I enjoyed being at Somerville. It was warm weather and the discipline of the hospital was easy. We used to lounge about in the grounds in our pyjamas and dressing-gowns, and even walk out into St. Giles’ and down the Cornmarket (also in pyjamas and dressing-gowns) for a morning cup of coffee at the Cadena. And there was a V.A.D. probationer with whom I fell in love. I did not tell her so at the time. This was the first time that I had fallen in love with a woman, and I had difficulty in adjusting myself to the experience. I used to meet her when I visited a friend in another ward, but we had little talk together. I wrote to her after leaving hospital. When I found that she was engaged to a subaltern in France I stopped writing. I had seen what it felt like to be in France and have somebody else playing about with one’s girl. Yet by the way she wrote reproving me for not writing she may well have been as fond of me as she was of him. I did not press the point. There was the end of it, almost before it started. While I was with the cadet battalion I used to go out to tea nearly every Sunday to Garsington. Siegfried’s friends, Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell, lived at the manor house there. The Morrells were pacifists and it was here that I first heard that there was another side to the question of war guilt. Clive Bell was working on the manor farm; he was a conscientious objector, and had been permitted to do this, as work of national importance, instead of going into the army. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey and the Hon. Bertrand Russell were frequent visitors. Aldous was unfit, otherwise he would certainly have been in the army like Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Herbert Read, Siegfried, Wilfred Owen, myself and most other young writers of the time, none of whom now believed in the war. Bertrand Russell, who was beyond the age of liability for military service but an ardent pacifist (a rare combination), turned sharply on me one afternoon and said: ‘Tell me, if a company of men of your regiment were brought along to break a strike of munition makers and the munition makers refused to submit, would you order the men to fire?’ I said: ‘Yes, if everything else failed. It would be no worse than shooting Germans, really.’ He was surprised and asked: ‘Would your men obey you?’ ‘Of course they would,’ I said; ‘they loathe munition makers and would be only too glad of a chance to shoot a few. They think that they’re all skrim-shankers.’ ‘But they realize that the war’s all wicked nonsense?’ ‘Yes, as well as I do.’ He could not understand my attitude.