In the Tower of London

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

1

AT the end of November, 1912, I joined the Grenadier Guards and, a week later, was posted to the battalion stationed at the Tower of London. Towards this purpose, I had been obliged, directly I reached London, to present myself for an interview at the Regimental Orderly Room. From the distance of thirty-five years later, I can comprehend, what I did not altogether realize at the time, the extreme accomplishment of the group of persons forming this entity, and that the head of it was more expert than anyone I have ever met in wrapping himself round with an air of quasibenevolent authority, and by this means obtaining an absolute and unquestioned obedience. And, since there have been modifications — for example, the chief would now be a young man, freshly versed in war, instead of being over sixty — let me give some account of this organization, as it was; though it survives and can still be studied to this day.

The effective head, the Lieutenant Colonel,” as he was known, of each of the four regiments of the Brigade ns then constituted — Grenadiers, Coldstream, Scots Guards, Irish Guards — possessed as his headquarters or appropriate shrine a kind of small Greek temple in stucco, with fluted pillars and capitals of the Doric order, placed, as if for the sake of inviolability, behind the stout, spearlike iron railings of Birdcage Walk. Besides being so important a military mandarin, the Lieutenant Colonel was, as well, an institution comparable to that of an Elder in the monasteries of the Russian Orthodox Church, healing, and bestowing advice or reprimands. In other respects, he more nearly, perhaps, resembled an idol.

Summoned hither, to the temple of the particular cult to whose worship he had been dedicated, the neophyte, not yet fledged, or newly joined Ensign, would find himself first involved in a flurry of stamping sentries and saluting orderlies. Then, ushered almost at once into the august presence, he would be obliged to salute, in his turn and as smartly as he could, the idol seated at a desk, behind the cloud of incense composed of his own cigarette smoke. Directly the Ensign beheld the old image, who would be puffing at a substantial, but delicately aromatic Turkish or Egyptian cigarette, he would realize that here, before him, was the improbable realization of an ideal; an ideal cherished by a considerable number of contemporaries, including most officers, and all the best tailors and haberdashers, hosiers, shoemakers, and barbers in London, indeed in England. Though too restrained to suggest dandyism, everything about him was immaculate, of the finest quality and cut: cloth, linen, and the man encased in them. Every pore of the skin, every hair of his gray mustache and eyebrows, was uncmphatically — for emphasis would smack of ostentation — in its right place, and showed in miniature the same kind of order and beautiful military precision that the regimental parades exhibited on the grand scale. His manners, too, imbued though they were by their quality of rather impersonal affability — and though it was quite evident, as well, that the idol realized that affability was not his whole practice and that at times it was his duty to instill awe — were memorable in their perfection.

At a single glance it might be deemed possible by the inexperienced, such was the apparent sincerity and straightforwardness of his self-presentation, to know all about him, even to write a testimonial: strong sense of duty, hard-playing (golf, cricket, polo), generous, brave, fine shot, adequate rider, man of the world, C. of E. These same attributes, too, seemed to belong to the objects on his desk, the photographs, in simple silver frames or leather — the best photographs of the best people, in the best frames — the silver cigarette lighter, made in the shape of a grenade, the silver pen tray and rack, the pens and pencils, the regimental trophies and presentations, even the blotting paper which lay spread out under his hand without a stain. (How did ho ever contrive to dry the ink on a letter, one asked oneself.) But where it would bo easy for the young officer to go astray in the estimate he was making would be if he were to dismiss the fine and benevolent old gentleman in front of him as at all remote, or out of touch with the true business of his regiment: for, as if the position he held bestowed upon him special powers of divination, he could, at one pounce, show himself singularly, surprisingly, frighteningly wellinformed.

The realization of an ideal always, no doubt, carries with it its weak points, but of one thing you could rest assured: the idol before you would never treat any man, especially one younger than himself, with unfairness; nor, you could be equally certain, would his predecessor have done it in the past, or his successor do it in the future. For the type was fast. When the time came for this elderly man to retire, another, almost identical in appearance, would reign with the same elegant ease in his stead, behind the same cloud of cigarette smoke, at the same table, covered, it might seem, with the same photographs, the same objects. Very seldom did these skillful old gentlemen, so well versed in the behavior of the young male of their sort, make a mistake. They knew their job.

2

HE newly joined Ensign was instructed, not only in the general and accepted code, but, if he were not already aware of it, was advised on what constituted for him the right kind of shoes, collars, shirts, and suits to wear, being given pieces of precise information; such as, for example, that when leave was granted to him, he should never spend a day of it. in London, and that he must, when not in uniform — which he only wore, of course, on duty — always, if the King was in London, wear a morning suit and top hat.

