Le Tréport enters the memoir as a temporary refuge from the trenches: during the winter of the First World War, the narrator was sent there for three weeks with trench fever. His stay in a converted hotel joined physical illness to enforced rest, an uneasy shared room, and a consequential reading encounter. Away from the front, a bed and a book became an unexpected setting for a change in literary sympathies.

A hospital reprieve

The illness was called trench fever by the troops and P.U.O.—Pyrexia, unknown origin—by the doctors. The narrator had had a weak chest since childhood and was already accustomed to making a minor illness one of life’s pleasures, even in peacetime. Against the alternative of the trenches, hospital brought the simple luxury of a bed and a book; the relief was sharpened by the hospital’s character as a converted hotel, where two patients shared a room.

The first week’s rest was interrupted by the roommate’s nighttime love affair with a nurse. Fever kept the narrator from embarrassment, but not from irritation: the whispering struck him as tedious and unmusical, especially at night. The episode makes the hospital’s quiet less idyllic than its promise of shelter suggests; recovery meant sharing close quarters with other people’s private lives.

Shared routines and brief companionship

The narrator’s circumstances improved when the amorous roommate was sent elsewhere and replaced by a musical misogynist from Yorkshire. On their second morning together, the new roommate proposed that they make their own beds so the nurses would not remain in the room for as long. They did so every day. When the two V.A.D.'s noticed and praised them, the men received their brightest smiles; the narrator suspected that the nurses took the gesture for gallantry.

The exchange turns a minor chore into the stay’s small social ritual. The bed-making was practical, prompted by the men’s wish to shorten the nurses’ visits, while its reception gave it a more flattering meaning. The scene belongs to a broader pattern in the narrator’s wartime recollections: brief contacts and ordinary gestures could make a temporary place feel hospitable without erasing its discomforts.

Reading G. K. Chesterton

Le Tréport was also where the narrator first read a volume of G. K. Chesterton’s essays. He had never heard of Chesterton and knew nothing of his position. The immediate attraction therefore surprised him: by his own account, pessimism, atheism, and hatred of sentiment should have made Chesterton seem congenial to him least of all. He could not fully explain why the encounter succeeded, and compared the involuntary, improbable act of liking an author to falling in love.

The attraction did not depend on agreement. The narrator regarded himself as an experienced enough reader to distinguish enjoying an author from accepting what that author said. What drew him was a humor inseparable from argument, rather than jokes inserted as decoration or a general air of flippancy. He valued wit that seemed to arise from the argument’s own movement and force, like a sword flashing because its wielder was fighting for his life.

He was equally struck by Chesterton’s goodness. The narrator stressed that this response did not reflect an effort to become good himself: he felt no automatic suspicion of goodness as smugness or hypocrisy. Instead, goodness had a charm he could recognize at a distance, even without intending to imitate it. This first reading in the hospital did not amount to a conversion or an explicit change of belief; its importance lies in the unexpected opening it made in the tastes of a young atheist and pessimist.

Place in the wartime memoir

The account gives Le Tréport a concentrated role rather than treating it as a destination in its own right. Illness removed the narrator from the trenches for three weeks, and the converted hotel supplied the shared room in which he endured nighttime disturbance, made beds with a new roommate, and encountered Chesterton. Recovery and reading thus occupy the same interval: a bodily reprieve became the setting for a literary attachment that crossed the boundaries of his existing outlook.

The memoir presents the change through particulars rather than a dramatic declaration. A weak chest, an uncertain diagnosis, a nurse’s visits, two made beds, and a volume of essays form the circumstances of the encounter. Le Tréport matters because this pause in wartime life placed the narrator, unexpectedly, before an author whose argumentative humor and goodness he could enjoy before he could account for their appeal.