"...the writing of Private Alfred M. Hale. He was a genteel, delicate,
monumentally incompetent middle-aged batman, known somewhat
patronizingly as "our Mr. Hale" in the Royal Flying Corps installations
where he served. Four years after the war, he composed a 658-page memoir
of his agonies and humiliations, dwelling on his palpable unfitness for
any kind of military life and on the constant ironic gap between what
was expected of him and what he could perform. At one camp it was his
job to heat water for the officers' ablutions. At the same time, he was
strictly forbidden to gather fuel for heating water, since the only
source of fuel was the lumber of numerous derelict barracks in the camp.
Frustrated almost to madness by this conflict of obligations, by the
abuse now from one set of officers for the insufficiently heated water,
now from another for his tearing up and incinerating the barracks, piece
by piece, Hale confesses to an anxiety fully as agonizing as that faced
by troops in an assault. "Heating water," he remembers, "was a sort of
punishment for every sin I have ever committed, I should say." Writing
his aggrieved memoir, he knows that he is dwelling excessively on his
water-heating problems, incontinently returning to them again and again.
He tries to break away and resume his narrative: "I said I was going to
turn to other matters." But it is exactly the irony of his former
situation that keeps calling him back: "In truth it is the irony of
things, as they were in those days, that has forced me back on my
tracks, as it has a habit of doing, whenever writing of what I then went
through."

The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell

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