must be jolly bad, I thought now, as the Sister came from behind the screen again. His voice went on, in the low, rapid, even tone of delirium. Sometimes I could catch what he said, troubled and unhappy and complaining. Someone called Dicky was on his mind, and he kept on crying out to Dicky. “Don’t go out, Dicky; they snipe like hell!” And then, “Curse the Wood.⁠ ⁠… Dicky, you fool, don’t go out!”⁠ ⁠… All the horror of the Somme attacks was in that raving; all the darkness and the dreadful daylight.⁠ ⁠… I watched the Sister come back with a white-coated doctor; the screen glowed comfortingly; soon the disquieting voice became inaudible and I fell asleep. Next morning the screens had vanished; the bed was empty, and ready for someone else.

Not that day, but the next one, my supplication to the Almighty was put to the test. The doctor came along the ward on his cheerful morning inspection. Arriving at my bed he asked how I was feeling. I stared up at him, incapable of asserting that I felt ill and unwilling to admit that I felt well. Fortunately he didn’t expect a reply. “Well, we’ll have to be moving you on,” he said with a smile; and before my heart had time to beat again he turned to the nurse with, “Put him down for the afternoon train.” The nurse made a note of it, and my mind uttered a spontaneous Magnificat. Now, with any luck, I thought, I’ll get a couple of weeks at one of those hospitals on the coast, at Etretat or Le Tréport, probably. The idea of reading a book by the seaside was blissful. No one could blame me for that, and I should be back with the Battalion by the end of August, if not earlier.

In my hurried exodus from my billet at La Chaussée, some of my belongings had been left behind, and good old Flook had brought them to the hospital next day. He had come treading in with clumsy embarrassment to deposit the packful of oddments by my bed, announcing in a hoarse undertone, “Ah’ve brought the stoof,” and telling me that the lads in C Company were hoping to see me back soon. Somehow Flook, with his rough and ready devotion, had seemed my strongest link with the Battalion. When I shook his hand and said goodbye, he winked and advised me, confidentially, not to be in too much of a hurry about getting back. A good rest would do me no harm, he said; but as he tiptoed away I wondered when he himself would get a holiday, and whether he would ever return to his signal-box on the railway.

The details of my journey to the Base were as follows. First of all I was carried carefully down the stairs on a stretcher (though I could easily have walked to the ambulance, or even to the railway station, if such an effort had been demanded of me). Then the ambulance took me to Corbie, and from there the train (with 450 casualties on board) rumbled sedately to Rouen; we did the sixty miles in ten hours, and at two o’clock in the morning I was carried into No. 2 Red Cross Hospital. I remember that particular hospital with affection. During the morning a genial doctor came along and had a look at me. “Well, my lad, what’s wrong with you?” he asked. “They call it enteritis,” I replied, with an indefinite grin. He had a newspaper in his hand as he glanced at the descriptive chart behind my bed. My name caused him to consult The Times. “Is this you?” he asked. Sure enough, my name was there, in a list of Military Crosses which chanced to have appeared that day. The doctor patted me on the shoulder and informed me that I should be going across to England next day. Good luck had “wangled me home.” Even now I cannot think of that moment without believing that I was involved in one of the lesser miracles of the Great War. For I am certain that I should have remained at Rouen if that observant and kindhearted doctor hadn’t noticed my name among the decorations. And in that case I should have been back with the Battalion in nice time for their operations at Delville Wood, which might quite conceivably have qualified my name for a place on the Butley village War Memorial.

The Hospital Ship left Rouen about midday. While we steamed down the Seine in fine weather I lay watching the landscape through a porthole with a sense of thankfulness which differed from any I had ever known before. A label was attached to me; I have kept that label, and it is in my left hand as I write these words. It is marked Army Form W 3083, though in shape and substance it is an ordinary civilian luggage label. It is stamped Lying Train and Ship in blue letters, with Sick P.U.O. on the other side. On the boat, my idle brain wondered what “P.U.O.” meant. There must, I thought, be a disease beginning with P. Perhaps it was “Polypipsis unknown origin.” Between Rouen and Havre I devised several feebly funny solutions, such as “Perfectly undamaged officer.” But my final choice was “Poorly until October.”

