You see the new officer, the men of the new draft, abstracted, with a rather wistful look on their faces, as they gaze into the brazier, or sit silently in billets when their work is done. You have felt like that, and you know what is the matter. The symptoms are not to be encouraged in the individual nor the mass. They lead to strong drink and dissipation, for no man can preserve his inward calm for long, if he dwells much on his dearest recollections of Home. There is but one remedy: work, and lots of it, action, movement, anything to distract. Many a man has committed some small “crime” that brought him to Orderly Room because he allowed his mind to wander ... Home--and realised too fully the percentage of his chances of ever seeing that home again. The Front is not a garden of Allah, or a bed of roses, or even a tenth-rate music-hall as some people would have us believe. It has to be made bearable by the spirit of those who endure it. There is enough that is grim and awe-inspiring--aye! and heart-rending, without seeking it. That is why we do not like certain kinds of music at the Front, why the one-time student of “intense” music develops an uncontrollable predilection for wild and woolly rag-time strains, and never winces at their execution however faulty. That is why the Estaminets sell so much bad beer, and so much _vin mousseux_ under the generic title of Champagne. Men want to forget about Home, for they dare not think of it too much. I have never heard a man speak of Home without a little hush in his voice, as though he spoke of something sacred that was, and might not be again. How often one heard the remark, a kind of apologia: “One must do something.” Yet, in spite of all they do to forget Home, they are least happy who have none to forget. Fortunately they are few. It is a strange provision of Providence that lends zest to the attempt at oblivion, and induces a frame of mind that yearns through that attempt for the very things it would fain forget! After all, it is very much like the school-boy who longs for privacy where he can blubber unseen, and is at the same time very glad that he has not got it, and _can’t_ blubber, because his school-fellows would see him! A superficial observer might think that the men at the Front are purely callous, intent on seizing lustily on every possible chance of doubtful and other pleasures that they can obtain. He may think that war has brutalised them, numbed their consciences, steeled their hearts. Or he may class them as of low intellect. In all of which he is wrong, and has utterly failed to grasp the morale of the man who lives to fight to-day, never knowing of a certainty if he will see another dawn. The soldier knows that he may not dwell in his heart on all he holds most dear. It “takes the stuffing out of him.” So, according to his lights, he works very hard indeed to keep up his spirits; to forget. Not _really_ to forget, only to pretend to himself that he is forgetting.