“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.

. . . You see what an invitation to grief is friendship with the regiments of foot. . . . They are touchingly profane about the dead friend . . . . They see that a cross comes from the battalion carpenter, or the especial friend like little ‘W——’ makes a cross himself and carves an ornate rising sun on it—but they are movingly profane about it all, employing all those proper expedients of the Digger for the disguising of deep feeling—of the exhibition of which the boys are so timid that they have evolved a language compound of blasphemy and catch phrases in which they can unpack their hearts without seeming to be guilty of the weakness of emotion.”