Energy books

-Pol,
Bruay, Lillers--a hundred others where officers stayed for years in
charge of motor-repair shops, ordnance-stores, labor battalions,
administration offices, claim commissions, graves' registration,
agriculture for soldiers, all kinds of jobs connected with that life
of war, but not exciting.
Not exciting. So frightful in boredom that men were tempted to take to
drink, to look around for unattached women, to gamble at cards with
any poor devil like themselves. Those were most bored who were most
virtuous. For them, with an ideal in their souls, there was no
possibility of relief (for virtue is not its own reward), unless they
were mystics, as some became, who found God good company and needed no
other help. They had rare luck, those fellows with an astounding faith
which rose above the irony and the brutality of that business being
done in the trenches, but there were few of them.
Even with hours of leisure, men who had been "bookish" could not read.
That was a common phenomenon.


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