At noon next day we reached Southampton. Nothing could be better than this, I thought, while being carried undeservedly from the ship to the train; and I could find no fault with Hampshire’s quiet cornfields and unwarlike woods in the drowsy August afternoon. At first I guessed that we were on our way to London; but when the journey showed signs of cross-countryhood I preferred not to be told where we were going. Recumbent, I gazed gloatingly at England. Peaceable stay-at-homes waved to the Red Cross Train, standing still to watch it pass. It was nice to think that I’d been fighting for them, though exactly what I’d done to help them was difficult to define. An elderly man, cycling along a dusty road in a dark blue suit and a straw hat, removed one hand from the handlebars to wave comprehensive gratitude. Everything seemed happy and homely. I was delivered from the idea of death, and that other thing which had haunted me, the dread of being blinded. I closed contented eyes, became sleepy, and awoke to find myself at Oxford. By five o’clock I was in a small white room on the ground-floor of Somerville College. Listening to the tranquil tolling of Oxford bells and someone strumming melodiously on a piano across the lawn, with a glimpse of tall chestnut trees swaying against the blue sky, I whispered the word “Paradise.” Had I earned it? I was too grateful to care.

II

In Oxford lived Mr. Farrell, an old friend of Aunt Evelyn’s. Some years before the War he had lived near Butley, and he now came to pay me an afternoon visit at the Hospital, where I was reclining under a tree on the lawn, still keeping up appearances as an invalid officer. He sat beside me and we conversed rather laboriously about Aunt Evelyn and her neighbourhood. He was Irish and a voluble talker, but he seemed to have lost much of his former vivacity. I noticed that he was careful to keep the conversation safely on this side of the Channel, probably out of consideration for my feelings, although I wouldn’t have minded telling him a thing or two about the Somme. Mr. Farrell was a retired Civil Servant and an authority on Military Records. He had written the lives of several famous Generals and an official History of the Indian Mutiny. But he showed no curiosity about the military operations of the moment. He was over seventy, and his face was unlit and fatigued as he talked about food restrictions in England. “Sugar is getting scarce,” he remarked, “but that doesn’t affect me; my doctor knocked me off sugar several years ago.” I looked at his noticeably brown teeth, and then averted my eyes as if he could read my thoughts, for I was remembering how Aunt Evelyn used to scold me for calling him “sugar-teeth”; his untidy teeth did look like lumps of sugar soaked in tea.⁠ ⁠…

Dear old Mr. Farrell, with his red tie and the cameo ring round it, and his silver hair and ragged tobacco-stained moustache! As his large form lumbered away across the lawn, I thought that his clothes had got too big for him, though he’d always worn them rather baggy. Could it be possible that scrupulous people at home were getting thin while the soldiers got fat on their good rations at the Front? I began to suspect that England wasn’t quite what it used to be. But my mind soon wandered indolently into the past which the veteran military historian had brought with him into the college garden. I remembered summer evenings when I was a little boy overhearing, from in bed upstairs, the mumble of voices down in the drawing-room, where Aunt Evelyn was having an after-dinner chat with Mr. Farrell and Captain Huxtable, who had walked across the fields from Butley in the twilight. Sometimes I tiptoed down the stairs and listened at the door (rather hoping to hear them saying something complimentary about myself) but they were nearly always gassing about politics, or India. Mr. Farrell had been in India for ages, and Captain Huxtable had been out there too; and Aunt Evelyn loved to hear about it. When we went to see Mr. Farrell he used to show us delightful old books with coloured plates of Indian scenes. What queer old codgers they were, sipping tea and puffing their cigars (which smelt quite nice) and talking all that rot about Lord Salisbury and his Government. “Her-her-her,” laughed Mr. Farrell whenever he finished another of his funny stories which always ended with what someone had said to someone else or how he’d scored off someone at his club. They’d go on talking just the same, whatever happened; even if a Death’s Head Hawk Moth flew into the room they wouldn’t be a bit excited about it. It would be rather fun, I thought, if I were to fire my percussion-cap pistol outside the drawing-room door, just to give them a surprise. As I crept upstairs again in my nightgown, I wondered if I should ever be like that myself.⁠ ⁠… Mr. Farrell was fond of playing tennis; he used to serve underhand, holding the ball a few inches above the ground as he struck it.⁠ ⁠…

