“The foot traffic, the men coming and going from divisional baths, bearing towels, coming from and going to that area where are estaminets, those links with a civilian past—those fairy lands within the four walls of which we can behave almost with the godlike freedom of the aristocratic days when one was a vendor of vegetables, a server of writs, a pleader of causes, a duke or a dustman.
“. . . . The men who are seeking their battalion—who drift out of nowhere, asking the whereabouts of the 27th, or the 10th, or the 6th, and who drift on into nowhere, and no doubt ultimately find there what they seek—no doubt through the exercise of a native scepticism regarding what is told them. For as there is a lot of human nature in war and it is human to wish to impart information, information is imparted with more willingness than accuracy, here even more than elsewhere. No doubt they find it, for all things are ultimately found in the army, through the Chinese patience with which the life has imbued all—a patient and an oriental sense of the unimportance of time bred by countless experiences which tells you that however long it takes you to get there you will one day or one year get there without disaster, and to hurry it unduly is bad in philosophy and unavailing in fact . . . .
“They come, these strays, from leave, from all those temporary detachments from their units, from hospital, from rest camps, and they live on the country, trusting no doubt to the freemasonry, the trades’ unionism of the fighting man, the large confederation—the offensive and defensive alliance of the lance-privates.
“From rail heads and the tender mercies of R.T.O’s., they move over France through villages, and over what were villages—over duck boards and shell holes with that grousing league-devouring indifference to all things made which is bred by a life two-thirds of the activity of which is moving from a place you don’t want to be in to a place you don’t want to go to.”
Looking for the Battalion.
The Mate.
“Most of the boys are of that age at which friendship is not the tepid give and take of years of discretion. Remember our friendship at twenty! At that age a friendship is a thing intense and unquestioning—it is blasphemy to it to think of it as anything less than eternal. . . . . Normally those friendships wither painlessly in their season, but this generation, or what maimed fragment of it lives through it all, will live with the memory of heroic friendships cut off at the height of their boyish splendour, and which can never suffer the slow deterioration of disillusionment.