en put down aren't the beautiful things they
ought to put down; most of them shove down lists of their meals, some of
the diaries are all just lists of things eaten, and a lot of them have
written the most damning stuff about outrages and looting. Which the
French are translating and publishing. The Germans would give anything
now to get back these silly diaries. And now they have made an order
that no one shall go into battle with any written papers at all.... Our
people got so keen on documenting and the value of chance writings that
one of the principal things to do after a German attack had failed had
been to hook in the documentary dead, and find out what they had on
them.... It's a curious sport, this body fishing. You have a sort of
triple hook on a rope, and you throw it and drag. They do the same. The
other day one body near Hooghe was hooked by both sides, and they had a
tug-of-war. With a sharpshooter or so cutting in whenever our men got
too excited. Several men were hit. The Irish--it was an Irish
regiment--got him--or at least they got the better part of him....

"Now that I am a sergeant, Park talks to me again about all these
things, and we have a first lieutenant too keen to resist such technical
details. They are purely technical details. You must take them as that.
One does not think of the dead body as a man recently deceased, who had
perhaps a wife and business connections and a weakness for oysters or
pale brandy. Or as something that laughed and cried and didn't like
getting hurt. That would spoil everything. One thinks of him merely as a
uniform with marks upon it that will tell us what kind of stuff we have
against us, and possibly with papers that will give us a hint of how far
he and his lot are getting sick of the whole affair....

"There's a kind of hardening not only of the body but of the mind
through all this life out here. One is living on a different level. You
know--just before I came away--you talked of Dower-House-land--and
outside. This is outside. It's different. Our men here are kind enough
still to little things--kittens or birds or flowers. Behind the front,
for example, everywhere there are Tommy gardens. Some are quite bright
little patches. But it's just nonsense to suppose we are tender to the
wounded up here--and, putting it plainly, there isn't a scrap of pity
left for the enemy. Not a scrap. Not a trace of such feeling. They were
tender about the wounded in the early days