It was about this time that Siegfried wrote the poem _When I’m asleep dreaming and lulled and warm_, about the ghosts of the soldiers who had been killed, reproaching him in his dreams for his absence from the trenches, saying that they had been looking for him in the line from Ypres to Frise and had not found him. He told Rivers that he would go back to France if they would send him, making it quite clear that his views were exactly the same as they had been in July when he had written the letter of protest—only more so. He demanded a written guarantee that he would be sent back at once and not kept hanging about in a training battalion. He wrote reprehending me for the attitude I had taken in July, when I was reminding him that the regiment would only understand his protest as a lapse from good form and a failure to be a gentleman. It was suicidal stupidity and credulity, he said, to identify oneself in any way with good form or gentlemanliness, and if I had real courage I wouldn’t be acquiescing as I was. He pointed out that I admitted that the people who sacrificed the troops were callous b——s, and that the same thing was happening in all countries except parts of Russia. I forget how I answered Siegfried. I might have pointed out that when I was in France I was never such a fire-eater as he was. The amount of Germans that I had killed or caused to be killed was negligible compared with his wholesale slaughter. The fact was that the direction of Siegfried’s unconquerable idealism changed with his environment; he varied between happy warrior and bitter pacifist. His poem: To these I turn, in these I trust, Brother Lead and Sister Steel; To his blind power I make appeal, I guard her beauty clean from rust.... was originally written seriously, inspired by Colonel Campbell, v.c.’s bloodthirsty ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’ address at an army school. Later he offered it as a satire; and it is a poem that comes off whichever way you read it. I was both more consistent and less heroic than Siegfried.