The rats worried him a little--they were bold enough to bare their teeth when they met him down a trench, and there was one big fellow called Cuthbert, who romped round his dugout and actually bit his ear one night. But these inconveniences did not seem to give any real distress to the soul of youth, out there alone and searching for human targets to kill... until one day, as I have said, everything snapped in him and the boy was broken. It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day that I met a queer apparition through a heavy snowstorm. It was a French civilian in evening dress--boiled shirt, white tie, and all--with a bowler hat bent to the storm. Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head. “It isn't true,” he said. “I don't believe it... We're mad, that's all!... The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?” We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise of gun-fire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard of snow. A little farther down the road we passed a signboard on the edge of a cratered field. New words had been painted on it in good Roman letters. Cimetiere reserve Tomlinson, the only Tomlinson, regarded it gravely and turned to me with a world of meaning in his eyes. Then he tapped his forehead and laughed. “Mad!” he said. “We're all mad!” XVIII In that winter of discontent there was one great body of splendid men whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing no hope ahead of them in that warfare of trenches and barbed wire. The cavalry believed they were “bunkered” forever, and that all their training and tradition were made futile by the digging in of armies. Now and again, when the infantry was hard pressed, as in the second battle of Ypres and the battle of Loos, they were called on to leave their horses behind and take a turn in the trenches, and then they came back again, less some of their comrades, into dirty billets remote from the fighting-lines, to exercise their horses and curse the war. Before they went into the line in February of '16 I went to see some of those cavalry officers to wish them good luck, and saw them in the trenches and afterward when they came out. In the headquarters of a squadron of “Royals”--the way in was by a ladder through the window--billeted in a village, which on a day of frost looked as quaint and pretty as a Christmas card, was a party of officers typical of the British cavalry as a whole. A few pictures cut out of La Vie Parisienne were tacked on to the walls to remind them of the arts and graces of an older mode of life, and to keep them human by the sight of a pretty face (oh, to see a pretty girl again!).