Lytton Strachey was unfit, but instead of allowing himself to be rejected by the doctors he preferred to appear before a military tribunal as a conscientious objector. He told us of the extraordinary impression that was caused by an air-cushion which he inflated during the proceedings as a protest against the hardness of the benches. Asked by the chairman the usual question: ‘I understand, Mr. Strachey, that you have a conscientious objection to war?’ he replied (in his curious falsetto voice), ‘Oh no, not at all, only to _this_ war.’ Better than this was his reply to the chairman’s other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: ‘Tell me, Mr. Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to violate your sister?’ With an air of noble virtue: ‘I would try to get between them.’ In 1916 I met more well-known writers than ever before or since. There were two unsuccessful meetings. George Moore had just written _The Brook Kerith_ and my neurasthenic twitchings interrupted the calm, easy flow of his conversational periods. He told me irritably not to fidget; in return I taunted him with having introduced cactus into the Holy Land some fifteen centuries before the discovery of America, its land of origin. At the Reform Club, H. G. Wells, who was Mr. Britling in those days and full of military optimism, talked without listening. He had just been taken for a ‘Cook’s Tour’ to France and had been shown the usual sights that royalty, prominent men of letters, and influential neutrals were shown by staff-conductors. He described his experiences at length and seemed unaware that I and the friend who was with me had also seen the sights. But I liked Arnold Bennett for his kindly unpretentiousness. And I liked Augustine Birrell. I happened to correct him when he said that the Apocrypha was not read in the church services; and again when he said that Elihu the Jebusite was one of Job’s comforters. He tried to over-ride me in both points, but I called for a Bible and proved them. He said, glowering very kindly at me: ‘I will say to you what Thomas Carlyle once said to a young man who caught him out in a misquotation, “Young man, you are heading straight for the pit of Hell!”’ And who else? John Galsworthy; or was my first meeting with him a year or two later? He was editor of a magazine called _Réveillé_, published under Government auspices (and was treated very ungenerously), the proceeds of which were to go to a disabled-soldier fund. I contributed. When I met him he asked me technical questions about soldier-slang—he was writing a war-play and wanted it accurate. He seemed a humble man and except for these questions listened without talking. This is, apparently, his usual practice; which explains why he is a better writer if a less forceful propagandist than Wells.... And Ivor Novello, in 1918. Then aged about twenty and already world famous as the author and composer of the patriotic song: