II

enormous thudding on the horizon and an aeroplane humming across the clear sky. For some obscure reason I felt confident and serene. My thoughts assured me that I wouldn’t go back to England tomorrow if I were offered an improbable choice between that and the battle. Why should I feel elated at the prospect of the battle, I wondered. It couldn’t be only the coffee and eggs which had caused me to feel so acquiescent. Last year, before the Somme, I hadn’t known what I was in for. I knew now, and the idea was giving me emotional satisfaction! I had often read those farewell letters from second-lieutenants to their relatives which the newspapers were so fond of printing. “Never has life brought me such an abundance of noble feelings,” and so on. I had always found it difficult to believe that these young men had really felt happy with death staring them in the face, and I resented any sentimentalizing of infantry attacks. But here was I, working myself up into a similar mental condition, as though going over the top were a species of religious experience. Was it some suicidal self-deceiving escape from the limitless malevolence of the Front Line?⁠ ⁠… Well, whatever it was, it was some compensation for the loss of last year’s daydreams about England (which I could no longer indulge in, owing to an indefinite hostility to “people at home who couldn’t understand”). I was beginning to feel rather arrogant toward “people at home.” But my mind was in a muddle; the War was too big an event for one man to stand alone in. All I knew was that I’d lost my faith in it, and there was nothing left to believe in except “the Battalion spirit.” The Battalion spirit meant living oneself into comfortable companionship with the officers and N.C.O. s around one; it meant winning the respect, or even the affection, of platoon and company. But while exploring my way into the War I had discovered the impermanence of its humanities. One evening we could be all together in a cosy room in Corbie, with Wilmot playing the piano and Dunning telling me about the eccentric old ladies who lived in his mother’s boardinghouse in Bloomsbury. A single machine-gun or a few shells might wipe out the whole picture within a week. Last summer the First Battalion had been