Having a house at Fleet that summer, I cycled over to beyond Camberley one day, just at the stage when coming events were beginning to cast their shadows before after the Serajevo assassinations, to watch the Aldershot Command at work, and talked long with many members of the Command and with some of the Staff College personnel who had turned out to see the show. Some of them--_e.g._ Lieut.-Colonels W. Thwaites and J. T. Burnett-Stuart and Major (or was it Captain?) W. E. Ironside--were to go far within the next five years. But there were also others whom I met that day for the last time--Brigadier-General Neil Findlay, commanding the artillery, who had been in the same room with me at the "Shop," and Lieut.-Colonel Adrian Grant-Duff of the Black Watch, excusing his presence in the firing-line on the plea that he "really _must_ see how his lads worked through the woodlands"; both had made the supreme sacrifice in France before the leaves were off the trees. How many are alive and unmaimed to-day of those fighting men of all ranks who buzzed about so cheerily amid the heather and the pine trees that afternoon, and who melted away so silently out of Aldershot a very few days later? The clouds thereafter gathered thicker from day to day, and on Friday morning, the 31st of July, I received a letter from General Henry Wilson, sent on from my town address, asking me to come and breakfast with him on the following day. I was going down to Winchester to see the Home Counties (Territorial) Division complete a long march from the east on their way to Salisbury Plain, and it happened to be inconvenient to go up to town that night, so I wired to Wilson to say I would call at his house on the Sunday. On getting back, late, to Fleet I however found a peremptory summons from him saying I must come and see him next day, and I went up in the morning. One could not foresee that that breakfast in Draycott Place to which I had been bidden was to take rank as a historic meal. Mr. Maxse has told the story of it in the pages of the _National Review_, and of how the movement was there started by which the Unionist leaders were got together from various quarters to bring pressure on the Government not to leave France in the lurch, a movement which culminated in Mr. Bonar Law's famous letter to Mr. Asquith.