Heytesbury was always at its best on the cusp between spring and summer. In May Theresa arrived to see her grandson for the first time. Her health was indifferent – she was arthritic and suffered bouts of angina. Being unable to climb the stairs at Heytesbury, she stayed at a Warminster hotel and travelled out each day. Nothing, however, could dampen her spirit and Sassoon described her as being ‘in splendid form. She is really glorious. It is so nice to see her with George.’ Another of Theresa’s grandchildren had just left Heytesbury, Michael’s son Hamo. His visit had been intended to last only three days but influenza kept him there for three weeks. Sassoon did not mind, since Hamo was his favourite nephew. There had been other guests, warmly welcomed and equally warmly waved goodbye. Hester had a number of little outbursts, which Sassoon put down to her inability to cope.

A month earlier they had been in Italy, staying at Rapallo and welcomed each day to the Villino Chiaro by Max and Florence. Sassoon enjoyed Hester’s company, breezily happy and engaged by the surroundings, especially the small church of San Pantaleone. Seven years before he had walked that same way with no assurance of future happiness: ‘My whole existence, as a feeling human being, dependent on the whims and caprices of Stephen, and three years of spiritual disintegration ahead of me – had I but known it! No need to explain the difference between then and now!’ He was so proud of Hester, who was always at her best with the Beerbohms, and happy that they liked her so much.

Together, relaxed and on holiday, Sassoon hearty and jolly, they appeared a contented couple. Back at Heytesbury their relationship was not as it had appeared in Italy. Three years into married life Sassoon reverted to, if indeed he ever left, the routine and habits of the single man. He began to resent what he regarded as Hester’s intrusions and possessiveness; he became almost paranoid, suspecting her of watching his every move, eaves-dropping on his conversations, prying into his correspondence. All his life he had guarded his privacy, made his own arrangements, followed his own timetable. Being married was no reason, as far as he could see, why he need submit all this to discussion, compromise and certainly not permission. He did not want to share all his life with his partner. The onus was on Hester to conform. He expected her to tend to a wife’s duties – run the house, entertain the guests, have children and make her husband comfortable. The impact of this philosophy of the paterfamilias made Heytesbury somewhat removed from the little Utopia of three years earlier and T. E. Lawrence’s description of a marital idyll. But Lawrence in the days before the wedding had sounded a warning note. He wrote to Nancy Astor that he had spoken with Hester, who was in love with Sassoon but ‘in terror of her life of proving inadequate. I tried to cheer her up, without being foolishly optimistic. I liked the foolhardy creature. Fancy taking on S.S.’

Foolhardy but in love, Hester wanted to share in her husband’s activities. She may well have been too insistent at times but Sassoon lacked the desire to include her and she was wounded by the exclusion. It was a rejection she could not understand. There is nothing to commend in his behaviour but there was nothing inconsistent in it either. No one was ever allowed to share his secret and ordered world; it was inviolable. The smallest intrusion, the momentary interruption, was repulsed. The clearest picture we have of Sassoon’s ideal is his depiction of Aunt Evelyn, who seems to exist entirely for her nephew, her household arranged for his convenience. George Sherston’s world was a man’s world, so was Heytesbury, and Hester was no Aunt Evelyn.

Inevitably there were outbursts. Embarrassed, Sassoon wrote to cancel an evening in London with Glen and Angela: ‘I can only assume that for me to spend an evening with you and Angela is more than Hester can humanly endure! Sad, isn’t it, that her love for me should take this form; but we must hope that she will some day arrive at a more sensible way of behaving.’ The letter bears the hallmarks of an end-of-term report. It lacked sympathy – it certainly lacked loyalty. There was forbearance but it was the fruit of indebtedness and not of love: ‘She has given me George, so I must not take this tiresomeness too seriously.’

