On the beach one day Bartlett and I saw an old ship’s fender; the knotted ropes at the top had frayed into something that looked like hair, so Bartlett said to me: ‘Poor fellow, I knew him well. He was in my platoon in the Hampshire Regiment and jumped overboard from the hospital ship.’ A little farther along we found an old pair of trousers half in the water, and a coat, and then some socks and a boot. So we dressed up Bartlett’s old comrade, draped sea-weed over him where necessary, and walked on. Soon after we met a coastguard and turned back with him. We said: ‘There’s a dead man on the beach.’ He stopped a few yards off and said, holding his nose: ‘Pooh, don’t he ’alf stink!’ We turned again, leaving him with the dead, and the next day read in the Isle of Wight paper of a hoax that ‘certain convalescent officers at Osborne’ had played on the coroner. Bartlett and I were nonsensical, and changed the labels of all the pictures in the galleries. Anything to make people laugh. But it was hard work. XXIV I used to hear from Siegfried regularly. He had written in March from the Second Battalion asking me to pull myself together and send him a letter because he was horribly low in spirits. He complained that he had not been made at all welcome. A Special Reserve officer who had transferred to the Second Battalion and was an acting-captain had gone so far as to call him a bloody wart and allude to the bloody First Battalion. He had swallowed the insult, but was trying to get transferred to the First Battalion. The Second was resting until the end of the month about two miles from Morlancourt (where we had been together in the previous March), surrounded by billows of mud slopes and muddy woods and aerodromes and fine new railroads, where he used to lollop around on the black mare of an afternoon watching the shells bursting away by the citadel. The black mare was a beautiful combative creature with a homicidal kink, only ridden by Siegfried. David Thomas and I once watched him breaking her in. His patience was wonderful. He would put the mare at a jump and she would sulk; and he would not force her but turn her around and then lead her back to it. Time after time she refused, but could not provoke his ill-temper or make him give up his intention. Finally she took the jump in mere boredom. It was a six-footer, and she could manage higher than that. He was in C Company now, he wrote, with a half-witted platoon awaiting his orders to do or die, and a beast of a stiff arm where Dr. Dunn had inoculated him, sticking his needle in and saying: ‘Toughest skin of the lot, but you’re a tough character, I know.’ Siegfried protested that he was not so tough as Dunn thought. He was hoping that the battalion would get into some sort of show soon; it would be a relief after all these weeks of irritation and discomfort and disappointment. (That was a feeling that one usually had in the Second Battalion.) He supposed that