"We have a parson attached to us now," Raymond Asquith wrote in a letter home during World War I, "a Cambridge don who wanted to hold a service today in our battalion mess room; but the walls have been thickly papered with French pictures of naked women. He had to confess the site inappropriate for a holy purpose."

["I am in the trenches and have been for three or four days now," Asquith wrote in another letter. "So far they are more uncomfortable and less dangerous than I had been led to expect. Waders are essential as the mud and water are well above the knee and the cold is intense. An unpleasant feature is the vast number of rats which gnaw the dead bodies and then run about on one's face, making obscene noises and gestures."]