Emerging from my retrospective reverie, I felt that this war had made the past seem very peculiar. People weren’t the same as they used to be, or else I had changed. Was it because I had experienced something that they couldn’t share or imagine? Mr. Farrell had seemed diffident that afternoon, almost as if he were talking to a survivor from an incomprehensible disaster. Looking round me I began to feel that I wanted to be in some place where I needn’t be reminded of the War all the time. For instance, there was that tall well-preserved man pushing his son very slowly across the lawn in a long wheeled bed. The son was sallow and sulky, as he well might be, having lost one of his legs. The father was all solicitude, but somehow I inferred that the pair of them hadn’t hit it off too well before the War. More than once I had seen the son look at his father as though he disliked him. But the father was proud of his disabled son, and I heard him telling one of the nurses how splendidly the boy had done in the Gommecourt attack, showing her a letter, too, probably from the boy’s colonel. I wondered whether he had ever allowed himself to find out that the Gommecourt show had been nothing but a massacre of good troops. Probably he kept a war map with little flags on it; when Mametz Wood was reported as captured he moved a little flag an inch forward after breakfast. For him the Wood was a small green patch on a piece of paper. For the Welsh Division it had been a bloody nightmare.⁠ ⁠… “Is the sun too strong for you here, Arthur?” Arthur shakes his head and frowns up at the sky. Then the father, with his neatly-trimmed beard and elegant buff linen waistcoat, begins to read him Haig’s latest despatch. “There is strong evidence that the enemy forces engaged on the battlefront have been severely shaken by the repeated successes gained by ourselves and our Allies.⁠ ⁠…” The level cultivated voice palavers on until the nurse approaches brightly with a spouted feeding-cup. “Time for some more beef-tea!” Nourishment is administered under approving parental eyes.

III

During my last week I was allowed out of the hospital in the afternoons, and I used to go up the Cherwell in a canoe. I found this recreation rather heavy work, for the water was a jungle of weeds and on the higher reaches progress had become almost impossible. Certainly the Great War had made a difference to the charming River Cherwell. But I had been feeling much more cheerful lately, for my friend Cromlech had risen again from the dead. I had seen his name in the newspaper list of killed, but soon afterwards someone telegraphed to tell me that he was in a London hospital and going on well. For fully a fortnight I had accustomed myself to the idea that his dead body was somewhere among the Somme shell-holes, and it was a queer experience, to be disentangling myself from the mental obituary notices which I had evolved out of my luminous memories of our companionship in the First Battalion. “Silly old devil,” I thought affectionately; “he always manages to do things differently from other people.”

By the end of August I was back at Butley with a month’s sick-leave and the possibility of an extension. So for the first week or two I forgot the future and enjoyed being made a fuss of by Aunt Evelyn. My outlook on the War was limited to the Battalion I had served with. After being kept out of the Line for nearly five weeks, they were expecting to be moved up at any moment. This news came in a letter from Durley. Suppressing such disquietude as it caused me, I put the letter in my pocket and went out to potter round the garden. It was a fine early September morning⁠—almost my favourite sort of weather, I thought. The garden was getting wild and overgrown, for there was only one old man working in it now. The day before I had begun an attempt to recivilize the tangled tennis-lawn, but it had been too much like canoeing on the Cherwell, and today I decided to cut dead wood out of the cedar. While I climbed about in the tree with a billhook in my hand I could hear old Huckett trundling the water-tank along the kitchen garden. Then Aunt Evelyn came along with her flower-basket full of dahlias; while she was gazing up at me another brittle bough cracked and fell, scaring one of the cats who followed her about. She begged me to be careful, adding that it would be no joke to tumble out of such a big tree.

