I have forgotten how it was worked and whether I had a hand in it, but he was sent to Palestine this time. He seemed to like it there, and I was distressed in April to have a letter from ‘somewhere in Ephraim,’ that the division was moving to France. He wrote that he would be sorry to be in trenches, going over the top to take Morlancourt or Méaulte. Seeing that we had recaptured Morlancourt had brought it home to him. He said that he expected that the First and Second Battalions had about ceased to exist by now for the _n_th time. I heard again from him at the end of May, from France. He quoted Duhamel. ‘It was written that you should suffer without purpose and without hope, but I will not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss.’ Yet he wrote the next paragraph in his happy-warrior vein, saying that his men were the best that he’d ever served with. He wished I could see them. I mightn’t believe it, but he was training them bloody well. He couldn’t imagine whence his flamelike ardour had come, but it had come. His military efficiency was derived from the admirable pamphlets that were now issued, so different from the stuff we used to get two years before. He said that when he read my letter he began to think, damn Robert, damn every one except his company, which was the smartest turn-out ever seen, and damn Wales and damn leave and damn being wounded and damn everything except staying with his company until they were all melted away. (Limping and crawling across the shell-holes, lying very still in the afternoon sunshine in dignified desecrated attitudes.) I was to remember this mood when I saw him (_if_ I saw him) worn out and smashed up again, querulous and nerve-ridden. Or when I read something in the casualty list and got a polite letter from Mr. Lousada, his solicitor. There never was such a battalion, he said, since 1916, but in six months it would have ceased to exist. Nancy’s brother, Tony, was also in France now. Nancy’s mother made herself ill with worrying about him. Early in July he was due to come home on leave; I was on leave myself at the end of one of the four-months’ cadet courses, staying with the rest of Nancy’s family at a big Tudor house near Harlech. It was the most haunted house that I have ever been in, though the ghosts were invisible except in the mirrors. They would open and shut doors, rap on the oak panels, knock the shades off lamps, and drink the wine from the glasses at our elbows when we were not looking. The house belonged to an officer in the Second Battalion whose ancestors had most of them died of drink. There was only one visible ghost, a little yellow dog that appeared on the lawn in the early morning to announce deaths. Nancy saw it one day.