Sometimes in the midst of my aching, tearing anxiety I found myself laughing out suddenly at the remembrance of some of the Boy's delightful extravagances; at how, for instance, one night when his battalion was stationed about three and a half miles away from us, he had driven up all that distance and back in a taxicab at midnight in order to get eighteenpence in ready money for a tip for the cab driver. He had been a short journey in the cab already, but the cost of that was going to be put down on an account. He wanted, however, to give a good tip, and, having no small change, he took the cab another seven miles to do it. Then there had been an occasion when, needing a piece of stout wire, he had secretly but relentlessly removed it from the inside of the handsome and nearly new piano, substituting a stout bootlace to act in its place. For one who had always been responsible far beyond his years--more responsible than most elderly men--he had astonishing little fits of gay irresponsibility in which he fell foul of the authority of everybody except his Big Yeogh Wough. Perhaps it was these very gleams of wildness that won for him the devotion of the servants in the house. Once a week everything else in the household routine had to give way to the making of his cake. The cook kneaded her heart's love into it in spite of his having robbed her of her young man for the benefit of the Army, and the others looked on at the making with sorrow and fear in their honest eyes. They might not agree with each other on all points at all times, but they always agreed about him; and so the family cake and the kitchen cake became poor and anæmic in order that the cake destined for the Front might be rich enough to put any young officer into a state of bilious inefficiency. Our anxiety to obey official instructions as to describing the contents of parcels led him to write a protest to his sister as Chief Commissariat Officer: "MY DEAR BYSTANDER, "I wish you wouldn't apologise all over the outside of my parcels for what is inside them. Why put 'Only six buns and two dried haddocks'? Or: 'Merely a little dill water'? Can't you put 'Provisions' only? Won't that satisfy the regulations?" The sending out of his silver identity disc and chain was an agonising experience. On the face of it there is nothing very tragic about a flat bit of silver with a man's name and regiment engraved on it. But what it stands for! Oh, heaven, what it stands for!