every pretty woman, every sandwich-man, every fine young
fellow in khaki, every car-load of men in blue hospital uniform. I love
the smell of London, the cinematographic picture of London, the thrill
of London. To understand what I mean you have only got to get rid of
your legs and keep your heart and nerves and memories, and live in a
little country town.

Yes, my visits to London are red-letter days. To get there with any
enjoyment to myself involves such a fussification, and such an
unauthorised claim on the services of other people, that my visits are
few and far between.

A couple of hours in a club smoking-room--to the normal man a mere
putting in of time, a vain surcease from boredom, a vacuous habit--is
to me, a strange wonder and delight. After Wellingsford the place is
resonant with actualities. I hear all sorts of things; mostly lies, I
know; but what matter? When a man tells me that his cousin knows a man
attached as liaison officer to the staff of General Joffre, who has
given out confidentially that such and such a thing is going to happen
I am all ears. I feel that I am sucked into the great whirlpool of Vast
Events. I don't care a bit about being disillusioned afterwards. The
experience has done me good, made a man of me and sent me back to
Wellingsford as an oracle. And if you bring me a man who declares that
he does not like being an oracle, I will say to his face that he is an
unblushing liar.

All this is by way of preface to the statement that on the third of May
(vide diary) I went to the club. It was just after lunch and the great
smoking-room was full of men in khaki and men in blue and gold, with a
sprinkling of men, mostly elderly, in mufti; and from their gilt frames
the full-length portraits of departed men of war in gorgeous uniforms
looked down superciliously on their more sadly attired descendants. I
got into a corner by the door, so as to be out of the way, for I knew
by experience that should there be in the room a choleric general, he
would inevitably trip over the casually extended front wheel of my
chair, greatly to the scandal of modest ears and to my own physical
discomfiture.

Various seniors came up and passed the time of the day with me--one or
two were bald-headed retired colonels of sixty, dressed in khaki, with
belts like equators on a terrestrial globe and with a captain's three
stars on their sleeves. Gallant old boys, full of gout and softness,
they had sunk their rank