One of the anthems that we used to sing was: ‘He that shall endure to the end, shall be saved.’ The words repeated themselves in my head like a charm whenever things were bad. ‘Though thousands languish and fall beside thee, And tens of thousands around thee perish, Yet still it shall not come nigh thee.’ And there was another bit: ‘To an inheritance incorruptible.... Through faith unto salvation, Ready to be revealed at the last trump.’ For ‘trump’ we always used to sing ‘crump.’ ‘The last crump’ was the end of the war and would we ever hear it burst safely behind us? I wondered whether I could endure to the end with faith unto salvation. I knew that my breaking point was near now, unless something happened to stave it off.... It was not that I was frightened. Certainly I feared death; but I had never yet lost my head through fright, and I knew that I never would. Nor would the breakdown come as insanity; I did not have it in me. It would be a general nervous collapse, with tears and twitchings and dirtied trousers. I had seen cases like that. The battalion was issued with a new gas-helmet, popularly known as ‘the goggle-eyed b——r with the tit.’ It differed from the previous models. One breathed in through the nose from inside the helmet and breathed out through a special valve held in the mouth. I found that I could not manage this. Boxing with an already broken nose had recently displaced the septum, so that I was forced to breathe through my mouth. In a gas-attack I would be unable to use the helmet and it was the only type claimed to be proof against the new German gas. The battalion doctor advised me to have an operation done as soon as I could. These months with the First Battalion have already been twice recorded in literary history; though in both cases in a disguise of names and characters. The two books are Siegfried Sassoon’s _Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man_, and _Nothing of Importance_, by Bill Adams, the battalion sniping and intelligence officer. Adam’s book did not sell, but was as good a book as 1917 censorship allowed; it should be re-printed. Adams was killed; in fact, three out of five of the officers of the First Battalion at that time were killed in the Somme fighting. Scatter’s dream of open warfare was not realized. He himself was very seriously wounded. Of A Company choir there is one survivor besides myself—C. D. Morgan, who had his thigh smashed, and was still in hospital sometime after the war ended. XIX