“This happened several years ago at a place called Canghall in the north of Scotland. A lot of us were stationed there after the War. We had a golf course of sorts near the garrison and played a good deal. Our best man was a chap named Brosser, a Major. He could wallop any of us, which wasn’t so bad, but he got himself eternally hated by always reminding us of it. As a soldier he was a fine fellow, but as a sportsman he was a rank outsider. If you took him on he not only beat you hard but he kept bragging about it, before, during and after. I guess he was the most thoroughly detested player who ever sank a putt. It got so, finally, that no one would play with the swanker, and he had to offer all sorts of handicaps and odds to get a game. Things went on like that for a year or more. Then a few of us saw that something had to be done. One of the mess knew a young chap named Bedford who was then on leave of absence down in Kent. This Bedford, a subaltern, was a good golfer, but just how good we didn’t know. Just the same, we decided to have a try with him. Well, we wrote to him and told him the lay and called on him in the name of all that was holy to come up for a week and slay the dragon. “He came, and I liked his looks from the first. Rather a wispy lad, he was; long-limbed and awkward until you put a club in his hands. Very modest, too, and not at all sure he could turn the trick for us, but willing to try. It didn’t take more than five minutes to arrange the match. The Major was tickled to death and went around telling what he would do to the youngster. Bedford played the course two or three times and then the match was on. The whole garrison turned out to see it. I don’t suppose, unless it was his caddie, the Major had a ‘rooter’ in the crowd. But that didn’t bother him a bit. I fancy he preferred things that way. Bedford didn’t get his stride until they’d played four holes, and by that time the Major had him two down. Bedford wasn’t in the Major’s class with the driver, but he was a wizard with an iron, and not far behind the other on his putts. He got into his swing after a while and at the end of nine holes he was even up. From there on it was a ding-dong battle. They were both playing wonderfully good golf. If the Major won one hole Bedford won the next, and so it went to the fifteenth. Bedford won that. They halved the sixteenth. The seventeenth was long but not hard if you kept in the fairway. Your first shot laid you down in the narrows, as we called it. There was a point of forest coming in on your right and some ugly ground on the left, rocks and gorse. The Major had sailed through there a hundred times without trouble, and we all knew it. But we hoped. Afterwards, talking it over, we found that every last one of us had prayed that the Major would slice into the woods. You see, the rough on the other side wouldn’t have done so well. With luck you could wangle out of there and be not much the worse for it.