It was quite truly said. Of the separation and contrast you got a full sense if fate took you straight from trench life in the stiff Flanders slime or the dreary wet chalk of the disembowelled Loos plain to one of the seats of authority far in the rear. G.H.Q., the most regal seat of them all, was divinely niched, during most of the war, at Montreuil, and Montreuil was a place to bring tears to the eyes of an artist, like Castelfranco, St. Andrews, or Windsor; the tiny walled town on a hill had that poignant fulness of loveliness, making the sense ache at it, like still summer evenings in England. It was a storied antique, unscathed and still living and warm, weathered mellow with centuries of sunshine and tranquillity, all its own old wars long laid aside and the racket of this new one very far from it. Walking among its walled gardens, where roses hung over the walls, or sitting upon the edge of the rampart, your feet dangling over among the top boughs of embosoming trees, you were not merely out of the war; you were out of all war! you entered into that beatitude of super-peace which fills your mind as you look at a Roman camp on a sunned Sussex down, where the gentle convexities of the turf seem to turn war into an old tale for children. Such gardens of enchantment were not known by sight to most of our fighting troops, but they were rumoured. The mind of Williams, in the front line, worked with a surly zest on the contrast between the two hemispheres of an army--the hemisphere of combatancy, of present torment, of scant reward, of probable extinction, and the hemisphere of non-combatancy, of comfort, of safety, of more profuse decoration, the second hemisphere ruling over the former and decimating it sometimes by feats like the Staff work of 1915. Among the straw in billets and the chalk clods in dug-outs, in the reeking hot twilight of parlours in French village inns, in the confidential darkness after Lights Out in hospital wards from Bethune to Versailles and Rouen, the vinegar tongue of Williams let itself go. Of course, he went wrong. And yet his error, like the facts which begat it, could not be helped. If all that you know of an alleged brother of yours is that he is having the best of the deal while you are getting the worst you have to be a saint of the prime to take it on trust that it really did please God, or any godlike human authority, to call him to a station in a dry hut with a stove, among the flesh-pots of an agreeable coast, and you to a station in a wet burrow full of rats and lice and yellow or white mud and ugly liabilities. And Williams was not a saint, although when he enlisted he was profusely told that he was by people who were to call him a sinner later, when as a Dundee rioter or "Bolshevik" miner, or as a Sinn Feiner or a Black-and-Tan, he transgressed some eternal law. Williams was and is only a quiet simple substance exhibiting certain normal reactions under certain chemical tests.