In September 1937 Sassoon began Book Two of The Old Century, which would recount the years he was at New Beacon School, Marlborough College, cramming at Henley House and failing dismally at Cambridge. He thought he might call it ‘Educational Experiences’. Obviously he found titles difficult! He was also finding writing difficult and was taking an inordinate time to complete just a few sentences. ‘Last night I spent three hours writing 150 words,’ he told Max. He did not hint that part of the problem was domestic distraction: only Glen was privy to the situation. Writing to him on 30 October, Sassoon reported that Hester had been ‘angelic of late’ but this was due to his ‘not allowing anything to happen which might upset her’. She was ill at ease if asked to entertain visitors whom Sassoon knew but she did not. When an old friend and distant relative of Theresa’s stayed at Heytesbury, Sassoon reported that he ‘was never left alone with her for 5 minutes. Odd, isn’t it?’ Hester had also taken against theatrical people, which ruled the Byam Shaws out – ‘She can’t bear to share me with anyone else. Don’t imagine that she dislikes you and Angela. It is merely this jealousy of hers. Even this letter will have to be posted surreptitiously, and your reply carefully worded.’ Efforts to explain his need for some time on his own, he said, had been unsuccessful.

By Christmas the writing situation had improved. He wrote to Max in a more confident frame of mind about the book, which he had decided to call The Old Century and seven more years. The lower case emphasised that this part was a sequel. It never appeared on the spine of the book, only on the title page, and is rarely if ever quoted as part of the title. He did not mention in his letter that the new work was to be dedicated to Max. When the Beerbohms arrived for a visit to Heytesbury in the first week of the New Year the book was not discussed in any detail. That happened in April, when Sassoon and Hester again visited Rapallo and presented the page-proofs for Max’s perusal. ‘Not many verbal alterations were required,’ Sassoon proudly recalled, ‘but I was aware of my punctuation being amateurishly unsystematic. For Max punctuation was of prime importance to perfected prose.’ The Old Century was published in September 1938. ‘It is,’ wrote Max, ‘a wonderous work, a miracle of evocation. I shall always be immensely proud of the dedication.’ It became Sassoon’s favourite work – ‘a daisy of a book’, he sometimes called it, or ‘a honey of a book and as mellow as an old fiddle’. But it was not the book he had intended to write.

In the Prelude there are two images. The first is of a rivulet flowing from Watercress Well, near Weirleigh, which ‘goes running through the wood, talking to itself in the wordless language of water and roots and stones’. The other image came to the child Siegfried as he watched his mother ‘making a water-colour sketch of a man sowing’. He combined these images to state his motive for writing: ‘The purpose of this book is to tell whither the water journeyed from its source, and how the seed came up.’ This new volume was to be, or so it would appear, an exploration of Sassoon’s inner life, his growing awareness of himself, how his perception of his environment, the places, people and his relationship to them had developed. But the book is not faithful to this intent. Towards the end of the volume Sassoon gives the reader a new reason for writing: ‘My intention in this book has been to commemorate or memorialize those human contacts which supported me in my rather simple-minded belief that the world was full of extremely nice people if only one got to know them.’ The focus has moved. Autobiography has become anecdotal rather than confessional, descriptive not revelatory, objective not subjective. Like the tableaux vivants Theresa used to arrange at Weirleigh, The Old Century became one sequence after another of groups and individuals representative of the last decade of the Victorian era. There is little if any historical or social context; there is much character description but minimal personal exploration – that has to be inferred. The book became an account of innocent, all-pervasive, all-conquering happiness, a world in which the intrusions of death and domestic misery yield to the optimistic spirit.

Why he changed the emphasis or what made him veer on to a different course is not clear. An educated guess might include his own state of unhappiness: Sassoon was in 1937–38 a disillusioned and disappointed man. His marriage was one factor, the lack of acclaim for his poetry another, but the world sliding into war was the ultimate blow. Of the opening years of the century he said, ‘the future then was something to be desired’. Optimism about the future was no longer a foundation on which he could build a philosophy. He turned around and followed the rivulet back to its source. Like Tolstoy, he was going to search for the green stick which marked the place where he had once been truly happy.

In August 1937 he drove to the Norfolk village of Edingthorpe, where in 1897 he had spent a holiday. In 1924, he revisited the place as part of his pilgrimage across England, which had ignited the idea of the memoirs. Edingthorpe, he discovered, was unchanged despite the passage of years. It was not frozen in time but timeless, immutable. There he succeeded, as he so evocatively described in chapter eight of The Old Century, in finding not the past so much as himself. The 50-year-old Sassoon made friends again with the 10-year-old Master Siegfried near to the Rectory, which all those years ago Theresa had taken for the summer:

The longing to be that boy again is almost palpable, to be the other side of that terrible war, free from the wound of knowledge, innocent again; to build a bridge of absolution between the boy and the man; to give the modern world the slip and embrace again the simplicities left behind. Heytesbury too was part of that wish. It was redolent of the harmony and felicity Sassoon desired in his own life. He had been conscious of the need in the twenties and had expressed it in The Heart’s Journey when he says, ‘my inward life took shape’.

