pinnacle and the Frenchmen with it. It was a very neat bit of shooting. I was proud to have limited the damage like that. Really, you must go and have a look at it.’ The nearest regimental depot was at Wrexham: the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The Harlech golf secretary suggested my taking a commission instead of enlisting. He rang up the adjutant and said that I was a public-school boy who had been in the Officers’ Training Corps at Charterhouse. So the adjutant said: ‘Send him right along,’ and on 11th August I started my training. I immediately became a hero to my family. My mother, who said to me: ‘My race has gone mad,’ regarded my going as a religious act; my father was proud that I had ‘done the right thing.’ I even recovered, for a time, the respect of my uncle, C. L. Graves, of _The Spectator_ and _Punch_, with whom I had recently had a tiff. He had given me a sovereign tip two terms previously and I had written my thanks, saying that with it I had bought Samuel Butler’s _Note Books_, _The Way of All Flesh_ and the two _Erewhons_. To my surprise this had infuriated him. The fellows who applied for commissions at the same time as myself were for the most part boys who had recently failed to pass into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and were trying to get into the regular army by the old militia door—which was now known as the Special Reserve. There were only one or two fellows who had gone into the army, like myself, for the sake of the war and not for the sake of a career. There were about a dozen of us recruit officers on the Square learning to drill and be drilled. My Officers’ Training Corps experience made this part easy, but I knew nothing about army traditions and made all the worst mistakes; saluting the bandmaster, failing to recognize the colonel when in mufti, walking in the street without a belt and talking shop in the mess. But I soon learned to conform. My greatest difficulty was to talk to men of the company to which I was posted with the necessary air of authority. Many of them were old soldiers re-enlisted, and I disliked bluffing that I knew more than they did. There were one or two very old soldiers employed on the depot staff, wearing the ribbon of Burma, 1885, and of even earlier campaigns, and usually also the ribbon of the ‘Rooti’ or good service medal awarded for eighteen years of undetected crime. There was one old fellow called Jackie Barrett, a Kipling character, of whom it was said: ‘There goes Jackie Barrett. He and his mucking-in chum deserted the regiment in Quetta and went across the north-west frontier on foot. Three months later he gave himself up as a deserter to the British consul at Jerusalem. He buried his chum by the way.’