I found the English Literature course tedious, especially eighteenth-century poets. My tutor, Mr. Percy Simpson, the editor of Ben Jonson’s plays, sympathized. He said that he had once suffered for his preference for the Romantic revivalists. He had been beaten by his schoolmaster for having a Shelley in his possession. He had protested between the blows: ‘Shelley is beautiful! Shelley is beautiful!’ But he warned me that I must on no account disparage the eighteenth century when I sat for my final examination. It was also difficult for me, too, to concentrate on cases and genders and irregular verbs in Anglo-Saxon grammar. The Anglo-Saxon lecturer was candid about his subject. He said that it was of purely linguistic interest, that there was hardly a line of Anglo-Saxon extant of the slightest literary merit. I disagreed; _Beowulf_ and _Judith_ seemed good poems to me. Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a _promenade_ to Holofernes’s staff-tent; and _Brunanburgh_ with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting—all this was closer to most of us at the time than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century. Edmund and I found ourselves translating everything into trench-warfare terms. The war was not yet over for us. In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune-La Bassée road; the men would be singing and French children would be running along beside them, calling out: ‘Tommee, Tommee, give me bullee beef’; and I would smell the stench of the knacker’s yard just outside the town. Or I would be in Laventie High Street, passing a company billet; an N.C.O. would roar out, ‘Party, ’shun!’ and the Second Battalion men in shorts, with brown knees and brown expressionless faces, would spring to their feet from the broken steps where they were sitting. Or I would be in a barn with my first platoon of the Welsh Regiment, watching them play nap by the light of dirty candle stumps. Or it would be a deep dug-out at Cambrin, where I was talking to a signaller; I would look up the shaft and see somebody’s muddy legs coming down the steps, and there would be a crash and the tobacco-smoke in the dug-out would shake with the concussion and twist about in patterns like the marbling on books. These day-dreams persisted like an alternate life. Indeed they did not leave me until well on in 1928. I noticed that the scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; it seemed as though the emotion-recording apparatus had failed after Loos.