The two summers which preceded the Second World War were as glorious as the days recounted in The Old Century. Conscious that the drift into conflict was inexorable, Sassoon adopted a policy of business as usual. He was not averting his gaze from the fact that armies were again on the move or closing his ears to the politicians; Sassoon remained well informed about what was happening. What he knew was there was nothing he could do about it except to do what a good batsman does, namely to keep his end up and that meant Heytesbury, the family and the village. Of the summer of 1938 he says, ‘We’ve had an idyllically quiet summer, punctuated by cricket matches in which I make fewer runs than I could have wished.’ But he could not resist boasting to Sydney Cockerell that he had scored a six the week before and smashed three panes of glass in the pavilion – ‘How many poets have done that at my age? Not even Bridges, I think, although he boasted that he once hit several boundaries in one over.’

Blunden came to Heytesbury during the second week of August, his first visit in 14 months. He and Sassoon had met earlier in that summer in Oxford when the Heytesbury XI took on the Barnacles, Blunden’s team. Sassoon’s life at this point stood in direct contrast to that of his old friend. Blunden was in perpetual motion, writing, publishing, lecturing and broadcasting; ferreting here and there for some rare edition, and keeping in touch with other poets, including the young and modern ones. Blunden loved activity and being at the heart of the literary world. Unlike Sassoon, he did not cut himself off from the places where interesting and new ideas were. He was particularly active in keeping contacts alive with Germany, arranging and attending literary conferences there and welcoming delegates to England. None of these activities, however, was allowed to impede his enthusiasm for cricket – watching it, talking and writing about it, but above all, playing it.

Sassoon as a writer had come to a full stop. It was a struggle to find the motivation to start another literary project, another volume of memoirs carrying on from where The Old Century left off and taking his story through to the beginnings of the Great War. Writing to Max at the year’s end, he confessed that he had not written anything. He cited the crisis in Europe, caused by Hitler laying claim to the Sudetenland and a general preoccupation with the deteriorating situation. Each morning, he followed the unfolding events in The Times, usually while lying in bed enjoying a boiled egg. Hester would invade his musings, anxious to share perspectives with him and gleanings from the political speeches or special reports broadcast on the wireless. She was well informed, probably better than he was, but Sassoon was reluctant to enter into any discussion. This reluctance contributed to more tensions as 1939 came and the last eight months of peace.

The year began with a visit from Max, followed by a visit from Rex Whistler’s brother Laurence and his wife, Jill Furze. He was designing the title page for Sassoon’s Rhymed Ruminations, to be published as a limited edition in July and followed by another edition dedicated to Blunden. Sassoon was looking forward to the spring and summer, not only because of the new volume but in order to see how his plans for the estate had worked out. A lot of time and effort had been spent reclaiming ground and improving the land. When the summer did arrive it brought with it a park smothered in buttercups and thrushes making their presence heard. Hester was happy, pottering around the garden, spending time with George and keeping in contact with her family, especially her brother Richard. During the last six months she had spent only five nights away from Heytesbury, ‘so it isn’t surprising that I am feeling the strain a bit’, complained Sassoon.

He had so looked forward to the summer and was pleased with the estate but he felt hemmed in. What he needed, he told his diary, was somewhere to work undisturbed by wife and child, especially the former. The ground-floor rooms where he would, in normal circumstances, fill the pages of his exercise books were no longer free from his promenading spouse, nor from the wireless to which she listened constantly for news of the European crisis. Her appetite for information was insatiable and driving Sassoon to distraction. At the same time his refusal to discuss the latest development was having a similar effect on her. At midnight on 21 May he decided to resolve his situation by moving up to a room off the first-floor landing where many of his books were already stacked. It was a retreat in every sense but it meant that Hester could listen to her wireless and, if callers came, he could escape to this refuge. He was also going to introduce rigid rules – all interruptions from Hester would be strictly forbidden. He did nothing to implement the plan until she went away. There was no discussion, otherwise she would start suggesting this or that alternative and the whole idea would dissolve into ruins.

