Paris. Perhaps that is
where I blundered. The idea of a shrieking revolutionary in Whitehall
must have sent a cold shiver down their spines. In the meanwhile, I
serve on as many War Committees in Wellingsford as is physically
possible for Sergeant Marigold to get me into. I address recruiting
meetings. I have taken earnest young Territorial artillery officers in
courses of gunnery. You know they work with my own beloved old fifteen
pounders, brought up to date with new breeches, recoils, shields, and
limbers. For months there was a brigade in Wellings Park, and I used to
watch their drill. I was like an old actor coming once again before the
footlights.... Of course it was only in the mathematics of the business
that I could be of any help, and doubtless if the War Office had heard
of the goings on in my study, they would have dropped severely on all
of us. Still, I taught them lots of things about parabolas that they
did not know and did not know were to be known--things that,
considering the shells they fired went in parabolas, ought certainly to
be known by artillery officers; so I think, in this way, I have done a
little bit for my country.

With regard to my friends, God has given me many in this quiet market
town--once a Sleepy Hollow awakened only on Thursdays by bleating sheep
and lowing cattle and red-faced men in gaiters and hard felt hats; its
life flowing on drowsily as the gaudily painted barges that are towed
on the canal towards which, in scattered buildings, it drifts
aimlessly; a Sleepy Hollow with one broad High Street, melting
gradually at each end through shops, villas, cottages, into the King's
Highway, yet boasting in its central heart a hundred yards or so of
splendour, where the truculent new red brick Post Office sneers across
the flagged market square at the new Portland-stone Town Hall, while
the old thatched corn-market sleeps in the middle and the Early English
spire of the Norman church dreams calmly above them. Once, I say, a
Sleepy Hollow, but now alive with the tramp of soldiers and the rumble
of artillery and transport; for Wellingsford is the centre of a
district occupied by a division, which means twenty thousand men of all
arms, and the streets and roads swarm with men in khaki, and troops are
billeted in all the houses. The War has changed many aspects, but not
my old friendships. I had made a home here during my soldiering days,
long before the South African War, my wife being a ki