If we had not gone out I don't know what would have happened. But I can guess. II And so Philpott finally broke his nerve. But he was still keen and resolute to go on, in spite of the bitterness in his heart. Philpott--and other things--had still to break his spirit. And the 'other things' were many that winter. It was a long, cold, comfortless winter. Billets became more and more broken and windowless and lousy; firewood vanished, and there was little coal. On the high slopes there was a bitter wind, and men went sick in hundreds--pneumonia, fever, frost-bite. All dug-outs were damp and chilling and greasy with mud, or full of the acrid wood-smoke that tortured the eyes. There were night advances in the snow, where lightly wounded men perished of exposure before dawn. For a fortnight we lived in tents on a hill-top covered with snow. And one day Harry discovered he was lousy.... Then, socially, though it seems a strange thing to say, these were dull days for Harry. Few people realize how much an infantryman's life is lightened if he has companions of his own kind--not necessarily of the same class, though it usually comes to that--but of the same tastes and education and experience--men who make the same kind of jokes. In the line it matters little, a man is a man, as the Press will tell you. But in the evenings, out at rest, it was good and cheering to sit with the Old Crowd and exchange old stories of Gallipoli and Oxford and London; even to argue with Eustace about the Public Schools; to be with men who liked the same songs, the same tunes on the gramophone, who did not always ask for 'My Dixie Bird' or 'The Green Woman' waltz.... And now there was none of the Old Crowd left, only Harry and myself, Harry with a company now, and myself very busy at Headquarters. And Harry's company were very dull men, promoted N.C.O.'s mostly, good fellows all--very good in the line--but they were not the Old Crowd. Now, instead of those great evenings we used to have, with the white wine, and the music, and old George dancing, evenings that have come down in the history of the battalion as our battles have done, evenings that kept the spirit strong in the blackest times--there were morose men with wooden faces sitting silently over some whisky and Battalion Orders.... And Hewett was dead, the laughing, lovable Hewett. That was the black heart of it. When a man becomes part of the great machine, he is generally supposed--I know not why--to surrender with his body his soul and his affections and all his human tendernesses. But it is not so. We never talked of Hewett very much. Only there was for ever a great gap. And sometimes, when we tried to be cheerful in the evenings, as in the old times, and were not, we said to each other--Harry and I--'I wish to God that he was here.' Yet for long periods I forgot Hewett. Harry never forgot him.