So in October he was discharged as medically unfit: ‘Of under-developed intelligence, unlikely to be of service in His Majesty’s Forces,’ and went home to his wife and pigs. While, of the singers, those who survived Festubert in the following May did not survive Loos in the following September. Recruit officers spent a good deal of their time at Company and Battalion Orderly Room, learning how to deal with crime. Crime, of course, meant any breach of army regulations; and there was plenty of it. In these days Battalion Orderly Room would last four or five hours every day, at the rate of one crime dealt with every three or four minutes.; This was apart from the scores of less serious offences tried by company commanders. The usual Battalion Orderly Room crimes were desertion, refusing to obey an order, using obscene language to a non-commissioned officer, drunk and disorderly, robbing a comrade, and so on. On pay-nights there was hardly a man sober; and no attention was paid so long as there was silence as soon as the company officer came on his rounds just before Lights Out. (Two years later serious crime had diminished to a twentieth of that amount, though the battalion was treble its original strength, and though many of the cases that the company officers had dealt with summarily now came before the colonel; and there was practically no drunkenness.) There was a boy called Taylor in my company. He had been at Lancaster, and I had bought him a piccolo to play when the detachment went out on route-marches; he would give us one tune after another for mile after mile. The other fellows carried his pack and rifle. At Wrexham, on pay-nights, he used to sit in the company billet, which was a drill-hall near the station, and play jigs for the drunks to dance to. He never drank himself. The music was slow at first, but he gradually quickened it until he worked them into a frenzy. He would delay this climax until my arrival with the company orderly-sergeant. The sergeant would fling open the door and bellow: ‘F Company, Attention!’ Taylor would break off, thrust the piccolo under his blankets, and spring to his feet. The drunks were left frozen in the middle of their capers, blinking stupidly. In the first Battalion Orderly Room that I attended I was surprised to hear a private soldier charged with a nursery offence, about the committal of which expert evidence was given and heard without a smile. I have an accurate record of the trial but my publishers advise me not to give it here.