After one particularly bad spell of trenches I got bad news in a letter from Charterhouse. Bad news in the trenches might affect a man in either of two ways. It might drive him to suicide (or recklessness amounting to suicide), or it might seem trivial in comparison with present expediences and be disregarded. But unless his leave was due he was helpless. A year later, when I was in trenches in the same sector, an officer of the North Staffordshire Regiment had news from home that his wife was living with another man. He went out on a raid the same night and was either killed or captured; so the men with him said. There had been a fight and they had come back without him. Two days later he was arrested at Béthune trying to board a leave-train to go home; he had intended to shoot up the wife and her lover. He was court-martialled for deserting in the face of the enemy, but the court was content to cashier him. He went as a private soldier to another regiment. I do not know what happened afterwards. The bad news was about Dick, saying that he was not at all the innocent sort of fellow I took him for. He was as bad as anyone could be. The letter was written by a cousin of mine who was still at Charterhouse. I tried not to believe it. I remembered that he owed me a grudge and decided that this was a very cruel act of spite. Dick’s letters had been my greatest stand-by all these months when I was feeling low; he wrote every week, mostly about poetry. They were something solid and clean to set off against the impermanence of trench life and the uncleanness of sex-life in billets. I was now back in Béthune. Two officers of another company had just been telling me how they had jslept, in the same room, one with the mother and one with the daughter. They had tossed for the mother because the daughter was a ‘yellow-looking little thing like a lizard.’ And the Red Lamp, the army brothel, was round the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one or the other of the three women in the house. My servant, who had been in the queue, told me that the charge was ten francs a man—about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. The assistant provost-marshal had told me that three weeks was the usual limit, ‘after which the woman retires on her earnings, pale but proud.’ I was always being teased because I would not sleep even with the nicer girls. And I excused myself, not on moral grounds or on grounds of fastidiousness, but in the only way they could understand: I said that I didn’t want a dose. A good deal of talk in billets was about the peculiar bed-manners of the French women. ‘She was very nice and full of games. I said to her: “S’il vous plaît, ôtes-toi la chemise, ma chérie.” But she wouldn’t. She said, “Oh no’-non, mon lieutenant. Ce