instructions, in my pocket and am actually moving towards the sea.
The youngest and keenest schoolboy returning home for his holidays
is a calm, collected, impassionate and even dismal man of the world
compared to me. I see little and am impressed by nothing; all things
and men are assumed to be good, and none of them is given the
opportunity of proving itself to be the contrary. As for the A.M.L.O.
at any other port but this one, I remark nothing about him except
his princely generosity in letting me have an embarcation card. He
is just one more good fellow in the long series of good fellows who
have authorised my move. I am borne out to sea in a dream--a dream
of England and all that England means to us, be that a wife or a
reasonable breakfast at a reasonable hour. Not until I am on my way
back does it occur to me that landing and transport officers have
identities, and by that time I have lost all interest in transport
and landing and officers and identities and everything else.

At the port of ----, however, it is very different. I may arrive on
the quay in a dream, but I'm at once out of it when I have caught
sight of Greatness sitting in its little hut with the ticket window
firmly closed until the arrival of the hour before which he has
disposed that it shall not open. Thoughts of home are gone; I can
think of nothing but Him. When at last I have obtained his gracious,
if reluctant, consent to my obeying the instructions I have, and have
got on to the boat, I deposit my goods hurriedly, anywhere, and fight
for a position by the bulwark nearest the quay, from which I may gaze
at his august Excellency for the few remaining hours during which it
is given us to linger in or near our well-beloved France.

How came it about, I ask myself, that the Right Man got to be in
the Right Place? It cannot have been merely fortuitous that he was
not thrust away into some such obscure job as the command of an
Expeditionary Force or the control of the counsels of the Imperial
General Staff. It must have been the deliberate choice of a wise
chooser; Major-General Military Landing himself, the SECRETARY OF
STATE FOR WAR on his own, even His MAJESTY in person? Or was a
plebiscite taken through the length and breadth of the British Isles
when I was elsewhere, and did Britain, thrilled to the core, clamour
for him unanimously?

I watch him keep a perturbed and restless Major from the line waiting
while he finishes his light-heart