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drags in, the thirty-six-hour-duty on the minimum legal wage and I know I don’t look it but I’ve fished the broken glass out of arseholes too, I know what it’s like, the bedside manner was an afterthought, Jesuits are also Police Judiciaire and are told off to shovel shit.”
    “I’m sorry, I was being dim.”
    “Everybody thinks his is the only cancer, it’s perfectly normal.”

    I wonder whether I might not have a shot at turning William into a Janeite. That sounds absurd; a Frenchman of his background and position. Never mind: circumstances, situations call for eccentricities of thought as well as of physical treatment. In many ways I want to loosen him. I think of acupuncture, and of a method familiar in Germany: a system of small injections at chosen points in the body’s surface (the thermograph will give me indications) or quite small shots of an ordinary local anaesthetic, which have a well-known effect in freeing and shortcutting hidden blockages. But there has to be more. The ‘Humberstall-Effect’; brilliantly described by an English writer. (I don’t know who reads Kipling nowadays: I do.)
    I introduced the Marquis to this – to this day it is “my invention”. He was delighted. Of course he loves English literature, is familiar with a great deal, though he didn’t know this. In the past, he said, he had “tried Jane”, but missed the point, was amused by the rediscovery. We came – for we value laughter, a powerful aid to any therapy – to use the slogan when we met.
    “Believe me, there’s no one like Jane in a tight place.” It is probable that William will know little or nothing of the background. The Marquis, a much older man, highly sophisticated and well read, has a strong sense of history, and caught on very quickly. People in general know something of the second world war but have fogotten what they ever knew of the first. The ’14–18. People no longer understand how much this meant, how deep it went. So I’m going back to the start of this story, since William is going to need that.
    Humberstall – a humble man – is a simple soldier with an artillery unit; a good soldier, immensely strong and a bit thick. He gets invalided home after being blown up by shellfire. In the hospital nobody can find much wrong with him; what would come to be called shell-shock was then little understood, but his none-too-bright wits are further dazed. He makes his own way back to his comrades out of instinct. His commander, a kindly man, has no use for him but finds a neat solution: “I particularly want you as a mess waiter.” He can hang about polishing things, perfectly happy.
    The unit’s guns are old-fashioned things on rails, largely worn out and ‘not much use this late in the war’: they have a quiet position well behind the front lines, forgotten by authority.
    This story would be no more than an anecdote without a peculiar psychological fact. The three officers have suffered the intense strains of their service, have seen their guns shunted aside as worthless, and have lost interest in the hostilities. To someone like myself, there is a parallel with a patient of William’s sort. They are cynical, since they serve no real purpose, but should the Germans bombard them they are in danger of death or mutilation. Their escape from this combination of risk and boredom is to play a typically English literary game with the characters of Jane Austen: the world where ‘nothing ever happens’.
    The Marquis was wonderfully quick at picking up constructions. “Of course,” he said at once. “I suppose the only really major novelist in any language whose world has totally banished war, violence, death and mutilation – or cancer come to that. The English are all mad on her – it’s worse than Trollope.”
    The officers have the solidarity between themselves of belonging to a ‘secret society’; they are the Janeites. Only one other man shares in this, a soldier with education, a sly