I knew many of those young Londoners. I had sat in teashops with them when they were playing dominoes, before the war, as though that were the most important game in life. I had met one of them at a fancy-dress ball in the Albert Hall, when he was Sir Walter Raleigh and I was Richard Sheridan. Then we were both onlookers of life⁠—chroniclers of passing history. I remained the onlooker, even in war, but my friend went into the arena. He was a Royal Fusilier, and the old way of life became a dream to him when he walked toward Loos, and afterward sat in shell-craters in the Somme fields, and knew that death would find him, as it did, in Flanders. I had played chess with one man whom afterward I met as a gunner officer at Heninel, near Arras, on an afternoon when a shell had killed three of his men bathing in a tank, and other shells made a mess of blood and flesh in his wagon-lines. We both wore steel hats, and he was the first to recognize a face from the world of peace. After his greeting he swore frightful oaths, cursing the war and the Staff. His nerves were all jangled. There was another officer in the 47th London Division whom I had known as a boy. He was only nineteen when he enlisted, not twenty when he had fought through several battles.