Nor did he care for the majority of his fellow officers. ‘Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors,’ he told Edith, ‘and even human beings rare indeed.’ He spent some of his time reading Icelandic – he was determined to keep up with his academic work during the war – but the time passed slowly. ‘These grey days,’ he wrote, ‘wasted in wearily going over, over and over again, the dreary topics, the dull backwaters of the art of killing, are not enjoyable.’
