It was a great friend of mine that I had gone forth to see: a cricketer whose only sin was the century that kept him out of the pavilion: a man without an enemy but the one he turned out to fight at forty. Yet the man I am gladdest to have seen that day on the Somme is not my friend, but my friend's friend and Major.... And to think that he opened his kindly fire upon me by saying absurd things about the only book of mine which has very many friends; and that I let him, God forgive me, instead of bowing down before the gorgeous man! THE GUARDS The Jocks started me thinking in units, the Gunners set me off on the chance meetings of this little war, and between them they have taken me rather far afield from my Noah's Ark in the mud. But I am not going back just yet, though the ground is getting dangerous. I am only too well aware of that. It is presumptuous to praise the living; and I for one would rather stab a man in the back than pat him on it; but may I humbly hope that I do neither in these notes? The bristling risks shall not deter me from speaking of marvellous men as I found them, nor yet from expressing as best I may the homage they inspired. I can only leave out their names, and the names of the places where we met, and trust that my precautions are not themselves taken in vain. But there is no veiling whole units, or at least no avoiding some little rift within the veil. And when the unit is the Guards--but even the Guards were not all in one place last winter. Enough that at one time there were Guardsmen to be seen about the purlieus of that 'battered caravanserai' which the war found an antique city of sedate distinction, and is like to leave yet another scrap-heap. The Guards were in the picture there, if not so much so as the Jocks; for in kilt and bonnet the Jocks on active service are more like Jocks than the Guards are like Guardsmen; nevertheless, and wherever they wander, the Guards are quite platitudinously unlike any other troops on earth.