Later in the morning I visited the stables. Stagnation had settled there; nettles were thick under the apple-trees and the old mowing-machine pony grazed in shaggy solitude. In Dixon’s little harness-room, saddles were getting mouldy and there were rust-spots on the bits and stirrup-irons which he had kept so bright. A tin of Harvey’s Hoof Ointment had obviously been there since 1914. It would take Dixon a long time to get the place straightened up, I thought, forgetting for a moment that he’d been dead six months.⁠ ⁠… It wasn’t much fun, mooning about the stables. But a robin trilled his little autumn song from an apple-tree; beyond the fruit-laden branches I could see the sunlit untroubled Weald, and I looked lovingly at the cowls of hop-kilns which twinkled across those miles that were the country of my childhood. I could smell autumn in the air, too, and I thought I must try to get a few days clubbing before I go back to the Depot. Down in Sussex there were a few people who would willingly lend me a horse, and I decided to write to old Colonel Hesmon about it. I went up to the schoolroom to do this; rummaging in a drawer for some notepaper, I discovered a little pocket mirror⁠—a relic of my days in the ranks of the Yeomanry. Handling it absentmindedly, I found myself using it to decipher the blotting-paper, which had evidently been on the table some time, for the handwriting was Stephen Colwood’s. “P.S. The Old Guvnor is squaring up my annual indebtedness. Isn’t he a brick?” Stephen must have scribbled that when he was staying with us in the summer of 1914. Probably he had been writing to his soldier brother in Ireland. I imagined him adding the postscript and blotting it quickly. Queer how the past crops up, I thought, sadly, for my experience of such poignant associations was “still in its infancy,” as someone had said of Poison Gas when lecturing to cannon-fodder at the Army School.

Remembering myself at that particular moment, I realize the difficulty of recapturing wartime atmosphere as it was in England then. A war historian would inform us that “the earlier excitement and suspense had now abated, and the nation had settled down to its organization of manpower and munition-making.” I want to recover something more ultimate than that, but I can’t swear to anything unusual at Butley except a derelict cricket field, the absence of most of the younger inhabitants, and a certain amount of talk about food prospects for the winter. Two of our nearest neighbours had lost their only sons, and with them their main interest in life; but such tragedies as those remained intimate and unobtrusive. Ladies worked at the Local Hospital and elderly gentlemen superintended Recruiting Centres and Tribunals; but there was little outward change and no military training-camp within a radius of ten miles. So I think I am accurate when I say that Aunt Evelyn was jogging along much as usual (now that her mind was temporarily at rest about my own active service career). She was, of course, a bit intolerant about the Germans, having swallowed all the stories about atrocities in Belgium. It was her duty, as a patriotic Englishwoman, to agree with a certain prelate when he preached the axiom that “every man who killed a German was performing a Christian act.” Nevertheless, if Aunt Evelyn had found a wounded Prussian when she was on her way to the post office, she would undoubtedly have behaved with her natural humanity (combined with enthusiasm for administering first aid). In the meantime we avoided controversial topics (such as that all Germans were fiends in human form) and while I was writing my letter to Colonel Hesmon she entered the schoolroom with her arms full of lavender which she strewed along the floor under the window. The sun would dry it nicely there, she said, adding that I must find her a very dull old party nowadays, since she had no conversation and seemed to spend all her time trying to catch a new housemaid. I assured her that it was a great relief, after being incessantly ordered about in the Army, to be with someone who had no conversation.

But after dinner that evening I did find myself a bit dull, so I walked across the fields for a chat with Protheroe, a middle-aged bachelor who lived in a modest old house with his quiet sister. Before I started my aunt implored me to be careful about extinguishing the oil lamp in the drawing-room when I got back. Oil lamps were far from safe⁠—downright dangerous, in fact!

The night was very still; as I went along the field path I was almost sure I could hear the guns. Not that I wanted to; but the newspapers reported that a new offensive had been started at Guillemont, and I couldn’t help feeling that our Division was in it. (I still thought of it as “our Division.”) Our village was quiet enough, anyhow, and so was Protheroe’s white-faced house, with its creaking gate and red-blinded windows. I rapped with the knocker and Miss Protheroe came to the door, quite surprised to see me, though I’d seen her a few hours before when she called to return last month’s Blackwood’s Magazine. Protheroe was in the middle of a game of chess with the village doctor, a reticent little man whose smallest actions were always extremely deliberate. The doctor would make up his mind to move one of his men, grasp it resolutely, become hesitative, release it, and then begin his cogitative chin-rubbing and eye-puckering all over again, while Protheroe drummed his fingers on the table and stared at a moth which was bumping softly against the ceiling of the snug little parlour, and his sister, with gentle careworn face, knitted something woollen for the brother who, though past forty, was serving as a corporal in the infantry in France. My arrival put a stop to the doctor’s perplexities; and since I was welcomed rather as a returned hero, I was inclined to be hearty. I slapped Protheroe on the back, told him he’d got the best dugout in Butley, and allowed myself to be encouraged to discuss the War. I admitted that it was pretty bad out there, with an inward feeling that such horrors as I had been obliged to witness were now something to be proud of. I even went so far as to assert that I wouldn’t have missed this War for anything. It brought things home to one somehow, I remarked, frowning portentously as I lit my pipe, and forgetting for the moment what a mercy it had been when it brought me home myself. Oh yes, I knew all about the Battle of the Somme, and could assure them that we should be in Bapaume by October. Replying to their tributary questions, I felt that they envied me my experience.

