I wrote to a friend in the Demobilization Department of the War Office asking him to expedite my demobilization. He wrote back that he would do his best, but that I must be certified not to have had charge of Government moneys for the last six months; and I had not. But the adjutant had just decided to put me in command of a company. He said that he was short of officers whom he knew could be trusted with company accounts. The latest arrivals from the new-army battalions were a constant shame to the senior officers. Paternity-orders, stumer cheques, and drunk on parade were frequent. Not to mention table-manners, at which Sergeant Malley would stand aghast. There were now two mess ante-rooms, the junior and the senior, yet if a junior officer was regimentally a gentleman (belonged, that is, to the North Wales landed gentry or had been to Sandhurst) he was invited to use the senior ante-room and be among his own class. All this must have seemed very strange to the three line-battalion second-lieutenants captured in 1914, now promoted captain by the death of most of their contemporaries and set free by the terms of the Armistice. The adjutant cancelled the intended appointment only when I promised to help him with the battalion theatricals that were being arranged for St. David’s Day; I undertook to play Cinna in _Julius Cæsar_. His change of mind saved me over two hundred pounds. Next day the senior lieutenant in the company that I was to have taken over went off with the company cash-box, and I would have been legally responsible. Before the war he used to give displays at Blackpool Pier as _The Handcuff King_; he got away safely to America. I went out a few miles from Limerick to visit my uncle, Robert Cooper, at Cooper’s Hill. He was a farmer, a retired naval officer, and had been having his ricks burnt and cattle driven. He was very despondent. Through the window he showed me distant cattle grazing beside the Shannon. ‘They have been out there all winter,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t had the heart to go out and look at them these three months.’ I spent the night at Cooper’s Hill and woke up with a chill. I knew that it was the beginning of influenza. At the barracks I found that the War Office telegram had come through for my demobilization, but that all demobilization among troops in Ireland was to be stopped on the following day for an indefinite period because of the troubles there. The adjutant, showing me the telegram, said: ‘We’re not going to let you go. You promised to help us with those theatricals.’ I protested, but he was firm. I did not intend to have my influenza out in an Irish military hospital with my lungs in their present state.