e shut into an
enchanted forest. No one looked at us, no one seemed to know we were
there. The General began to talk again, unconscious as the rest of
anything or anybody not his affair.

"I got my commission in 1915 in K-1, Kitchener's first hundred thousand,
and I went off to the front in the second year of the war. I had a
scratch and was slightly gassed once, but nothing much happened for a
long time. And in 1916, in May, came the news that my godfather, the
person closest to me on earth, was drowned at sea. I was in London, just
out of the hospital and about to go back to France."

The old General stopped and stared down at the graveled path with its
trim turf border lying at his feet.

"It was to me as if the world, seething in its troubles, was suddenly
empty--with that man gone. I drifted with the crowd about London town,
and the crowd appeared to be like myself, dazed. The streets were full
and there was continually a profound, sorrowful sound, like the groan of
a nation; faces were blank and gray. Those surging, mournful London
streets, and the look of the posters with great letters on them--his
name--that memory isn't likely to leave me till I die. Of course, I got
hold of every detail and tried to picture the manner of it to myself,
but I couldn't get it that he was dead. Kitchener, the heart of the
nation; I couldn't comprehend that he had stopped breathing. I couldn't
get myself satisfied that I wasn't to see him again. It seemed there
must be some way out. You'll remember, perhaps, that four boats were
seen to put off from the _Hampshire_ as she sank? I tried to trace those
boats. I traveled up there and interviewed people who had seen them. I
got no good from it. But it kept coming to me that it was not a mine
that had sunk the ship, that it was a torpedo from a German submarine,
and that Kitchener was on one of the boats that put off and that he had
been taken prisoner by the enemy. God knows why that thought
persisted--there were reasons against it--it was a boy's theory. But it
persisted; I couldn't get it out of my head. I was in St. Paul's at the
Memorial Service; I heard the 'Last Post' played for him, and I saw the
King and Queen in tears; all that didn't settle my mind. I went back to
the front, heavy-hearted, and tried to behave myself as I believed he'd
have had me--the Sirdar. My people had called him the Sirdar always.
Luck was with me in France; I had chances, and did a bit of work, and
g