n,' I announced; 'I'll be back in
time for dinner.'

'Try my tailor,' said Sandy. 'He's got a very nice taste in red tabs.
You can use my name.'

An idea struck me. 'You're pretty well all right now. If I wire for
you, will you pack your own kit and mine and join me?'

'Right-o! I'll accept a job on your staff if they give you a corps. If
so be as you come down tonight, be a good chap and bring a barrel of
oysters from Sweeting's.'

I travelled up to London in a regular November drizzle, which cleared
up about Wimbledon to watery sunshine. I never could stand London
during the war. It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out
into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my
notion of it. One felt the war more in its streets than in the field,
or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose. I
dare say it was all right; but since August 1914 I never spent a day in
town without coming home depressed to my boots.

I took a taxi and drove straight to the Foreign Office. Sir Walter did
not keep me waiting long. But when his secretary took me to his room I
would not have recognized the man I had known eighteen months before.

His big frame seemed to have dropped flesh and there was a stoop in the
square shoulders. His face had lost its rosiness and was red in
patches, like that of a man who gets too little fresh air. His hair
was much greyer and very thin about the temples, and there were lines
of overwork below the eyes. But the eyes were the same as before, keen
and kindly and shrewd, and there was no change in the firm set of the
jaw.

'We must on no account be disturbed for the next hour,' he told his
secretary. When the young man had gone he went across to both doors
and turned the keys in them.

'Well, Major Hannay,' he said, flinging himself into a chair beside the
fire. 'How do you like soldiering?'

'Right enough,' I said, 'though this isn't just the kind of war I would
have picked myself. It's a comfortless, bloody business. But we've
got the measure of the old Boche now, and it's dogged as does it. I
count on getting back to the front in a week or two.'

'Will you get the battalion?' he asked. He seemed to have followed my
doings pretty closely.

'I believe I've a good chance. I'm not in this show for honour and
glory, though. I want to do the best I can, but I wish to heaven it
was over. All I think of is coming out of it with a whole