To one recollection at least it has seemed that the New Army's spring-tide of faith and joyous illusion came to its height on a night late in the most beautiful May of 1915, in a hut where thirty men slept near a forest in Essex. Nothing particular happened; the night was like others. Yet in the times that came after, when half of the thirty were dead and most of the others jaded and soured, the feel of that night would come back with the strange distinctness of those picked, remembered mornings and evenings of boyhood when everything that there was became everlastingly memorable as though it had been the morning or evening of the first day. Ten o'clock came and Lights Out, but a kind of luminous bloom still on the air and a bugle blowing Last Post in some far-away camp that kept worse hours than we. I believe the whole hut held its breath to hear the notes better. Who wouldn't, to listen to that most lovely and melancholy of calls, the noble death of each day's life, a sound moving about hither and thither, like a veiled figure making gestures both stately and tender, among the dim thoughts that we have about death the approaching extinguisher--resignation and sadness and unfulfilment and triumph all coming back to the overbearing sense of extinction in those two recurrent notes of "Lights Out"? One listens as if with bowed mind, as though saying "Yes; out, out, brief candle." A moment's silence to let it sink in and the chaffing and laughter broke out like a splash of cool water in summer again. That hut always went to bed laughing and chaffing all round, and, though there was no wit among us, the stories tasted of life, the inexhaustible game and adventure. Looker, ex-marine turned soldier, told us how he had once gone down in a diving-suit to find a lost anchor and struck on the old tin lining out of a crate, from which some octopian beast with long feelers had reached out at him, and the feelers had come nearer and nearer through the dim water. "What did you do, Filthy?" somebody asked (we called Looker "Filthy" with friendly jocoseness). "I 'opped it," the good fellow said, and the sane anti-climax of real life seemed twice as good as the climax that any Hugo or Verne could have put to the yarn. Another described the great life he had lived as an old racing "hen," or minor sutler of the sport of kings. Hard work, of course. "All day down at Epsom openin' doors an' brushin' coats and shiftin' truck for bookies till you'd make, perhaps, two dollars an' speculate it on the las' race and off back 'ome to London 'ungry, on your 'oofs." Once a friend of his, who had had a bad day, had not walked--had slipped into the London train, and at Vauxhall, where tickets were taken, had gone to earth under the seat with a brief appeal to his fellow travellers: "Gents, I rely on your honour." The stout narrator could see no joke at all in the phrase. He was rather scandalized by our great roar of laughter. "'Is honour! And