It’s very strange, the things the war did to people. It was less than three years since I’d been a spry young shop-assistant, bending over the counter in my white apron with “Yes, madam! Certainly, madam! And the next order, madam?” with a grocer’s life ahead of me and about as much notion of becoming an Army officer as of getting a knighthood. And here I was already, swaggering about in a gorblimey hat and a yellow collar and more or less keeping my end up among a crowd of other temporary gents and some who weren’t even temporary. And—this is really the point—not feeling it in any way strange. Nothing seemed strange in those days.

It was like an enormous machine that had got hold of you. You’d no sense of acting of your own free will, and at the same time no notion of trying to resist. If people didn’t have some such feeling as that, no war could last three months. The armies would just pack up and go home. Why had I joined the Army? Or the million other idiots who joined up before conscription came in? Partly for a lark and partly because of England my England and Britons never never and all that stuff. But how long did that last? Most of the chaps I knew had forgotten all about it long before they got as far as France. The men in the trenches weren’t patriotic, didn’t hate the Kaiser, didn’t care a damn about gallant little Belgium and the Germans raping nuns on tables (it was always “on tables,” as though that made it worse) in the streets of Brussels. On the other hand it didn’t occur to them to try and escape. The machine had got hold of you and it could do what it liked with you. It lifted you up and dumped you down among places and things you’d never dreamed of, and if it had dumped you down on the surface of the moon it wouldn’t have seemed particularly strange. The day I joined the Army the old life was finished. It was as though it didn’t concern me any longer. I wonder if you’d believe that from that day forward I only once went back to Lower Binfield, and that was to Mother’s funeral? It sounds incredible now, but it seemed natural enough at the time. Partly, I admit, it was on account of Elsie, whom, of course, I’d stopped writing to after two or three months. No doubt she’d picked up with someone else, but I didn’t want to meet her. Otherwise, perhaps, when I got a bit of leave I’d have gone down and seen Mother, who’d had fits when I joined the Army but would have been proud of a son in uniform.