However, as it seemed that I was destined for a short life, I determined to make it as merry as possible, and in the company of a kindred spirit, who was posted from hospital a couple of days after I was, and who is now a Bimbashi in the Soudan, I went up to town about three nights a week, danced and did a course of theatres. By day there was no work to do as the brigade already had far too many officers, none of whom had been out. The battery to which we were both posted was composed of category C1 men,--flat-footed unfortunates, unfit to fight on medical grounds, not even strong enough to groom horses properly. A futile existence in paths of unintelligence and unendeavour worshipping perforce at the altar of destruction, creating nothing, a slave to dishonesty and jobbery,--a waste of life that made one mad with rage in that everything beautiful in the world was snapped in half and flung away because the social fabric which we ourselves had made through the centuries, had at last become rotten to the core and broken into flaming slaughter, and was being fanned by yellow press hypocrisy. Every ideal cried out against it. The sins of the fathers upon the wilfully blind children. The Kaiser was only the most pitch-covered torch chosen by Nemesis to set the bonfire of civilisation ablaze. But for one branch in the family tree he would have been England’s monarch, and then----? There have been moments when I have regretted not having sailed to New York in August, 1914,--bitter moments when all the dishonesty has beaten upon one’s brain, and one has envied the pluck of the honest conscientious objector who has stood out against the ridicule of the civilised world. The only thought that kept me going was “suppose the Huns had landed in England and I had not been fighting?” It was unanswerable,--as I thought then. Now I wish that the Hun had landed in England in force and laid waste the East coast, as he has devastated Belgium and the north of France. There would have been English refugees with perambulators and babies, profiteers crying “Kamerad!” politicians fleeing the House. There would have been some hope of England’s understanding. But she doesn’t even now. There were in 1918, before the armistice, men--MEN!--who, because their valets failed to put their cuff links in their shirts one morning, were sarcastic to their war-working wives, and talked of the sacrifices they had made for their country. How _dared_ they have valets, while we were lousy and unshaved, with rotting corpses round our gun wheels? How _dared_ they have wives, while we “unmarried and without ties” were either driven in our weakness to licensed women, or clung to our chastity because of the one woman with us every hour in our hearts, whom we meant to marry if ever we came whole out of that hell? 2