While I was on my way home, I felt elated at having outgrown the parish boundaries of Butley. After all, it was a big thing, to have been in the thick of a European War, and my peacetime existence had been idle and purposeless. It was bad luck on Protheroe and the doctor; they must hate being left out of it.⁠ ⁠… I suppose one must give this damned War its due, I thought, as I sat in the schoolroom with one candle burning. I felt comfortable, for Miss Protheroe had made me a cup of cocoa. I took Durley’s letter out of my pocket and had another look at it; but it wasn’t easy to speculate on its implications. The War’s all right as long as one doesn’t get killed or smashed up, I decided, blowing out the candle so that I could watch the moonlight which latticed the floor with shadows of the leaded windows. Where the moonbeams lay thickest they touched the litter of drying lavender. I opened the window and sniffed the autumn-smelling air. An owl hooted in the garden, and I could hear a train going along the Weald. Probably a hospital-train from Dover, I thought, as I closed the window and creaked upstairs on tiptoe so as not to disturb Aunt Evelyn.

About a week afterwards I received two letters from Dottrell, written on consecutive days, but delivered by the same post. The first one began:

“The old Batt. is having a rough time. We were up in the front a week ago and lost 200 men in three days. The aid-post, a bit of a dugout hastily made, was blown in. At the time it contained 5 wounded men, 5 stretcher-bearers, and the doctor. All were killed except the Doc. who was buried in the debris. He was so badly shaken when dug out that he had to be sent down, and will probably be in England by now. It is a hell of a place up there. The Batt. is attacking today. I hope they have better luck. The outlook is not rosy. Very glad to hear you are sitting up and taking nourishment. A lot of our best men have been knocked out recently. We shall soon want another Batt. All the boys send their love and best wishes in which your humble heartily joins.”

The second letter, which I chanced to open and read first, was the worst of the two.

“Dear Kangaroo.⁠ ⁠… Just a line to let you know what rotten bad luck we had yesterday. We attacked Ginchy with a very weak Batt. (about 300) and captured the place but were forced out of half of it⁠—due to the usual thing. Poor Edmunds was killed leading his Coy. Also Perrin. Durley was badly wounded, in neck and chest, I think. It is terrible to think of these two splendid chaps being cut off, but I hope Durley pulls through. Asbestos Bill died of wounds. Fernby, who was O.C. Bombers, very badly hit and not expected to live. Several others you don’t know also killed. Only two officers got back without being hit. C.S.M. Miles and Danby both killed. The Batt. is not now over strength for rations! The rest of the Brigade suffered in proportion. Will write later. Very busy.”⁠ ⁠…

I walked about the room, whistling and putting the pictures straight. Then the gong rang for luncheon. Aunt Evelyn drew my attention to the figs, which were the best we’d had off the old tree that autumn.

IV

October brought an extension of my sick-leave and some mornings with the hounds. By the time I received another letter from Dottrell, Delville Wood had more or less buried its dead, in my mind if not altogether in reality. The old Quartermaster let off steam in a good grumble from which I quote a specimen.

“Well, we have been out at rest about 10 kilos from the place we were at last Xmas. We expected to be there three weeks but after 8 days have had sudden orders to move to the old old spot with a Why. Kinjack left us to take command of a Brigade; a great loss to the Batt. They all come and go; stay in the Batt. long enough to get something out of it, and then disappear and will hardly give a thought to the men and officers who were the means of getting them higher rank. It’s a selfish world, my friend. All successive C.O.s beg me to stay with the old Battalion they love so well. I do. So do they, till they get a better job. They neither know nor care what happens to me (who at their special request have stuck to ‘the dear old Corps’) when I leave the Service on a pension of 30s. a week.”

