It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs.

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.