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above Harlech I found a personal peace independent of history or geography.
My friend George Mallory, for instance, who later disappeared close to the summit of Mount Everest,
They began singing. Instead of the usual music-hall songs they sang Welsh hymns, each man taking a part. The Welsh always sang when pretending not to be scared; it kept them steady. And they never sang out of tune.
I saw a man lying on his face in a machine-gun shelter. I stopped and said: ‘Stand-to, there!’ I flashed my torch on him and saw that one of his feet was bare. The machine-gunner beside him said: ‘No good talking to him, sir.’ I asked: ‘What’s wrong? Why has he taken his boot and sock off?’ ‘Look for yourself, sir!’ I shook the sleeper by the arm and noticed suddenly the hole in the back of his head. He had taken off the boot and sock to pull the trigger of his rifle with one toe; the muzzle was in his mouth. ‘Why did he do it?’ I asked. ‘He went through the last push, sir, and that sent him a
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Remember reading this and being amazed. It must have been horrific to be there.
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running their thumb-nails up the seams of their shirts to kill lice,
Prince of Wales, then a lieutenant in the Fortieth Siege Battery, was billeted sometimes. We did not find him in. I had spoken to him once – in the public bath at Béthune, where he and I were the only bathers one morning. Dressed in nothing at all, he graciously remarked how bloody cold the water was,
Once I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted them on the slimy body of an old corpse.
