His visit was invaluable: it gave him perspective. Returned to England he went straightway to Oxford and started on the Introduction to his history. That Introduction in its final form is a beautiful piece of writing. But the writing of it did not come too easily. Sir Walter wrote with pain. The subject was new. The author was modest and conscientious. Nothing but his very best would satisfy him. Indeed he was seldom satisfied with what he wrote. “It goes heavy, so far, and I am destroying much of what I write,” he says in a letter written when he was finishing the Introduction. “False starts,” he goes on, “but it will get smoother soon.” And a few days later, “I am cobbling the Introduction; you shall have it by Monday morning.” Statistics did not excite him. Long unwieldy committee names and strings of facts tired him. In the Introduction he was able to let himself go a bit. “It may seem rather a high-pressure start--opening out the engine at once,” he wrote. “But it will be only now and then in the course of the book, that I shall get a chance to say what I think.” He brought his manuscript to the office and the staff sat around him whilst he read it. He was very sensitive. He felt himself an amateur in the midst of a body of experts. It must have been a new experience for him to come and submit his work to a tribunal of ordinary people like ourselves. As he read on he warmed to his work. He forgot us. We forgot him. His fine voice held us. We were taken, as it were, over the world on the wings of the wind. The whole meaning of air warfare was made plain to us. We were looking down now on this battle-field, now on that, and the whole vast organization was seen clear cut as through a diminishing glass. Now and again the glass was reversed and focused on to any individual member of the force. His feelings were laid bare to our gaze. We seemed to understand everything. We did not notice when the reading finished. The spell would hardly break. Perhaps it was not so much what was read to us, although it was inspiring; it may have been the spell cast by the author himself. Perhaps it was that the sight of him, offering himself to our judgment, flattered us to wonder. I do not know. I know that the officer who was then in charge of the Air Branch, expressed very diffidently something of what we felt at the reading. Sir Walter was immensely pleased. “I should be pretty sick if the public liked my work, and the men who have been in the air didn’t,” he wrote back.