Twice he was offered a commission, but he refused to take one. He distrusted his ability to be a good officer and also he desired to go on fighting side by side with his comrades, one of whom, now an officer and a prisoner in Germany, had been his friend before the war. I was told by a man of his company that one day a General was conducted along the trenches by the Colonel commanding the regiment and recognised Munro, whom he had met at dinner-parties in London. “What on earth are you doing here?” he asked, and said that he had a job to be done at the rear which would be the very thing for him. Munro excused himself from accepting it. Another opportunity of less arduous work was offered him. Men who could speak German were ordered to report: interpreters were wanted to deal with prisoners. Munro reported, but urged that it had taken him two years to get out to the front and that he desired to remain there. He was allowed to do as he wished. And his gaiety never left him. Those who were with him speak of the tales with which he amused them. He even founded a club in one place at which they were stationed, and called it the Back Kitchen Club, because the members met in the kitchen of a peasant’s cottage. When he came home on leave, it was evident that the strain of military life was telling on him. He was thin and his face was haggard. But the spiritual change wrought in him by the war was greater than the physical. He told me that he could never come back to the old life in London. And he wrote asking me to find out from a person in Russia whether it would be possible to acquire land in Siberia to till and to hunt, and whether a couple of Yakutsk lads could be got as servants. It was the love of the woodlands and the wild things in them, that he had felt as a child, returning. The dross had been burnt up in the flame of war. Munro fell in the Beaumont-Hamel action in November 1916. On the 12th he and his comrades were at Beldancourt. At one o’clock in the morning of the 14th they went to Mailly. As the men were crossing No-Man’s-Land to occupy trenches evacuated by the enemy, Munro was shot through the head. “Poor Saki! What an admiration we all had for him,” wrote the officer in command of the 22nd Royal Fusiliers. “I always quoted him as one of the heroes of the war. I saw daily the appalling discomforts he so cheerfully endured. He flatly refused to take a commission or in any way to allow me to try to make him more comfortable. General Vaughan told him that a brain like his was wasted as a private soldier. He just smiled. He was absolutely splendid. What courage! The men simply loved him.” ROTHAY REYNOLDS, _September 1918_. THE TOYS OF PEACE