I remarked aloud. But as he always took my admonitions for what they were worth, the matter ended amicably, and a minute later I was able to remind him that he was going on parade without a tie.
I have already said that, as a rule, we avoided war-talk. Outwardly our opinions did not noticeably differ, though his sense of “the regimental tradition” was stronger than mine, and he “had no use for anti-war idealism.” But each of us had his own attitude toward the War. My attitude (which had not always been easy to sustain) was that I wanted to have fine feelings about it. I wanted the War to be an impressive experience—terrible, but not Horrible enough to interfere with my heroic emotions. David, on the other hand, distrusted sublimation and seemed to want the War to be even uglier than it really was. His mind loathed and yet attached itself to rank smells and squalid details. Like his face (which had a twist to it, as though seen in a slightly distorting mirror) his mental war-pictures were a little uncouth and out of focus. Though in some ways more easily shocked than I was, he had, as I once informed him, “a first-rate nose for anything nasty.” It is only fair to add that this was when he’d been discoursing about the ubiquity of certain establishments in France. His information was all secondhand; but to hear him talk—round-eyed but quite the man of experience—one might have imagined that Amiens, Abbeville, Bethune, and Armentières were mainly illuminated by “Blue Lamps” and “Red Lamps,” and that for a good young man to go through Havre or Rouen was a sort of Puritan’s Progress from this world to the next.