who now combined the offices of Master and Secretary, and for a few weeks the prewar past appeared to have been conjured up for my special benefit. It was difficult to believe that the misty autumn mornings, which made me free of those well-known woods and farms and downs, were simultaneously shedding an irrelevant brightness on the Ypres Salient and on Joe Dottrell riding wearily back with the ration-party somewhere near Plug Street Wood. I don’t think I could see it quite like that at the time. What I am writing now is the result of a bird’s-eye view of the past, and the cub-hunting subaltern I see there is part of the “selfish world” to which his attention had been drawn. He is listening to Colonel Hesmon while the hounds are being blown out of a big wood—hearing how well young Winchell has done with his Brigade (without wondering how many of them have been “blown out” of their trenches) and being assured by the loquacious old Colonel that the German Count who used to live at Puxford Park was undoubtedly a spy and only hunted with the Ringwell for that reason; the Colonel now regretted that he didn’t ride over to Puxford Park and break all the windows before war was declared. He also declared that any man under forty who wasn’t wearing the King’s uniform was nothing but a damned shirker. I remarked to Moffat afterwards that the Colonel seemed to be overdoing it a bit about the War. Moffat told me that the old boy was known to have practised revolver-shooting in his garden, addressing insults to individual tree trunks and thus ventilating his opinion of Germany as a whole. He had been much the same about vulpicides and socialists in peacetime. “It’s very odd; for Hesmon’s an extraordinarily kindhearted man,” said Moffat, who himself regarded the War as an unmitigated nuisance, but didn’t waste his energy abusing it or anybody else. He had enough to do already, for he found it far from easy to keep the Hunt on its legs, and what the hounds would get to eat next year he really didn’t know. He added that “the Missus’s dachshunds only just escaped being interned as enemy aliens.”
Sport in Sussex was only a makeshift exhilaration, and early in November I went to London for a final Medical Board. At the Caxton Hall in