The Adjutant would attend the first fittings of each young officer, surveying with a practiced eye the whole effect, and scrutinizing minutely the cut of the tunic of scarlet Melton cloth, the smoothness of shoulders and waist. Above all, there must, be no wrinkling. And this uniform constituted, withal, an important question, both for the young man and for his parents, since it cost several hundreds of pounds. The review belt alone, made of scarlet and gold, cost thirty-six pounds, I remember, and I had occasion to wear it only once. Then there was the bearskin, as well, to be fitted and tried on, and the perfection of this proved to be of so esoteric a kind that no one new to the matter would be able to tell a good from a bad, and, myself, I never contrived to master the principles that governed the choice. The bearskin had, of course — for it must measure nearly two feet high — to be sufficiently well balanced and well fitting to enable the Ensign to carry it on his head, and the Color in front of him, in a gale, without mishap, and this, even with the best constructed bearskin, was not easy: because the forecourt of Buckingham Palace gives ample space for the east wind, which the front faces, to play, while the weight of the Color, although the butt of it is supported most of the time in a pipe-clayed belt, is considerable, and the left arm, to balance, and also for (he sake of smart appearance, must swing free. In addition, however, to these necessary qualities, I may place it on record for those in the future of an inquiring disposition, that the good bearskin should possess an interior curl and a special gloss, at once perceptible to the expert.

The fitting of headgear and uniform and belts constituted something of an ordeal. Not only did it without exception occupy a full hour — and by nature I have always been too impatient either to deserve or to obtain perfectly fitting clothes — but, while the young officer, prodded from time to time with questing fingers, as if he were a prize bull at a show, stood in the center of a small closet, full of mirrors set at different angles so as to reflect him in his half-finished scarlet tunic, and every detail of his dress, with a kind of dull but yet varied repetition that recalled delirium, during all these minutes, a highly technical conversation was taking place between the Adjutant and the tailor. After they had debated some particularly enthralling point, the tailor would call in the cutter and ask for his view on it: but the cutter, partially blind from his work, would pretend to be deaf also. This, I think, he did as some personal form of subservience combined with defiance, that he had worked out for himself — but at any rate, every question would have to be put at least three times before he would answer. “The best cutter in London, now that the ladies have taken all the others,” the tailor would say of him, adding, “But he’s a very difficult man to deal with, must be given his head.”

Occasionally, the tailor himself would dart at my shoulder or waist, and rip the seam open, so that the gray padding stood exposed beneath the vermilion stuff. It was true that one felt oneself to be the most important person there—as the prize bull must feel himself; the very center of the debate. Yet, too, one felt at the same time curiously left out of things: for neither Adjutant, tailor, nor cutter seemed to see the man who wore the uniform, only the uniform itself. The tunic glowed, emberlike, in the misty and pocked mirrors, and the cutter peered through spectacles that, magnified his eyes to the size of a god’s: he jabbed and snipped, but never spoke.

A touch of Ouida, a breath of the Boer War — even though these two influences were in contradiction — both seemed to linger still about the life I was entering.

3

THROUGHOUT the months that ensued between December, 1912, and the outbreak of the war, my background varied constantly: the Tower, Aldershot, several months of leave, Pirbright, Purfleet, and Wellington Barracks. There was the inner regimental world, the brother officers I must learn to know and understand, and the officers, beyond that, of the whole Brigade of Guards, who formed the mass out of whom to choose one’s friends: with whom one must associate, expecting to meet them every day at restaurants and theaters, at dinners and dances in private houses; and, outside, the second, the fashionable world, of whom, apart from relatives, I knew singularly few members.

I must mention, for he belonged to this first world, one young officer in the Irish Guards, a friend and exact contemporary of mine. This was “Alex”: the future Field Marshal Viscount Alexander of Tunis, the greatest soldier Britain has produced since Wellington, who came, too, of a precisely similar family and origin. In the days of which I write, he was a charming and elegant young man, with then, as now, a seriousness underlying his gayety of disposition, and a quick and easy smile. Since he was also stationed at Wellington Barracks while I was there, I saw a good deal of him, and 1 recollect that he and a great friend and brother officer of his, Eric Greer, who was killed in the 1914 conflict, were unlike others of my friends in their enthusiastic study of military history, to which they devoted themselves for hours; though quietly, and without giving their views on it to the rest of us.

I am not enough of a military Philistine to fail to recognize a great soldier when I see one; though, when Alex and I met, as we did frequently, we discussed people, and the things pertaining to them, more often than strategy or modern literature; because, to mention a subject of any consequence in the environment in which we found ourselves would not have been well looked upon. Enjoyment was the aim of life, and gayety and high spirits the links that bound us. I remember many long walks back to Wellington Barracks late at night in his company, from some dance or supper party, down the graceful yellow sickle of the Nash Regent Street, and down Lower Regent Street to the Mall, across the Iron Bridge that spans St. James’s Lake, and so home to Wellington Barracks.

