Once or twice, in the soddenness of his discontent, he was tempted to turn to the gross pleasures of drink and worse in which others found distraction from their dullness; but the temptation was never an urgent one and there was no great merit in his resistance. One night he overdrank himself in a deliberate attempt at forgetfulness—whereupon he was violently sick, crawled to bed throbbing with headache, and did not repeat the experience. He felt himself drifting mentally, and, to his credit, made efforts to save himself; tried to awaken an interest in the French language, bought a dictionary and phrase-book and attended bi-weekly classes in a neighbouring Y.M.C.A. hut. He spent a certain amount of his leisure in the Y.M.C.A. hut; borrowing books from its library, listening to its concerts, and now and again making one at a game of draughts. He made no real friends—probably because he was not in the mood for making any; with his comrades of the office he got on well enough, but there was no such tie between him and them as had existed between him and the men of his mess in the days when he first donned his uniform. The hope deferred that had sickened his heart had driven him in upon himself; then his desk-work was obviously well within his powers and outwardly there was nothing about him to call for special sympathy and kindliness. His fellows mostly looked on him as a harmless, uncompanionable chap who preferred to be left to himself. * * * * * By degrees William Tully was moulded to the narrow little life departmental and lived through its duties and hours of leisure taking not much thought for the morrow; in the Rue Ernest Dupont the war seemed much smaller, much farther away, than it had seemed at home in England, and, absorbed in its minor machinery, he could no longer consider it as a whole. The office and the daily details of the office, the companions he worked with, disliked and liked, loomed larger in his eyes than the crash of armies or the doings of men at the front. As a civilian he had wrestled with strategy and pored over maps; as a soldier of England he could not see the wood for the trees. And if he did not fall mentally to the level of that species of surgeon to whom war is an agency for the provision of interesting cases, it was merely because, unlike the surgeon, he had little enthusiasm for his work.