I went to see him at Aldershot on the Friday before war was declared, and found, as I expected, that he regarded it as inevitable. He had undergone a very severe operation in the early summer, and was still quite unfit to stand the strain of hard exercise. It had been arranged that we were to go together, a few days later, to Sweden, for six weeks' shooting and fishing in the mountains. He was very anxious to return to England for the September manoeuvres. His surgeon,[6] however, forbade this, on the ground that even by that time he would not be fit to sit for a whole day in the saddle. He was in two moods on this occasion. He was as light-hearted as a boy who is unexpectedly released from school; the reason being that the Army Medical Officer had that morning passed him as physically fit to go abroad with Sir Douglas Haig, to whom he had acted as Senior Staff Officer since the previous autumn. {xxxiii} His other mood was very different. The war which he had foreseen and dreaded, the war which in his view might have been avoided upon one condition, and one only--if England had been prepared--had come at last. I don't think I have ever known any one--certainly never any anti-militarist--whose hatred and horror of war gave the same impression of intensity and reality as his. Not metaphorically, but as a bare fact, his feelings with regard to it were too deep for words; he would suddenly break off speaking about things which had occurred in his own experience; in particular, about loss of friends and comrades. He was an Irishman, and had not the impassive coldness of some of the great soldiers. But most of all he hated war when it was not inevitable--when with foresight and courage it might have been averted--as in his opinion this war might have been. In radium there is said to be a virtue which enables it to affect adjacent objects with its own properties, and to turn them, for a time, and for certain purposes, into things of the same nature as itself. Certain rare human characters possess a similar virtue; but although I have met with several of these in my life, there is none of them all who seemed to me to possess this quality in quite so high a degree as Gough. He was an alchemist who made fine soldiers out of all sorts and conditions of men, and whose spirit turned despondency out of doors.