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and even sinister man, exactly the type who wangles himself a good job in prison. He is of course the officers’ mess orderly, simply because he too knows how to talk about Jane.
    Poor Humberstall can make nothing of it: what are they all on about? The crafty one offers, for payment naturally, to introduce him to this secret world, and night after night he has to read the books, wondering what they, too, are all about! But this as promisedpays off; he gets tips, and is indeed treated as privileged, exempt from all tedious military chores. No wonder that he is very happy. “Our little group, there was no one to touch us.”
    This idyllic life cannot last, and does not. The German attack of March 1918 swamps their safely forgotten position. They are bombarded, the unit is destroyed, the others are all killed, and Humberstall, intact and bewildered, finds himself ‘the only Janeite left’. But even in the mess and confusion of evacuation he remembers his passwords, quotes Jane to a hospital sister and is rewarded by a safe passage out. “I expect she was the Lady Catherine of the area,” he says, delighted. Years after, finding himself looked after and kindly treated, he will put his good fortune down to being a true Janeite. As he tells Kipling, “I reread all her books still for pleasure, and then I remember it – right down to the smell of the gluepaint on the screens.”
    The Marquis was enchanted – “I see it all”. He must indeed have known and frequented many a chalky old general who had been a junior officer in the trenches of ’14. “Do you think there would be any female Janeites?”
    “There was the sister, to whom he said ‘Stop Miss Bates there talking’ – but in general I should think it’s a man’s world. And very English.”
    “One can’t be sure. Kipling loved France, and has always been popular here.”

    To enrol William as a Janeite is tempting; it’s a possible means of approach. I would want to know rather more about him, and in particular about his wife. Whom I must meet, and this is to be arranged.
    I can hear a lot of people – not all of them French – clicking their tongue and tutting at my frivolity. Here is a doctor, with qualifications in neuropsychiatry and quite some experience in the field, amusing himself with jokes of this sort. It would be easy to knock such people on the head with professional jargon; there’s plenty of that about. To tell the truth I haven’t a lot of patience with them. The French are world-champion swallowers of anti-depressant pills, cherish them as a child its teddybear. Very well, to restore sanity adopt simple language.
    It is logical to be depressed if suffering from a grave malady. Melancholy affects William. The classical pointers to depression are easily described: irritability; a diminished interest in most normal spheres of activity; loss of weight; tendency to insomnia, fatigue and loss of energy; devaluation of the professional role (the feeling of being useless and guilt about that); a weakened ability at organizing one’s own existence; recurrent gloomy thoughts about death – it could be with an urge towards suicide; inaptitude at ordinary social obligations.
    It gets said at school that any five of these adds up to a syndrome. In consequence nine-tenths of the population describes itself as depressive; I do so myself. Congratulating themselves upon the important discovery they rush to their family doctor demanding the fashionable pill: since, alas, doctors are judged by the number and variety of their prescriptions (it’s an over-crowded profession), all too often they get it. William, robust as he is, hasn’t thought of this yet. But it’s quite likely that he will.
    I could get pretty technical about all this. In fatally loose talk about depressions (the media are full of it) one is describing an illness and neglecting the patient. The clinician, general or psychiatric, is caught between his job of prescribing and that of