Milsom greeted me a couple of hours later in the big oak-panelled hall of the Officers' Mess at the Marine Headquarters. I had been on board the ship, had half an hour's yarn with the Skipper (who was full of the ways of Dockyard Officials and the tale of our Defect List), shifted, and got up to the Marines' Mess as the first dinner bugles were sounding. Every time I enter that hall, with its tattered Colours hanging from the walls and the portraits of bygone Commandants staring down over their gorgets, I am struck afresh by the reminders, cherished here on all sides, of the proud past of the Corps. Greenwich Hospital excepted, the Navy has no shrines where the emblems of its traditions are preserved, but the Marine Headquarters always seem to echo with whispers of the Marines' history. In the seconds that it took me to cross the wide floor, I had a blurred vision of the Rock, taken by storm and held against odds; of haggard, fever-stricken detachments in rotting pith helmets, fighting their way through swamp and jungle, of the African sun catching the reddened bayonets of a desert square.... "Cocktail, I think." Milsom beckoned to a waiter, and, slipping his arm through mine, drew me down beside him on to the high-padded fender of the old fireplace that is a miracle of carving. He had had a game of squash, he explained, and a tub since his arrival, and felt that he had decidedly earned a drink. "Plenty of time," he added as he lit a cigarette. "Guest night, and the Colonel's waiting for a guest!" We sipped our cocktails, and while we yarned I studied the gathering all round us on the look-out for old shipmates and familiar faces. The Commandant I knew well, a grizzled veteran, whose skin had been so baked by tropic suns that it had the appearance of ancient parchment. He came towards us for a few minutes' chat, limping slightly from the effects (so it was said) of a mauling by a lion in Somaliland, and sat rolling his cigarette round and round between his fingers and thumb, his keen old eyes watching the door for his guest. Markham was there, upright and groomed to the last hair, and the sight of his face instantly recalled the vision I always cherish of him astride the wall of a Chinese fort, plying his sword like a swashbuckler, and endeavouring to shield the body of an unconscious N.C.O. from the pikes of the Boxer rabble below. Ye gods! And we called that war!