on 22 February, and was gassed on 4 March. In all he spent seventeen months in war-hospitals. By September 1917 he felt that the cause of honour and justice had been lost in the lust of Victory ("We were too ready to go on fighting without offering terms"). Passed fit for garrison duty at Chatham (3rd Battalion Royal West Kent HQ), he sought the help of fellow-Apostle Keynes to return to France, and from August 1918 to the Armistice he was Staff lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps (Third Army HQ), examining German prisoners near Bapaume and Le Quesnoy. His life hung in the balance in November 1918 shortly after the Armistice, when his lung wounds reopened in the influenza pandemic. He returned to Cambridge in January 1919. Fell-walking in the Lake District "on Easter morning [1919] on Kidsty Pike, between Hawes Water and Hayes Water, a blinding spring sun on snowy ridge beyond ridge, from Fairfield to Blucathra, brought a moment of such ecstatic intoxication that, were I a mystic, I should have called it a mystical experience." Career Resuming his undergraduate studies, Lucas won a Chancellor's Medal for Classics and the Browne Medal (1920), and revived meetings of the Apostles, suspended since 1914, becoming Society Secretary and contributing nineteen papers. He was elected to a Fellowship at King's College in 1920 before he had completed his degree, Keynes paying for him to holiday in Greece with Sebastian Sprott on the eve of his Tripos. He took a starred first and began his career as a Classics lecturer in October 1920. In the spring of 1921 he spent three months in Greece as a student of the British School at Athens, locating the site of the Battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly (see Pharsalus below). Back in Cambridge he switched that year to teaching for the English Tripos (instituted in 1919). He was a member of the Cambridge University English Faculty from 1921 to 1939 and from 1945 to 1962, and a University Reader in English from 1947 to 1962. At the invitation of Desmond MacCarthy, literary editor of the New Statesman, Lucas reviewed poetry and criticism for that journal from 1922 to 1926, having begun his career as reviewer with the Athenaeum in 1920–21, its last year. Early reviews and essays were collected in his Authors Dead and Living (1926). Among them was a review of Housman's Last Poems (1922)