Old! When I came home from the last Balkan War I brought him some souvenirs from the battle-fields of Macedonia, and he sent me a telegram to meet him at 8 a.m. at a quiet West End hotel--where he was in the habit of staying. I arrived at that hour and he grasped my hand, welcomed me back from many months of a winter campaign with the Servian headquarters staff, and, erect and smiling, said: "Now, let's talk. I've already done my correspondence and had my breakfast. I was up at half-past five,"--when I had been snoring! Roberts was a soldier of the old school. He knew our national weakness, and he knew our stubborn stone-wall resistance. After the outbreak of war he told me that he would deplore racing, football, and cricket--our national sports--while we were at death-grips with Germany, because, as he put it, if we race and play games, the people will not take this world-war seriously. Then he turned in his chair in my room, and, looking me straight in the face, said: "What did I tell you, Le Queux, when you were forecasting 'The Invasion'--that the British nation will not be awakened by us--but only by a war upon them. They are at last awakened. I will never seek to recall the past, but my duty is to do my best for my King and my Country." And so he died--cut off at a moment when he was claiming old friendship of those from India whom he knew so well. The night before he left England to go upon the journey to the front which proved fatal, he wrote me a letter--which I still preserve--deploring the atrocities which the Germans had committed in Belgium. Ever since the war broke out we have heard of great concentration of troops, and ships intended to carry them, at Wilhelmshaven and Cuxhaven, a strong indication that something in the nature of a raid was in contemplation. It is quite possible that opinion, both in Germany and in this country, has been very profoundly modified by the fate which befell the last baby-killing expedition launched against our eastern coasts, which came to grief through the vigilance of Admiral Beatty. The terrible mauling sustained by the German squadron, the loss of the _Blucher_ and the battering of the _Seydlitz_ and _Derfflinger_, may have done a good deal to drive home into the German mind the conviction that in the face of an unbeaten--and to Germany unbeatable--battle-fleet, the invasion of England would be, at the very best, an undertaking of the most hazardous nature which would be foredoomed to failure and in which the penalty would be annihilation.