I began functioning. My servant summoned all the heads of departments and they appeared before me in a sullen row. At my suggestion tongues wagged freely for about half an hour. I addressed them in their own language and then, metaphorically speaking, we shook hands all round, sang hymn number 44 and standings suddenly began to spring up like mushrooms. It was really extraordinary how those fellows worked once they’d got the hang of the thing. It left me free to go joy-riding with my stable companion in the afternoons. We carried mackintoshes on the saddle and scoured the country, splashing into Bailleul--it was odd to revisit the scene of my trooper days after three years--for gramophone records, smokes, stomachic delicacies and books. We also sunk a lot of francs in a series of highly artistic picture postcards which, pinned all round the hut at eye level, were a constant source of admiration and delight to the servants and furnished us with a splash of colour which at least broke the monotony of khaki canvas. These were--it goes without saying--supplemented from time to time with the more reticent efforts of _La Vie Parisienne_. All things being equal we were extremely comfortable, and, although the stove was full of surprises, quite sufficiently frowzy during the long evenings, which were filled with argument, invention, music and much tobacco. The invention part of the programme was supplied by my stable companion who had his own theories concerning acetylene lamps, and who, with the aid of a couple of shell cases and a little carbide nearly wrecked the happy home. Inventions were therefore suppressed. They were tranquil days, in which we built not only book shelves, stoves and horse standings but a great friendship,--ended only by his death on the battlefield. He was all for the gun line and its greater strenuousness. As for me, then, at least, I was content to lie fallow. I had seen too much of the guns, thanked God for the opportunity of doing something utterly different for a time and tried to conduct a mental spring-clean and rearrangement. As a means to this I found myself putting ideas on paper in verse--a thing I’d never done in all my life--bad stuff but horribly real. One’s mind was tied to war, like a horse on a picketing rope, and could only go round and round in a narrow circle. To break away was impossible. One was saturated with it as the country was with blood. Every cog in the machinery of war was like a magnet which held one in spite of all one’s struggles, giddy with the noise, dazed by its enormity, nauseated by its results.