Having devised his plan, Sassoon felt much happier. He was as pleased as a schoolboy with a secret. Externally, things took a fine turn when the clouds lifted, the sun cheered everything and the birds were singing wondrously. Sassoon thought that the song of the blackcaps and the warblers especially was sweeter than ever. Regrettably, there was no sound of the nightingale, which rarely came to the Wylye valley. Standing on the lawn and casting his eye around, Sassoon discerned ‘an earthly Elysium of heavenly sunlight and evening peace’. In the final weeks of peace he filled his diary with beautiful vignettes of Heytesbury: Hester in a blue linen dress tending the garden in the Long Walk; George enjoying his freedom on the lawn and bringing joy to his grandmother, Lady Gatty; Sassoon riding Huntsman or Sparks in the cool northerly breeze that wafted across the Great Ridge. ‘The buttercup yellow acres of the peaceful park were a paradise of day-dreaming indolence, the house standing there as though expecting nothing to happen till haymaking. The whole place looked pluperfect.’ References to the tranquillity of the place increased in number and intensity as the war drew ever nearer but Sassoon knew that earthly paradises are not permanent. They come for a moment, a comforting moment whose memory becomes a sustainment in uglier times:

Sporting a new cricket blazer – dark blue with gilt buttons, bought at Winchester College sports shop – Sassoon guided the Heytesbury team to a season of unqualified success. A number of top-rate performances from himself made all the difference, or so his diary records. Blunden’s team came and were soundly defeated by 106 runs. Sassoon must have had an off-day, for he only scored two. Blunden scraped by with seven but got a nasty cut on his finger, the price paid for not wearing gloves, as was his habit. He was, however, named man of the match for taking six catches behind the wicket – wearing gloves. Sassoon cherished the moments: the house, the park, the walled garden, the smell of mown grass up on the Jubilee plantation and all the wild strawberries clustered about the appropriately named Heaven’s Gate. Above all he loved trees, the cedar, the lime and his favourite, the beech. He listened as the wind swept through its branches and it became his ‘whispering tree’. He christened one of them:

Sitting under a beech with Hester and George, Sassoon was roused from his ‘day-dreaming indolence’ by his surveyor, John Baragwanath. He had a large map of the estate under his arm and brought news of a calamitous decision made by the Wiltshire County Council on behalf of the Ministry of Transport: a bypass was to be built. This meant that a mighty swathe of road would be driven across the cricket ground, the park would be split in half and the drive blocked at the half-point, effectively separating the house from the lodge gate and eliminating access to the village. Sassoon was left in a state of bewilderment. Could such a travesty be allowed? Next day, during a match on the threatened pitch, a mighty noise was heard from the direction of the stables. An enormous branch from one of the beech trees had crashed to the ground on the instant the ball claimed the last wicket of the innings. It was, Sassoon decided, an omen of approaching war and the demise of the cricket ground.

The Tank Corps, based at Warminster, had a passably good XI and was the next team to challenge Heytesbury. During the match on their bumpy and parched Warminister ground Sassoon resolved that he must fight against the accursed bypass. Much of the inspiration to do so emanated from the crisis-point the game had reached. Heytesbury was in danger of losing. It called out the fighting spirit in Sassoon – ‘I got 17 not out and played just the sort of innings I enjoy most – every run counting in a crisis. I feel greatly cheered up by this succcess. I don’t often get a chance to pull the match out of the fire.’ Watching his team, he sensed the need to safeguard the traditions of the village and of cricket. Driving home he met his neighbour, a renowned horticulturist, Dr Hinton, and told him that the battle of Heytesbury was now joined. He announced the news with such conviction that Hinton declared, ‘I shall sleep well tonight.’ Never reluctant to use his influence or that of others, Sassoon lined up his well-connected family-in-law, recruited prominent friends and spotted an Old Marlburian tie on the County Council. Wanting to appear reasonable, he tramped around spying out possible alternative routes. The signs were hopeful, support for his cause strong; the enemy was divided, County Council bickering with Whitehall over the bill. On the other hand, the War Office was pressing for an improved road between Warminster and Salisbury and the south coast. With war in the offing, this could be decisive.

