There are indeed times when we are inclined to welcome the infirmities and immunities of age. During the coal strike of 1921 my platoon was protecting the property of the Shell Motor Spirit Company in Newcastle. It was a dismal enough spot, beside the river. There was a long row of miners’ cottages between my billet and the guard-room, and after tea the women would sit upon their doorsteps and talk to one another, while the children played on a strip of grass that ran dingily to the waterside. Beyond a more or less mechanical supervision I had very little work to do, and in the evenings I would stand in the roadway and watch the dusk rise slowly from the river, to soften the harsh outline of chimney stack and factory. I grew lonely and a little wistful as the twilight settled caressingly on the poor houses that the sunlight had made so drab. Evening is always beautiful. And I used to indulge the hour of sentiment with romantic reveries concerning a young and charming girl who would sit evening after evening knitting beside her mother. I can recall now not a single feature of her; whether she was dark or fair or tall: but I seem to recollect vaguely that she was plump and that the light in her eyes was roguish. I used to think how pleasantly a love affair would enliven the tedium of military routine. I had not, let it be clearly understood, the slightest intention of embarking on such an enterprise. On the lowest grounds, it would have been unsoldierlike behaviour. The preliminaries, at any rate, would have been staged in full view of my platoon. And an officer should not encourage in the private soldier a suspicion that he is a creature of the same clay and of the same instincts. There is much to be said for the Ouida convention of beer in the canteen and champagne in the mess. But dreams are agreeable things, and my fancy created a number of romantic situations in which that girl and myself might at some later day find ourselves. I never came out of my billet without a slight quickening of the pulses. “Will she be there?” I asked myself. “Will she be as pretty as she was yesterday?” Once she smiled at me, and my vanity began to wonder whether she too was not regretting that there lay between us the barrier of military rank. Perhaps she, too, was musing wistfully in the twilight on the inequalities of time and place. Perhaps she, too, was dreaming of some romantic encounter in a lane in spring-time on the Cornish cliffs. “You!” I should gasp. And we should stand still, gazing at one another. And then we should both begin to talk eagerly at once. “I so wanted to speak to you,” I should say. “I, too,” she would reply. And we should walk together arm-in-arm along the lane by the tall cliffs, standing perhaps silent for a while saddened by the permanence of these high cliffs. So were they yesterday, so would they be to-morrow; their silence might well seem a criticism of our enchantment.