Goodbye to all That by Robert Graves — Read

SIEGFRIED had written in March 1917 from the Second Battalion, asking me to pull myself together and send him a letter because he felt horribly low in spirits. He complained of his welcome there. The battalion was now restocked with senior officers, and my enemy, the Special Reserve second-lieutenant with the regular commission, now an acting-captain, had gone so far as to call him a bloody wart, and allude to the bloody First Battalion. Siegfried swallowed the insult, but tried to get transferred to the First Battalion.

The Second was resting until the end of the month about two miles from our beloved Morlancourt, surrounded by billows of mud slopes and muddy woods and aerodromes, and fine new railroads where he used to lollop about on the black mare of an afternoon. (David Thomas and I once watched Siegfried breaking in that black mare, a beautiful combative creature with a homicidal kink, and wondered at his patience. He would put the mare at a jump and, when she sulked, not force her but simply turn her around and then lead her back to it. Time after time she refused, yet could neither provoke his ill-temper nor make him give up his intention. Finally she took the jump in mere boredom - a six-footer, and she could manage higher than that.)