Sassoon’s battle with the planners was, of course, a fight against the despoiling of his estate but he also drew another motive in his diary: ‘I would give up all my fame in the outside world rather than lose my cricket and its human significance, wherein I am not S.S. but “the Captain” or “the Guv’nor”.’ Where 15 years earlier he was eager to raise the banner of revolution, now he believed that the structured society from which he had sprung, whose roots lay in rural, agrarian England, was to be cherished and defended. Watching his team play Devizes, responsible for George while Hester kept the score, he saw clearly what kind of England he counted as civilised. ‘Village cricket with my retainers and neighbours, my son and heir (who is my sun and air), my refusal to go away from Heytesbury and take advantage of my fame – what are all these but acceptance of the fact that one’s home is all that matters? I care about the people among whom I exist. They never go to London. Why should I? And I think that they are beginning to realise that I am one of them in the simplicity of my life. Up on the cricket ground the games go on. Smoke goes up from the kitchen chimney of the house. Tea is waiting for us in the garage. It all belongs to me. But the Heytesbury players know that I own it as a sort of trustee.’

Sassoon was romanticising again, proffering ideas which belonged to the eighteenth century and which most thought had expired in the Great War. He does not explain his journey across a wide spectrum of economic and social arrangement – from choosing two-roomed Turnerdom to buying Heytesbury, from lodger to squire in a decade. He was proud of the estate and the improvements: it was a community where the continuity of relationships was secured. He relished the prospect of young Sam Gedge sharing an opening partnership with George while he himself, grown old, watched from the boundary, content to have secured the things of good report for another generation. But it was also the language of someone who has watched the fire slowly reducing itself to embers and whose musings were an attempt to prolong the moment.

Sassoon oscillated between hope and despair. If only he were of an age to defend Heytesbury as he had vowed to defend the Weald in August 1914. He had no role, no contribution to make this time. These were not worries for or about himself, they stemmed from his involvement in other people’s futures, especially George and Hester’s; it was not only the Nazis and the trouble in Europe that were vexatious, it was the way the world was going. H. G. Wells had come on a visit and mentioned the whole monetary system was bound to collapse. Sassoon immediately understood what that meant for life at Heytesbury – extinction. Such a calamity would quickly make an end to any desire to live – ‘As a selfish individual I ask only that I be allowed to keep my beloved home and refuge from the age of barbarism toward which the world seems tending.’

Perhaps he might save Heytesbury by writing articles for American magazines? The fees were high and required less effort than writing further memoirs. His New York friend, Sam Behrman, when he visited Heytesbury encouraged the idea. With the fountain of inspiration reduced to a trickle, why not? Then into his creative gloom would toddle George ‘the healer of all my trivial discontents and dullness’. The important thing, Sassoon concluded, was to grasp these moments of intimacy and revisit through George the ‘snake-less Eden of childhood’.

Sassoon had managed to transfer his study from the ground floor to the smaller room upstairs. Hester had taken George to see Theresa at Weirleigh. It was a moment of relief and opportunity. She had changed her mind several times about going, being unhappy at leaving her husband when the international situation was so grave. Sassoon lived in hope that she would just disappear for a few days. Solitude, solitude, he craved solitude.

Eventually she went, clutching George, something she continued to do throughout the time at Weirleigh, much to the concern of Theresa. She also clutched the telephone. Each evening she would ring Sassoon and insist on a complete breakdown of his day. On her return relations between them improved – they usually did after a brief separation. Together with George, they went on outings. Dinner in the evening saw Hester attired as though she was going out on the town. She liked Sassoon to dance with her in the room he had vacated. Suddenly she would break off and go to listen to the news, then return and berate him for not paying her sufficient attention and not discussing the issue of war. Much would be required of Hester when the war came. The authorities had already advised her that Heytesbury would be needed to house evacuees from London and she would have to arrange their accommodation and feeding. The prospect did not daunt her, but Sassoon shuddered. How would he survive this further invasion?

