That London leave is curiously blurred in my memory. It was only my body that was in England; my soul was in France. I rushed from tailors to bankers, from bankers to bootmakers, from bootmakers to lunches and theatres; I met people and laughed with people and said “Good-bye” to people, but there was nothing real in anything that I saw or did. In imagination I saw myself on the Amiens road fighting. “Our backs are to the wall,” Sir Douglas Haig had told us. “The Canadians will advance or fall with their faces to the foe”—that was how my Corps Commander’s special order had run. Every moment that I was not there with the chaps seemed shameful. If we were beaten back it seemed that it would be my fault—one more man in the line might make all the difference. How little I was noticing the world about me was emphasized by one small incident. I had been taxi riding all over the map in a frenzied effort to collect my gear. In these war-days London taxi-drivers have developed short tempers, especially for fares who keep them waiting. My man had been extraordinarily docile. At the end of two hours, when I had deposited some of my baggage at Victoria, I said to him, “I suppose I’d better pay you off now. I’ve got to go to Battersea; you won’t want to go there, so I’ll have to go by train.” “My time’s yours,” said the man. “We can’t get any jobs since this offensive started; all the officers have left for France.” It was true, and I hadn’t noticed it. The restaurants were empty, except for a few civilians. You could get seats for any theatre and as many as you wanted. Almost over night the soldier-men had departed. I remember with peculiar vividness the attitude of my friends towards me. They treated me as a person who tomorrow would be dead—the way we treated men in khaki in 1914, before we had learnt that not every man who goes into battle stays there a corpse. My two brothers got leave from the Navy and came to see me off. I left them to do the booking of rooms at the hotel: when we went up to bed the night before I started, I found that instead of booking three rooms, they had booked one room with two beds. I didn’t comment on it. It was dark when we rose. While we dressed, we talked emptily with a feverish jocularity. In the midst of a hurried breakfast four friends appeared, who had given me no previous warning of their intentions. They were people who liked their comfort; they must have travelled by workmen’s trains to get there. Chatting with a spurious gaiety, we walked over to the station through the damp raw half-light. I wasn’t allowed to carry anything. As though their minds were clocks ticking, I could hear them repeating over and over, “The Canadians will advance, or fall with their faces to the foe. Our backs are to the wall—He’ll fall,” they kept repeating; “he’ll fall.”