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Now, the people of Lucerne could never have smelled them, or at all events they could never have appreciated those perfumes as I did, or the town would have been evacuated. Their olfactory sense compared with mine must have been a stupid thing, dense to begin with, and cudgelled by use and wont into blank insensibility. Because, it is obvious, delicacy in this, as in all the senses, can only be acquired by avoiding habitual overstimulation. And that avoidance is only possible in a country where odours are fine, etherealised, rare.

Even in France, France the enlightened, the sensitive, the refined, primitive odours pervade the country, as our Army knows very well. Not only is the farm dunghill given place of honour in the farm courtyard, close to doors and windows, but even in the mansions of the wealthy the cesspool still remains—not outside, but inside, the house, the water-carriage system, even the pail-system (if that can be called a system), being unknown. So that our Army authorities had to send round a peculiar petrol-engine, known to the Tommies as “Stinking Willie,” to empty those pools of corruption. Some of the monasteries used by us as hospitals were, at the beginning of the war, even worse.