III

were the country of my childhood. I could smell autumn in the air, too, and I thought I must try to get a few days clubbing before I go back to the Depot. Down in Sussex there were a few people who would willingly lend me a horse, and I decided to write to old Colonel Hesmon about it. I went up to the schoolroom to do this; rummaging in a drawer for some notepaper, I discovered a little pocket mirror⁠—a relic of my days in the ranks of the Yeomanry. Handling it absentmindedly, I found myself using it to decipher the blotting-paper, which had evidently been on the table some time, for the handwriting was Stephen Colwood’s. “ P.S. The Old Guvnor is squaring up my annual indebtedness. Isn’t he a brick?” Stephen must have scribbled that when he was staying with us in the summer of 1914. Probably he had been writing to his soldier brother in Ireland. I imagined him adding the postscript and blotting it quickly. Queer how the past crops up, I thought, sadly, for my experience of such poignant associations was “still in its infancy,” as someone had said of Poison Gas when lecturing to cannon-fodder at the Army School.