There were not many officers in the Second who had been with it when I left it a month after Loos, but at any rate I expected to have a friendlier welcome than the first time I had come to the battalion at Laventie. But, as one of them recorded in his diary: ‘Graves had a chilly reception, which surprised me.’ The reason was simple. One of the officers who had joined the Third Battalion in August 1914, and had been on the Square with me, had achieved his ambition of a regular commission in the Second Battalion. He was one of those who had been sent out to France before me as being more efficient and had been wounded before I came out. But now he was only a second-lieutenant in the Second Battalion, where promotion was slow, and I was a captain in the Third Battalion. Line-battalion feeling against the Special Reserve was always strong, and jealousy of my extra stars made him bitter. It amused him to revive the suspicion raised at Wrexham by my German name that I was a German spy. Whether he was serious or not I cannot say, probably he could not have said either; but the result was that I found myself treated with great reserve by all the officers who had not been with me in trenches before. It was unlucky that the most notorious German spy caught in England had assumed the name of Karl Graves. It was put about that he was a brother of mine. My consolation was that there was obviously a battle due and that would be the end either of me or of the suspicion. I thought to myself: ‘So long as there isn’t an N.C.O. told off to watch me and shoot me on the slightest appearance of treachery.’ Such things had been known. As a matter of fact, though I had myself had no traffic with the enemy, there was a desultory correspondence kept up between my mother and her sisters in Germany; it came through her sister, Clara von Faber du Faur, mother of my cousin Conrad, whose husband was German consul at Zurich. It was not treasonable on either side, merely a register of the deaths of relations and discreet references to the war service of the survivors. The German aunts wrote, as the Government had ordered every German with relations or friends in enemy or neutral countries to do, pointing out the righteousness of the German cause and presenting Germany as the innocent party in a war engineered by France and Russia. My mother, equally strong for the Allied cause, wrote back that they were deluded. The officers I liked in the battalion were the colonel and Captain Dunn, the battalion doctor. Doctor Dunn was what they call a hard-bitten man; he had served as a trooper in the South African War and won the d.c.m. He was far more than a doctor; living at battalion headquarters he became the right-hand man of three or four colonels in succession. When his advice was not taken this was usually afterwards regretted. On one occasion, in the autumn fighting of 1917, a shell burst among the headquarters staff, knocking out adjutant, colonel, and signals officer.