I must return to my old comrades of the Great War - to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Of joys departed, not to return, how painful the remembrance.
Soldiers, I had lately like to have been taken from you by the attempt of a few desperate men, but by the grace and providence of the gods, I am still preserved.
Eventually, I was sent to Wales and Germany, and after the war, to Paris.
As early as December 1945, I accompanied my wife and a few relatives in their return from evacuation in the countryside to Cologne, where over the years we settled down in a destroyed house.
Soldiers, I intend to stay here, not only as long as a man remains, but as long as a piece of a man is left.
My father died in France, and my sisters and I went over with my mum to bring back his body. I remember going to the funeral parlour in France and being given a laminated menu of coffins, and thinking, surely there is an ice cream at the back of here!
As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.
Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
I am left alone in the wide world. My own dear family I have buried: one in Rangoon, and two in Amherst. What remains for me but to hold myself in readiness to follow the dear departed to that blessed world, 'Where my best friends, my kindred dwell, where God, my Saviour, reigns.'
The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.'