“He was there as we came back with Wilkins after watching the reply to the S.O.S., sleeping on the eternal petrol tin, and was there when we got breakfast—dead to the world . . . . I have not at all drawn him as childish as he looked . . . . He had come down with a relief from somewhere near Glencorse Wood and had lost himself and floundered all night in shell holes and mud through the awful rain and wind which seemed to have power to wash out the very gunfire of Manton’s battery. He had floundered into the cover of the tunnel and stopped there, disregarded, save for occasional attempts to assist on the part of the men—attempts that could not penetrate through to his consciousness past the dominating instinct to sleep anywhere, anyhow, and at any cost . . . . The boys tried to get him to report to the Pommy Colonel in another gallery . . . . but he dropped off again into that coma of a spent man, too spent to be wholly unconscious of his misery even in sleep . . . . and I heard him muttering in a sullen diminuendo, like a rebellious schoolboy, ‘Bloody war!! Bloody war!! Bloody war.’ . . . . He looked like the hundred others one has seen—like many in the company that were lining the corridors, but that his abandonment was greater—he was emphatically lost, lost like a child, and evoking some of the pity that goes to a child, he looked so very young—that quality which here has power to touch the heart of older men in the strongest way. To see going into the line boys whose ingenuous faces recall something of your own boyhood—something of someone you stole fruit with, or fought with or wagged it with through long hot Australian afternoons—to see them in this bloody game and to feel that their mother’s milk is not yet dry upon their mouths . . . .”