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In August 1918 my parents accepted the inevitable and I enlisted in the infantry, and was posted to the First Reserve Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment at the Isle of Grain at the mouth of the Thames.
    By that time the casualty lists had grown enormously; the bottom of the manpower barrel was being scraped in England and people were being sent into the army and to France who never should have gone at all. Phillip Bainbrigge was typical of these casualties, a brilliant young Sixth Form schoolmaster at Shrewsbury. He was a tall, delicate, weedy man with very thick glasses in his spectacles without which he was as blind as a bat. He had a great sense of humour and enormous academic ability; when the time came for him to go into the army I have no doubt that he went willingly and made a good officer in regard to morale and within the limits of his physical deficiencies. He left as a memorial a sonnet written in the trenches which I have never seen printed, but which seems to me one of the best war poems that I have ever heard.
    If I should die, be not concerned to know
  The manner of my ending, if I fell
Leading a forlorn charge against the foe,
  Strangled by gas, or shattered by a shell.
Nor seek to see me in this death-in-life
  Mid shirks and curses, oaths and blood and sweat,
Cold in the darkness, on the edge of strife,
  Bored and afraid, irresolute, and wet.
    But if you think of me, remember one
  Who loved good dinners, curious parody,
Swimming, and lying naked in the sun,
  Latin hexameters, and heraldry,
Athenian subtleties ofand,
  Beethoven, Botticelli, beer, and boys.
    Soon after that was written, Phillip Bainbrigge was dead.
    At that time it was quite unusual for a boy with an old school tie to go into the ranks as a private soldier; the social barriers were still great in England. It was, of course, very good for me indeed. I will not say that I enjoyed the first fortnight because I didn’t; the adjustments to be made were too great. Life in the ranks was much cruder than it is today; the food was coarse, dirty, and badly cooked, and it was difficult to learn to sleep on a straw palliasse on a plank bed. The language of the men was no novelty to me, of course, and I could out-swear most of them, but their attitude to women was shocking to me in my immature state. I remember forming the resolution to do three things each day, believing that if I did these things I should come through the ranks all right and be the same person when I regained my own world: to wash, and clean my teeth, and evacuate. There could be worse good resolutions, I suppose.
    I must have been in a hut with quite a decent lot of men,because they left me very much to myself. In a month I had settled down and was enjoying my life. I knew far more about soldiering than the other recruits and my time at Woolwich had hardened me physically, so that the recruit training was child’s play to me. Most of the battalion were men who were unfit in various ways, and though if the war had gone on I should certainly have been drafted to France, the stammer was still bad and probably made the medical officer think twice about my value in the front line. For the last three months of the war, therefore, I mounted guard at the mouth of the Thames Estuary against Germans who could hardly have invaded us at that stage of the war, and in that time I recovered the morale that I had lost through my repeated failures to get a commission.
    I know of no life so restful as the life of a private soldier. In those days it was assumed that he was quite incapable of any rational thought or responsibility; his corporal shepherded him about and told him where to go and what to do. He never had to think for himself about anything at all. If he didn’t turn up on parade it was a valid defence to say he didn’t know he had to, and the corporal got blamed for not looking after his men properly. In after years it was considered an eccentricity when T. E. Lawrence