He was back in England and very ill. He told me that often when he went out he saw corpses lying about on the pavement. He had written from hospital, in April, how bloody it was about the Second Battalion. Yates had sent him a note saying that four officers were killed and seven wounded in the show at Fontaine-les-Croiselles, the same place that he had been at, and it had been a ‘perfectly bloody battle.’ But there had been an advance of about half a mile, which seemed to Siegfried to be some consolation. Yet, in the very next sentence, he wrote how mad it made him to think of all the good men being slaughtered that summer, and all for nothing. The bloody politicians and ditto generals with their cursed incompetent blundering and callous ideas would go on until they were tired of it or had got all the kudos they wanted. He wished he could do something to protest against it, but even if he were to shoot the Premier or Sir Douglas Haig they could only shut him up in a madhouse like Richard Dadd of glorious memory. (I recognized the allusion. Dadd was an early nineteenth-century painter who made out a list of people who deserved to be killed. The first on the list was his father. He picked him up one day in Hyde Park and carried him on his shoulders for nearly half a mile before publicly drowning him in the Serpentine.) Siegfried went on to say that if he refused to go out again as a protest they would only accuse him of being afraid of shells. He asked me whether I thought we would be any better off by the end of that summer of carnage. We would never break their line. So far, in April, we had lost more men than the Germans. The Canadians at Vimy had lost appallingly, yet the official _communiqués_ were lying unblushingly about the casualties. Julian Dadd had come to see him in hospital and, like every one else, urged him not to go out again, to take a safe job at home—but he knew that it was only a beautiful dream, that he would be morally compelled to go on until he was killed. The thought of going back now was agony, just when he had got back into the light again—‘Oh life, oh sun.’ His wound was nearly healed and he expected to be sent for three weeks to a convalescent home. He didn’t like the idea, but _anywhere_ would be good enough if he could only be quiet and see no one, just watch the trees dressing up in green and feel the same himself. He was beastly weak and in a rotten state of nerves. The gramophone in the ward plagued him beyond endurance. The _Old Huntsman_ had come out that spring after all, and, for a joke, he had sent a copy to Sir Douglas Haig. He couldn’t be stopped doing _that_ anyhow.