Like a fool, I allowed myself to be persuaded to drink liqueur brandies after dinner that evening; and paid for it with a sleepless night. No doubt it was the unexpected meeting with Elizabeth which made me think a lot about George during those ghastly wakeful hours. I can’t claim that I had set up any altar to the deceased George in my heart, but I truly believe that I am the only person left alive who ever thinks of him. Perhaps because I was the only person who cared for George for his own sake, disinterestedly. Naturally, his death meant very little to me at the time—there were eighty deaths in my own battalion on the day George was killed, and the Armistice and getting out of the blasted Army and settling my own problems and starting civilian life again and getting to work, all occupied my attention. In fact it was not until two or three years after the war that I began to think much, if at all, about George. Then, although I didn’t in the least believe in it, I got a half-superstitious, half-sentimental idea that “he” (poor old bag of decaying bones) wanted me to think about him. I half-knew, half-guessed that the people on whom he had counted had forgotten him, at least no longer cared that he had existed; and would have been merely surprised and rather annoyed if he had suddenly come back, like one of those shell-shocked heroes of fiction who recover their wits seven years after the Armistice. His father had taken it out in religiosity, his mother in the sheik, Elizabeth in “unlicensed copulation” and brandy, and Fanny in tears, and marrying a painter. But I hadn’t taken it out in anything, I hadn’t been conscious that George’s death meant anything in particular to me; and so it was waiting inside patiently to be dealt with in due course. Friendships between soldiers during the war were a real and beautiful and unique relationship which has now entirely vanished, at least from Western Europe. Let me at once disabuse the eager-eyed Sodomites among my readers by stating emphatically once and for all that there was nothing sodomitical in these friendships. I have lived and slept for months, indeed years, with “the troops,” and had several such companionships. But no vaguest proposal was ever made to me; I never saw any signs of sodomy, and never heard anything to make me suppose it existed. However, I was with the fighting troops. I can’t answer for what went on behind the lines.