We came rather to dread the occasions when the Chief was going to deliver one of his periodical orations in the House of Lords. Singularly enough, he used to take these speeches of his, in which he took good care never to tell his auditors anything that they did not know before, quite seriously--a good deal more seriously than we did. He prepared them laboriously, absorbing a good deal of his own time, and some of the time of certain of those under him, and then he would read out his rough draft to one, asking for approval and grateful for hints. He was always delighted to have some felicitous turn of expression proffered him, and he would discuss its merits at some length as compared with his own wording, ending by inserting it in the draft or rejecting it, as the case might be. I remember on one occasion, when he was going to fire off one of these addresses, just about the time when the great Boche thrust of 1915 into the heart of Russia came to an end, his making use of the idiom that the German "bolt was about shot." I objected. "Don't you like the phrase?" demanded Lord K. I admitted that it was an excellent phrase in itself, but urged that it was not altogether applicable, that the enemy seemed to have come to a standstill, not because he could get no farther but because he did not want to go farther, meaning to divert force in some new direction, and that the words somehow represented our principal foe as in worse case than was correct. Lord K. seemed disappointed. He said that he would consider the matter, and he made a note on his draft. But he stuck to his guns as it turned out; he used the phrase in the Upper House a day or two later, and it was somewhat criticised in the newspapers at the time. He was, I believe, so much captivated by his little figure of speech that he simply could not bear to part with it. He was a regular salamander. The heat of his room, owing to the huge fire that he always maintained if it was in the least cold outside and to the double windows designed to keep out the noise of Whitehall, was at times almost unbearable. One's head would be in a buzz after being in it for some time. His long sojourn in southern lands no doubt rendered him very susceptible to low temperatures. On one occasion, when General Joffre had sent over a couple of superior staff officers to discuss some questions with him, the four of us sat at his table for an hour and a half, and the two visitors and I were almost [p.79] in a state of collapse at the end. "Mais la chaleur! Pouf! C'etait assommant!" I heard one say to the other as they left the room, not noticing that I was immediately behind.