On the way I encountered Eric Bethune, my friend. It always thrills me, even at my sober age, to encounter Eric suddenly. I have never got over my boyish tendency to hero-worship. We shook hands. "Come along the Green Walk with me," he said. "My car is waiting at the West Lodge; I have to fly back to my orderly room." "We seem to be fairly for it, this time," I said, as we strode along the avenue of grass. Eric threw up his handsome head exultantly. The sloping sunlight caught his clean-cut profile and sinewy throat. "Yes," he said; "we’re for it! The Fleet has been ordered not to disperse after Manoeuvres. The Army is mobilising. We are going to have at them at last! It’s ’Der Tag,’ all right! You are coming back to us, I suppose, Alan?" "If they will have me," I said. "Have you? They’ll jump at you! They’ll give you a battalion! We shall all get battalions! Brigades, perhaps!" He laughed joyfully, like a schoolboy who sees his first eleven colours ahead. "There will be promotions all round—" "In a month or two," I said soberly, "there will be a lot more." "Oh, I don’t know," replied Eric. "We may finish Fritz off in one big battle. The German soldier is a machine: so is his officer. The whole German Army is a machine." "A damned efficient machine, too!" I observed. "Yes, boy; but cumbrous, cumbrous! If we let it get into its swing, it will be hard to stop. But we won’t. The little British Army—and mind you, as a result of its South African lessons, it is the best trained, the best led, and the finest body of men that we have ever put into the field in all our history—will get the first move on, and it will chuck itself, like a flinty little pebble, plumb in the middle of the German machinery, and put all its gadgets out of gear! After that, the German, with his entire lack of initiative, will go to pieces, and we’ll eat him up!" Eric’s old Scottish nurse was accustomed to say of him that he was "aye up in the cloods or doon in the midden." There was no mistaking his whereabouts to-day. I began to feel the thrill too. "Are you going back to the First Battalion?" I asked. "No word of it as yet. My orders are to stay here and perfect mobilisation arrangements. The moment the word goes out from the jolly old War Office, we shall be swamped with reservists: we may have to start a recruiting station as well. Great work! Great work! So long, old son! Run home and polish your buttons!" He leaped into his car, and disappeared in a cloud of dust—a most characteristic embodiment of the spirit that was flaming in the hearts of all the youth of England and Scotland during that hectic, unforgettable, blissfully ignorant week.