two
young cavalry officers on long benches crowded with subalterns of many
regiments. It was a merry meal and a good one--to this day I remember a
potato pie, gloriously baked, and afterward, as it was the last night
of the course, all the officers went wild and indulged in a "rag" of the
public-school kind. They straddled across the benches and barged at
each other in single tourneys and jousts, riding their hobby-horses with
violent rearings and plungings and bruising one another without grievous
hurt and with yells of laughter. Glasses broke, crockery crashed upon
the polished boards. One boy danced the Highland fling on the tables,
others were waltzing down the corridors. There was a Rugby scrum in the
refectory, and hunting-men cried the "View halloo!" and shouted "Yoicks!
yoicks!" ... General Baker-Carr was a human soul, and kept to his own
room that night and let discipline go hang....

When the battles of the Somme began it was those young officers who
led their machine-gun sections into the woods of death--Belville Wood,
Mametz Wood, High Wood, and the others. It was they who afterward held
the outpost lines in Flanders. Some of them were still alive on March
21, 1918, when they were surrounded by a sea of Germans and fought until
the last, in isolated redoubts north and south of St.-Quentin. Two of
them are still alive, those between whom I sat at dinner that night,
and who escaped many close calls of death before the armistice. Of
the others who charged one another with wooden benches, their laughter
ringing out, some were blown to bits, and some were buried alive, and
some were blinded and gassed, and some went "missing" for evermore.

XVIII

In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was boredom
that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming boredom to
thousands of men who were in exile from the normal interests of life and
from the activities of brain-work; an intolerable, abominable boredom,
sapping the will-power, the moral code, the intellect; a boredom from
which there seemed no escape except by death, no relief except by vice,
no probable or possible change in its dreary routine. It was bad enough
in the trenches, where men looked across the parapet to the same corner
of hell day by day, to the same dead bodies rotting by the edge of the
same mine-crater, to the same old sand-bags in the enemy's line, to the
blasted tree sliced by shell-fire, the upturned rail