to address them and navy
leagues condemn me in resolutions, Hanks wonders why I accepted his
commission with such hearty acquiescence. He deems me inconsistent.

The truth was that my heart leaped at this opportunity for real
adventure. I was years older than in the days when I dreamed of
wearing a cork helmet and carrying the Gospel and an elephant gun into
darkest Africa; but few of us, when we become men, really put away
childish things. Here was my boyhood's dream come true and glorified.
And what a week I had buying my toys! The cork helmet became a
reality, and with it I equipped myself with smartly fitting khaki, and
in the quiet of my lodgings viewed myself with ineffable satisfaction.
I bought equipment enough to have lasted me through a three years'
campaign, as I have since learned from experience, for the exigencies
of transport made me abandon most of it at the very outset of my new
career. But the loss was more than compensated by the delight which I
had in the brief possession of so much warlike paraphernalia.

For two years after that I lived in the midst of armies. It was
action, and to me inaction was a dreadful sickness. Even when we lay
in camps for weeks and months there was the never-ending preparation
for the struggles which lay ahead, and though there were hours as quiet
as Broadway in mid-August, days could not be dull when you could see
the smoke of hostile fires on distant mountains or a wild scout
hovering on the fringe of the desert. For me the happiest days were
when I could ride with the marching columns, when the distant barking
of the guns called me to a hard gallop, when at night by the scant
light of a candle I sat in my tent cross-legged, with my pad on my knee
and my pencil in hand.

In war man strips himself of the unessential things which make up the
museum of superfluities that he calls his home. At home he has
countless troubles. Here he has few, but though they are simple, they
are vital. I faced these elemental problems for the first time when
with my little caravan I set out to join the Turkish army where it lay
camped near the Greek frontier. As I rode my vagrant thoughts might
turn back to home, and in my heart I might feel the old dull pain and
longing, but when a pack-horse was running away with half my
commissariat on his back such moody meditations had to be broken short.
Some days the question of mere bread for a crying stomach became vital,
or a flask o