I am afraid I wasn’t worrying overmuch about “the dear old Corps” myself, while out with the Ringwell Hounds on Colonel Hesmon’s horses. In spite of the War, hunting was being carried on comfortably, though few people came out. “The game was being kept alive for the sake of the boys at the Front,” who certainly enjoyed the idea (if they happened to be keen fox-hunters and were still alive to appreciate the effort made on their behalf). As for me, I was armed with my uniform and the protective colouring of my Military Cross, and no one could do enough for me. I stayed as long as I liked with Moffat, the genial man who now combined the offices of Master and Secretary, and for a few weeks the prewar past appeared to have been conjured up for my special benefit. It was difficult to believe that the misty autumn mornings, which made me free of those well-known woods and farms and downs, were simultaneously shedding an irrelevant brightness on the Ypres Salient and on Joe Dottrell riding wearily back with the ration-party somewhere near Plug Street Wood. I don’t think I could see it quite like that at the time. What I am writing now is the result of a bird’s-eye view of the past, and the cub-hunting subaltern I see there is part of the “selfish world” to which his attention had been drawn. He is listening to Colonel Hesmon while the hounds are being blown out of a big wood⁠—hearing how well young Winchell has done with his Brigade (without wondering how many of them have been “blown out” of their trenches) and being assured by the loquacious old Colonel that the German Count who used to live at Puxford Park was undoubtedly a spy and only hunted with the Ringwell for that reason; the Colonel now regretted that he didn’t ride over to Puxford Park and break all the windows before war was declared. He also declared that any man under forty who wasn’t wearing the King’s uniform was nothing but a damned shirker. I remarked to Moffat afterwards that the Colonel seemed to be overdoing it a bit about the War. Moffat told me that the old boy was known to have practised revolver-shooting in his garden, addressing insults to individual tree trunks and thus ventilating his opinion of Germany as a whole. He had been much the same about vulpicides and socialists in peacetime. “It’s very odd; for Hesmon’s an extraordinarily kindhearted man,” said Moffat, who himself regarded the War as an unmitigated nuisance, but didn’t waste his energy abusing it or anybody else. He had enough to do already, for he found it far from easy to keep the Hunt on its legs, and what the hounds would get to eat next year he really didn’t know. He added that “the Missus’s dachshunds only just escaped being interned as enemy aliens.”

Sport in Sussex was only a makeshift exhilaration, and early in November I went to London for a final Medical Board. At the Caxton Hall in Westminster I spent a few minutes gazing funereally round an empty waiting-room. Above the fireplace (there was no fire) hung a neatly-framed notice for the benefit of all whom it might concern. It stated the scale of prices for artificial limbs, with instructions as to how officers could obtain them free of cost. The room contained no other ornament. While I was adjusting my mind to what a journalist might have called “the grim humour” of this footnote to Army life, a Girl Guide stepped in to say that Colonel Crossbones (or whatever his cognomen was) would see me now. A few formalities put paid to my period of freedom, and I pretended to be feeling pleased as I walked away from Westminster, though wondering whether the politicians had any expectation that hostilities would be concluded by Christmas, and eyeing the Admiralty with a notion that it must be rather nice to be in the Navy.

Goodbyes began all over again. A last day with the Ringwell ended at the crossroads by the old Harcombe point-to-point course. I went one way and the hounds went another. Jogging down the lane, they disappeared in the drizzling dusk. Moffat’s “Best of luck, old boy!” left me to ride on, alone with the creak of the saddle. I was due back at the Depot next day, but we’d had a good woodland hunt with one quite nice bit in the open, and I’d jumped a lot of timber and thoroughly enjoyed my day. Staring at the dim brown landscape I decided that the War was worth while if it was being carried on to safeguard this sort of thing. Was it? I wondered; and if a doubt arose it was dismissed before it had been formulated. Riding into Downfield where I was leaving the horse which had been lent me, I remembered how I’d slept on the floor of the Town Hall on the day war was declared. Two years and three months ago I had enlisted for “three years or the duration.” It was beginning to look as if I had enlisted for a lifetime (though the word was one which had seen better days). Under the looming shadow of the hills the lights of the town twinkled cosily. But a distant bugle-call from some camp seemed to be summoning the last reluctant farm labourer. “You’ll all have to go in the end,” it seemed to say, and the comfortless call was being sounded far across Europe.⁠ ⁠…

On my way home in the train I read about Romania in the paper. Everyone, Aunt Evelyn included, had been delighted when Romania came in on our side in August. But the results had not been reassuring. I couldn’t help feeling annoyed with the Romanian Army for allowing their country to be overrun by the Germans. They really might have put up a better show than that!