I travelled up to London in a regular November drizzle, which cleared up about Wimbledon to watery sunshine. I never could stand London during the war. It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my notion of it. One felt the war more in its streets than in the field, or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose. I dare say it was all right; but since August 1914 I never spent a day in town without coming home depressed to my boots.
I took a taxi and drove straight to the Foreign Office. Sir Walter did not keep me waiting long. But when his secretary took me to his room I would not have recognized the man I had known eighteen months before.
His big frame seemed to have dropped flesh and there was a stoop in the square shoulders. His face had lost its rosiness and was red in patches, like that of a man who gets too little fresh air. His hair was much greyer and very thin about the temples, and there were lines of overwork below the eyes. But the eyes were the same as before, keen and kindly and shrewd, and there was no change in the firm set of the jaw.
“We must on no account be disturbed for the next hour,” he told his secretary. When the young man had gone he went across to both doors and turned the keys in them.
“Well, Major Hannay,” he said, flinging himself into a chair beside the fire. “How do you like soldiering?”
“Right enough,” I said, “though this isn’t just the kind of war I would have picked myself. It’s a comfortless, bloody business. But we’ve got the measure of the old Boche now, and it’s dogged as does it. I count on getting back to the front in a week or two.”
“Will you get the battalion?” he asked. He seemed to have followed my doings pretty closely.
“I believe I’ve a good chance. I’m not in this show for honour and glory, though. I want to do the best I can, but I wish to heaven it was over. All I think of is coming out of it with a whole skin.”
He laughed. “You do yourself an injustice. What about the forward observation post at the Lone Tree? You forgot about the whole skin then.”
I felt myself getting red. “That was all rot,” I said, “and I can’t think who told you about it. I hated the job, but I had to do it to prevent my subalterns going to glory. They were a lot of fire-eating young lunatics. If I had sent one of them he’d have gone on his knees to Providence and asked for trouble.”
Sir Walter was still grinning.
“I’m not questioning your caution. You have the rudiments of it, or our friends of the Black Stone would have gathered you in at our last merry meeting. I would question it as little as your courage. What exercises my mind is whether it is best employed in the trenches.”
“Is the War Office dissatisfied with me?” I asked sharply.
“They are profoundly satisfied. They propose to give you command of your battalion. Presently, if you escape a stray bullet, you will no doubt be a Brigadier. It is a wonderful war for youth and brains. But … I take it you are in this business to serve your country, Hannay?”
“I reckon I am,” I said. “I am certainly not in it for my health.”
He looked at my leg, where the doctors had dug out the shrapnel fragments, and smiled quizzically.
“Pretty fit again?” he asked.
“Tough as a sjambok. I thrive on the racket and eat and sleep like a schoolboy.”
He got up and stood with his back to the fire, his eyes staring abstractedly out of the window at the wintry park.
“It is a great game, and you are the man for it, no doubt. But there are others who can play it, for soldiering today asks for the average rather than the exception in human nature. It is like a big machine where the parts are standardized. You are fighting, not because you are short of a job, but because you want to help England. How if you could help her better than by commanding a battalion—or a brigade—or, if it comes to that, a division? How if there is a thing which you alone can do? Not some embusqué business in an office, but a thing compared to which your fight at Loos was a Sunday-school picnic. You are not afraid of danger? Well, in this job you would not be fighting with an army around you, but alone. You are fond of tackling difficulties? Well, I can give you a task which will try all your powers. Have you anything to say?”
My heart was beginning to thump uncomfortably. Sir Walter was not the man to pitch a case too high.
“I am a soldier,” I said, “and under orders.”
“True; but what I am about to propose does not come by any conceivable stretch within the scope of a soldier’s duties. I shall perfectly understand if you decline. You will be acting as I should act myself—as any sane man would. I would not press you for worlds. If you wish it, I will not even make the proposal, but let you go here and now, and wish you good luck with your battalion. I do not wish to perplex a good soldier with impossible decisions.”
This piqued me and put me on my mettle.
“I am not going to run away before the guns fire. Let me hear what you propose.”
Sir Walter crossed to a cabinet, unlocked it with a key from his chain, and took a piece of paper from a drawer. It looked like an ordinary half-sheet
