The adjutant, an East Lancashire lieutenant, by name Deane. The day after war was declared a German armed cruiser had held up the neutral liner in which he was sailing home from the Cape and taken him off. He was forced to give his parole not to fight against Germany in the war. The cruiser was subsequently sunk by a British ship, the _Highflyer_, and Deane was rescued; but the signed parole was saved by the German captain, who escaped in a boat and gave it in charge of the German consul at Las Palmas. So Deane was forbidden the trenches, and when I met him in 1917 he was a staff-colonel. A doctor who was the mess buffoon. I broke the scabbard of my sword on his back one night. The interpreter, a Thomas Cook man who could speak every European language but Basque. He admitted to a weakness in Lithuanian, and when asked what his own nationality was would answer, ‘I am Wagon-Lits.’ I had an inconvenient accident. The telephone bell was constantly going from Western Command Headquarters; it was installed in an office-room where I slept on a sloping desk. One night Pack-Saddle (the code-name for the Chief Supply Officer of the Western Command) rang up shortly after midnight with orders for the commandant. They were about the rationing of a batch of four hundred prisoners who were being sent up to him from Chester and North Wales. I was half asleep and not clever at the use of the telephone. In the middle of the conversation, which was difficult because a storm was going on at the time and Pack-Saddle was irritable, the line was, I suppose, struck by lightning somewhere. I got a bad electric shock, and was unable to use a telephone properly again until some twelve years later.