So presently I was sent to Oswestry. A good colonel, but the material at his disposal was discouraging. The men were mostly compulsory enlistments, and the officers, with few exceptions, useless. The first task I was given was to superintend the entraining of battalion stores and transport; we were moving to Kinmel Park Camp, near Rhyl. I was given a company of one hundred and fifty men and allowed six hours for the job. I chose fifty of the stronger men and three or four N.C.O.’s who looked capable, and sent the rest away to play football. By organizing the job in the way that I had learnt in the First Battalion I got these fifty men to load the train in two hours less than the scheduled time. The colonel congratulated me. At Rhyl he gave me the job of giving ‘further instruction’ to the sixty or so young officers who had been sent to him from the cadet-battalions. Few officers in the battalion had seen any active service. Among the few was Howell Davies (now literary editor of the _Star_), who had had a bullet through his head and was in as nervous a condition as myself. We became friends, and discussed the war and poetry late at night in the hut; we used to argue furiously, shouting each other down. It was at this point that I remembered Nancy Nicholson. I had first met her at Harlech, where the Nicholsons had a house, when I was on leave in April 1916 after the operation on my nose. She was sixteen then, on holiday from school. I had made friends with her brother Ben, the painter, whose asthma had kept him out of the army. When I went back to France in 1917 I had gone to say good-bye to Ben and the rest of the family on the way to Victoria Station, and the last person to say good-bye to me at that time was Nancy, I remembered her standing in the doorway in her black velvet dress. She was ignorant but independent-minded, good-natured, hard, and as sensible about the war as anybody at home could be. In the summer of 1917 (shortly after the episode with the Somerville nurse) I had seen her again and we had gone together to a revue, the first revue I had been to in my life. It was _Cheep_, Lee White was in it, singing of Black-eyed Susans, and how ‘Girls must all be Farmers’ Boys, off with skirts, wear corduroys,’ and Nancy told me that she was now on the land herself. She showed me her paintings, illustrations to Stevenson’s _Child’s Garden of Verses_, my child-sentiment and hers—she had a happy childhood to look back on—answered each other. I liked all her family, particularly her mother, now dead, Mabel Nicholson, the painter, a beautiful wayward Scotch-melancholy person. William Nicholson, again ‘the painter,’ is still among my friends. Tony, a brother, just older than Nancy, was a gunner, waiting to go to France.