Well—­there’s such a thing as conversion, isn’t there?  You never can tell what may happen to you, and the War isn’t over yet.  Those of us who are in it now aren’t going to see the best of it by a long way.  There’s no doubt the very finest fighting’ll be at the finish; so that the patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to join up will be jolly well sold, poor devils.  Take me, for instance.  If I’d got what I wanted and been out in Flanders in 1914, ten to one I should have been in the retreat from Mons, like Frank, and never anywhere else.  Then I’d have given my head to have gone to Gallipoli; but now, well, I’m just as glad I’m not mixed up in that affair.

Still, that’s not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you can get out of it for yourself.  And it’s certainly not the way to win the War.  At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the Rhine, while all the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash on the way there.  So if you’re going to be converted let’s hope you’ll be converted quick.

If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight away.  There are things you won’t be able to stand if you’re a Tommy.  For instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your brother Tommies.  I slept for three months next to a beastly blighter who used to come in drunk and tread on my face and be ill all over me.

Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything that’s happened out here.  But that’s because at home your mind isn’t adjusted to horrors.  That chap came as a shock and a surprise to me every time.  I couldn’t get used to him.  Whereas out here everything’s shifted in the queerest way.  Your mind shifts.  You funk your first and your second sight, say, of a bad stretcher case; but when it comes to the third and the fourth you don’t funk at all; you’re not shocked, you’re not a bit surprised.  It’s all in the picture, and you’re in the picture too.  There’s a sort of horrible harmony.  It’s like a certain kind of beastly dream which doesn’t frighten you because you’re part of it, part of the beastliness.

No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was—­what d’you think?  A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run over the other day in the street by a motor-cyclist—­and a civilian at that.  There were two or three women round it, crying and gesticulating.  It looked as if they’d just lifted it out of a bath of blood.  That made me sick.  You see, the little dog wasn’t in the picture.  I hadn’t bargained for him.

Yet the things Morrie saw in South Africa—­do you remember how he would tell us about them?—­weren’t in it with the things that happened here.  Pounding apart, the things that corpses can do, apparently on their own, are simply unbelievable—­what the war correspondents call “fantastic postures.”  But I haven’t got to the point when I can slap my thighs, and roar with laughter—­if they happen to be Germans.