The book after two or three refusals was accepted by Grant Richards and published in July 1917 in the same week that I was posted as a machine-gun second-lieutenant to the B.E.F. in France. It could not have come out under luckier auspices. It had an immediate news value. There was a boom in soldier poets. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Nichols, W.J. Turner had recently made their debuts. Here was a soldier novelist, the first and in his teens. As always in war-time there was a demand for books and there was that summer a dearth of novels. A spirit of challenge and criticism was in the air. The war after three years was still "bogged down" and public opinion attributed allied failings in the field to mismanagement in high places. The rebelliousness of _The Loom of Youth_ was in tune with the temper of the hour. Finally I had the immense advantage of being the son of Arthur Waugh. My father as a critic and a publisher was one of the most loved and respected figures in the world of letters. Many were anxious to give his son a chance. The book had a flattering reception. Nothing of any particular interest was being published at the moment and reviewers welcomed it. J.C. Squire, Gerald Gould, Ralph Straus, C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, E.B. Osborn, all made it their book of the week. Nor was it noticed only in the book sections. Richards had suggested that Thomas Seccombe who was then history professor at Sandhurst and had introduced the book to him, should write a preface. That preface discussed the Public School system in the light of contemporary events. The system, Seccombe wrote, "has fairly helped, you may say, to get us out of the mess of August 1914. Yes, but it contributed heavily to get us into it." The preface encouraged and helped a journalist to use the book as the text for a general article. Within a month it had received twenty-four columns of reviews and was in its third impression. Grant Richards told my father that with any luck he would sell five thousand copies.