Forthwith he swarmed over the parapet, full of life again, nosed about till he found the reeking thing, and gazed on it with undisguised interest. No sign of horror or disgust could I detect in him. Yet it was not pure ghoulishness; it was simply the boy's greed for experience and the savour of adventure. Anyhow, my experiment had failed; and I found that I was glad. But when I was leaving him for the next platoon, he was lying down for a little sleep on the dirty floor of the trench, and as he flashed his electric torch over the ground, I saw several small white objects writhing in the dust. The company commander whom we had relieved had told me how under all these trenches the Turks and the French had buried many of their dead, and in a moment of nauseating insight I knew that these things were the maggots which fed upon their bodies.

'Harry,' I said, 'you can't sleep there; look at those things!' And I told him what they were.

'Rubbish,' he said, 'they're glow-worms gone to sleep.'

Well, then I left him. But that's how he was in those days.

III

So many men have written descriptions of trench life in France; there have been so many poems, plays, and speeches about it that the majority of our nation must have a much clearer mental picture of life on the Western Front than they have of life at the Savoy, or life in East Ham. But the Gallipoli Peninsula was never part of the Western Front, and no man came back from that place on leave; lucky, indeed, if he came at all. The campaign was never, for obvious reasons, an important item in official propaganda, and the various non-official agencies which now bring home the war to Streatham had not begun to articulate when the campaign came to an end. And so neither Streatham nor any one else knew anything about it. And though for a soldier to speak, h