Aside from wounds, gas, and the accidents of war, the life of the trench soldier was, for the most part, not unhealthy. Food was plentiful and hard work in the open air made up for the discomfort of wet feet and clothes and draughty billets. A continual need for alertness discouraged minor illnesses; a cold was thrown off in a few hours, an attack of indigestion was hardly noticed. This was true, at least, in a good battalion, where the men were bent on going home either with an honourable wound or not at all. In an inferior battalion the men would prefer a wound to bronchitis, but would not mind the bronchitis. In a bad battalion they did not care ‘whether,’ in the trench phrase, ‘the cow calved or the bull broke its bloody neck.’ In a really good battalion, as the Second Battalion was when I went to it first, the question of getting wounded and going home was not permitted to be raised. Such a battalion had a very small sick list. In the 1914–15 winter there were no more than four or five casualties from ‘trench feet’ in the Second, and the following winter no more than eight or nine; the don’t-care battalions lost very heavily indeed. Trench feet was almost entirely a matter of morale, in spite of the lecture-formula that N.C.O.’s and officers used to repeat time after time to the men: ‘Trench feet is caused by tight boots, tight puttees or any other clothing calculated to interfere with the circulation of blood in the legs.’ Trench feet was caused rather by going to sleep with wet boots, cold feet, and depression. Wet boots, by themselves, did not matter. If the man warmed his feet at a brazier or stamped them until they were warm and then went off to sleep with a sandbag tied round them he took no harm. He might even fall asleep with cold, wet feet, and they might swell slightly owing to tightness of boots or puttees; but trench feet only came if he did not mind getting trench feet or anything else, because his battalion had lost the power of sticking things out. At Bouchavesnes on the Somme in the winter of 1916–17 a battalion of dismounted cavalry lost half its strength in two days from trench feet; our Second Battalion had just had ten days in the same trenches with no cases at all. Autumn was melancholy in the La Bassée sector; in the big poplar forests the leaves were French yellow and the dykes were overflowing and the ground utterly sodden. Béthune was not the place it had been; the Canadians billeted there drew two or three times as much pay as our own troops and had sent the prices up. But it was still more or less intact and one could still get cream buns and fish dinners.