At least he found a room of his own. Sitting there in mid-August, signing copies of the limited edition of Rhymed Ruminations, window open for relief from the stuffy and sticky night, he was startled when some earth came in at the window. Hester had a tendency for little jokes. Sassoon made the inevitable assumption, moved to the window and was greeted by a voice from his past. Clearly visible in the night by the luminosity of a white coat and white shoes stood Stephen Tennant. Over six years had elapsed since Sassoon had seen him. Stephen had tried several times to re-establish contact but Sassoon had heeded the warnings of Edith Olivier: he had no intention of being hurt again. Only out of courtesy had he sent him a copy of Rhymed Ruminations and now through the same prompting he opened the garden hall door. Two days previously the Hunter sisters, ‘Really and Truly’, had been to Heytesbury for tea. According to their reports Stephen was on the downward slope and regarded by those close to him as a ‘mental case’. This was one occasion when Hester’s presence was more than welcome. When first told who was there she flared up, but in the quietness of the music room she was calm and polite. Sassoon thought she was, if anything, fascinated by Stephen, as she rather than Sassoon held the conversation together. He felt nothing for their visitor and marvelled he should ever have felt so deeply about him. All he wanted was for him to leave, which Stephen did after an hour. Hester and Sassoon accompanied him to the front gate. As he dived into his small car, he invited Hester to lunch or dinner: ‘Siegfried, of course, will be too busy working.’ And then he was gone. ‘He’s good company,’ said Hester. Sassoon thought there was little likelihood of Stephen being a danger – ‘though he may become a nuisance to us’.

A thousand times more welcome than Stephen was the arrival on 22 August of Blunden, together with his wife Sylva and H. E. Donner, a Swede working at Exeter College, Oxford. Arriving at six o’clock, they saw the final overs of a tense – ‘edge of the abyss’ – match, which Heytesbury won. Sassoon contributed only five runs to a total of 85. He was out to one of those deceptively slow deliveries which always tempted him with the promise of an easy boundary and which he never learnt to resist. Blunden was newly returned from Germany. Their conversation confirmed what Sassoon knew. Blunden was ‘strongly imbued with the German point of view, and seems unable to realise the meaning of Nazi aims and methods. It is pleasant to hear someone talking tolerantly about Germany but I simply can’t agree with his view that their bullyings are justified and that English public opinion is unfair to them. He disregards the essential wickedness of the Nazi Party machine and their avowed intention of imposing their will on the rest of Europe by brute force.’ Blunden, like Sassoon, was not a political animal. Barry Webb, Blunden’s biographer, writes, ‘this was Blunden at his most gullible’. It was also Blunden at his most distraught. He did not think the situation was caused by one man and he knew that more than one man would die fighting it; the spectre of all he had witnessed between 1914 and 1918 happening again was cause of deep bewilderment and distress: ‘Oh those endless, endless graves of mere boys.’

It was a spectre that also haunted Sassoon – he had seen enough and wished only for peace. He loathed the idea of war propaganda, lumping together every German as wicked. How could that be true of Walther and Johanna Hirth, who tended the sick with such love? They were among the noblest people he knew. Small children in Germany, young as his own son, would know savage deprivations and Germans as young as his nephew Hamo would be maimed and massacred. ‘If war comes, I shall find myself living in a world gone mad. Life will become a hymn of hate.’ Yet he had reached the stark conclusion that Germany needed ‘to be delivered from its present Government; war seems to be the only way of eliminating Hitlerism. Can such things be? Can one endure them?’

One way to endure would be to find something to do, to make some contribution; it did not have to be conspicuous. Given the choice, he would prefer to ‘endure in silence’ but if he took such a course, he would end up ‘dotty’. Back in May he had penned a letter to Eddie Marsh asking him what ‘a supposedly influential writer’ might contribute if there were a war? ‘I would be grateful if you could find an opportunity to show this letter to Winston.’ In the event Sassoon remained at Heytesbury, his services were not required. Hester prepared for 18 evacuees and two helpers. The maids began to sew blackout curtains and the wireless reported the inevitable final steps to war. Sydney Cockerell arrived on the last day of August; he had written to ask if he might find a refuge at Heytesbury. His invalid wife was safe in Gloucester and their grandchildren were being settled at Sutton Veny, a stone’s throw from Heytesbury. Sassoon liked the idea of the valley, ‘empty of nightingales but full of Cockerells’. His arrival brought the added bonus that he could engage Hester in conversation, especially about the European situation, which was the last thing Sassoon wished to do.

On Sunday, 3 September, as he listened to the declaration of war against Germany, Sassoon wrote in his diary that no other course would rid the world of Nazism. The statement did nothing to relieve his depression. He had never thought he would live to see again a world engaged in the slaughter of its youth. Middle-aged men like himself would be safe in their inactivity, safe but not happy – ‘Happy are those who are too busy to think! It all makes me wish that the July 1918 bullet had finished me. I can do nothing now, except endure this nightmare.’