[43] In fact, General Pershing crossed independently. [44] Judge Amos, now Judicial Adviser in Cairo, endorses the substantial truth of the report which circulated about his chess-playing at this time. A tall man with a folding pocket-chessboard and a coloured silk handkerchief containing an incomplete set of chessmen might have been observed at almost any hour of the day or night prowling the deck with a preoccupied air and seeking to lure any one into playing with him. Those who knew the moves promptly beat him; those who did not know the moves had them lucidly explained--and then beat him as promptly. He had, I believe, exhausted the 6,000 Canadian troops, the ship's company and the other members of the mission before approaching that corner of the smoking-room in which, according to the story, I was sitting with an expression of imbecility calculated to suggest that I could not play chess and would not learn. He persevered with his explanation and after five minutes challenged me to a game. I hate to record that he did not win it. [45] The phrase is borrowed from Mr. Asquith. [46] One of the last words, in a long list beginning with "Armageddon," to hypnotize the newspaper-reader. [47] One evening I entered Covent Garden after the curtain had risen. "M. Kerenski?" enquired the sole occupant of the box, peering at me through the gloom. "I beg your pardon! I see that he landed in England this afternoon." [48] At the risk of a prophecy I would suggest that Masefield's _Gallipoli_ has a lasting place in the treasury of great English prose, so long, at least, as our present canons of perfection in prose-style are maintained. [49] I am not limiting myself strictly to those war-books which had been published by the date of the armistice. [50] "Honestly, I do not care about the clever people," confessed 'Lady Maybury'. "I find them _borné_, self-centred, touchy, and embarrassing. They have _no_ conversation, and they always ask me if I was at Ranelagh last Saturday. Have you ever observed that?" [51] At Oxford I first heard the couplet which tells how "From out their different tubs Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs," it was quoted by one member of a prolific triumvirate which then filled a considerable proportion of the critical journals. In those days it was hardly possible to read an article by A which did not contain a panegyric of B's latest book; it was no less difficult to read B's book without meeting a reference to what had been "most justly observed by C." [52] The volume of hostile reviews, surely too great to be spontaneous and independent, which greeted _The Autobiography of Margot Asquith_, was only less remarkable than the success which the book achieved in spite of them.