r the influence of some deep excitement.
He told me that he was sleeping badly, that his head ached, and that
his eyes hurt him, but he did not seem distressed by these things. He
was too strongly absorbed by something to be depressed. He treated me
and everything around him with impatience, as though he could not wait
for something that he was expecting.

I have seen in this business of the war strange things that nerves can
do with the human mind and body. I have seen many men who remain with
their nerves as strong as steel from the first to the last, but this
is, I should say, the exception and only to be found with men of a
very unimaginative character. As regards Trenchard one must take into
account his recent loss, the sudden stress of incessant exhausting
work, the flaming weather and the constant companionship of the one
human being of all others most calculated to disturb his tranquillity.
But in varying degrees I think that every one in this place was at
this time working under a strain of something abnormal and
uncalculated. The very knowledge that the attack was now being pressed
severely and that we had so little ammunition with which to reply, was
enough to strain the nerves of every one. Trenchard told me, in the
course of the conversation, that I had with him during my second day's
stay, that his visit to the lines some days earlier (this is the visit
of which he speaks in his diary) had greatly upset him. He had been
disturbed apparently by the fact that there were not sufficient
wagons. The whole sense of the Forest, he told me, was a strain to
him, the feeling that he could not escape from it, the thought of its
colour and heat and at the same time its ugliness and horror, the
cholera scarecrow in it, and the deserted town and all the horrors of
the recent attacks. The dead Austrians and Russians.... But I repeat,
most emphatically, that he was not depressed by this. It was rather
that he wished to keep his energies fresh and clear for some purpose
of his own, and was therefore disturbed by anything that threatened
his health. He was not quite well, he told me--headaches, not
sleeping--but that "he had it well in control."

And here now is a strange thing. One of the chief purposes of my visit
had been to persuade one of the four men to return with me to the
Otriad. Molozov had asserted very emphatically that none of them should
be compelled against their will to return to Mittoevo, but he thought
t