I got the draft off all right, and the inspecting general was so pleased with the soldier-like appearance that the adjutant and I had given them that he sent them all to the camp cinema at his own expense. This gave me a good mark with the colonel in Ireland. The climax of my good services was when I checked an attempt on the part of the camp quartermaster to make the battalion responsible for the loss of five hundred blankets. It happened like this. Suddenly one night I had three thousand three hundred leave-men from France thrown under my command; they were Irishmen, from every regiment in the army, and had been held up at Holyhead on the way home by the presence of submarines in the Irish Sea. They were rowdy and insubordinate, and for the four days that they were with me I had little rest. The five hundred missing blankets were some of the six thousand six hundred that had been issued to them, and had probably been sold in Rhyl to pay for cigarettes and beer. I was able to prove at the Court of Inquiry that the men, though attached to the battalion for purposes of discipline, had been issued with blankets direct from the camp quartermaster’s stores before coming to it. The loss of the blankets might be presumed to have taken place between the time of issue and the time that the men arrived in the battalion lines. I had given no receipt to the camp quartermaster for the blankets. The Court of Inquiry was held in the camp quartermaster’s private office; but I insisted that he should leave the room while evidence was being taken, because it was now no longer his private office but a Court of Inquiry. He had to go out, and his ignorance of my line of defence saved the case. This success, and the evidence that I was able to give the colonel of presents accepted by the battalion mess-president when at Rhyl, from wholesale caterers (the mess-president had tried to make me pay my mess-bill twice over and this was my retaliation), so pleased the colonel that he recommended me for the Russian Order of St. Anne, with Crossed Swords, of the Third Class. So, after all, I would not have left the army undecorated but for the October revolution, which cancelled the award-list.