Sometimes the conversation would take a more thoughtful turn, ill suited to our attire; for we were dressed — with the dandyism of a time when in England cleanliness was really believed to be next to godliness, instead of being regarded, as now it is, as an unjustifiable and antisocial extravagance — in silk hats and evening clothes, wearing broad-braided black trousers, white waistcoats, starched shirts and white ties, white kid gloves, with a white carnation or gardenia in the buttonhole of our coats, and carried goldor tortoise-shell-topped Malacca canes.

If we talked rather seldom of grave affairs, and never of professional, it must be granted, notwithstanding, that somehow or other I succeeded in divining Alex’s capacity.

I went to Wellington Barracks at the end of Army Maneuvers, on which I had proceeded with the 1st Battalion from Aldershot. Each day, we marched some twenty to thirty miles, and by dark I was usually too exhausted to know or care Avhere I might be. My incapacity as a soldier must, indeed, have been conspicuous; if sent out, as sometimes one was, with a map, to find the way for the battalion, expeditions inevitably had to be sent out before long, in their turn, to find me.

In these maneuvers, t hough, some friends of mine distinguished themselves as much as I disgraced myself: but it all came to the same thing; for in those days to spring a surprise on the Staff by doing too well was equivalent to doing badly. Thus I well remember the consternation caused when, the Intelligence Officer falling ill, my friend Geoffrey Moss temporarily took over his work, and since he possesses an acute and untrammeled mind, nearly put an end to maneuvers by capturing two motorcars full of “enemy” generals. They had hurriedly to be released, for they had envisaged no such move on the part of a junior officer, and their faces flamed red as the tabs they wore, with anger.

4

As far as I know, though it has been for so long one of the spectacles most familiar to inhabitants of London, and most loved by visitors, little has been written about the Changing of the Guard: to the crowd, the performers in the ceremony cease to exist when they have marched away; and so I propose to give an account of the very individual life led by the officers on this duty, who, after the manner of monks, albeit for twenty-four hours only, are immured in the seclusion of a brick building from which, though situated in the very center of the capital, you can scarcely hear the passing of traffic.

First, the new Guard marches to the ceremony, just as later the old Guard returns to barracks, to the military music of the drums and fifes of the battalion from which it is drawn. If the King is in London, the ceremony takes place, as all Londoners know, about ten minutes to eleven in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, or, in the monarch’s absence from London, in the Color Court at St. James’s: but, as a spectacle, Buckingham Palace is to be preferred as a background, because of the greater space it affords. The drill exhibited has many of the merits of a work of art, such as only the most accomplished forms of dancing or skating display.

But of all the difficult tasks, the Ensign — the youngest officer present — has the most awkward allotted to him: marching just behind the Captain and Lieutenant of the King’s Guard, and in front of the detachment of men composing it, the whole body progressing in slow time — an exercise which itself requires the greatest skill — at right angles to the Palace, he must lower the Color in salute to the Color of the King’s Guard relieving or being relieved, and hold it stretched out in that position for some twenty paces. Many weeks of practice on the barrack square are required before perfection is attained — if ever it is — in this stately ceremonial crawl to the solemn and inspiring strains of the March from Handel’s Scipio, which the Grenadiers have adopted as their own, in the same way that the Coldstream use the March from Figaro.

After this part of the performance has been concluded, and the new Guard has taken over, and while the sentries are being posted, and the detachments placed in position, the officers of the King’s Guard, mounting and dismounting, walk up and down together in twos, according to the military rank they hold, while whichever regimental band may be playing gives selections from its repertory. Each of the four, naturally, had its own specialties, and in those days the band of the Grenadiers used often, rather unexpectedly, but always to my delight, to break into contemporary Spanish marches and selections from current zarzuelas: for Prince Alexander of Battenberg, the Queen of Spain’s brother, who was in the Grenadiers at the time and possessed that love of music which, since the days of George I, so many members of the Royal Family have shown, used to bring back the scores with him from his visits to Andalusia and Madrid.

Sometimes the band grew ambitious, and I remember Williams, for many years Bandmaster of the Grenadiers, telling me of how he had made an arrangement for his men of part of the score of Elektra by Richard Strauss, and of what happened when first he played it. It had taken them many months to learn, and they had just given it in public for the first time during this long interval in the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, and had experienced a due sense of elation at their own audacity and at the success that had crowned it, when — a rare event — a scarlet-coated page came out from the Palace with a personal message for Williams from King George V. The note was brief and ran: “His Majesty does not know what the band has just played, but it is never to be played again.”

For some twenty minutes or half an hour, then, the band would lift the spirits of the watching crowd, ox-eyed at the railings, and by the end of that time, every sentry would be in his place, and the rest of the oncoming Guard be free to march away to its quarters in St. James’s Palace, and the old Guard to return home.

The oncoming Guard was on duty until relieved twenty-four hours later. During this space of time, the officers had to remain in the part of St. James’s Palace allotted to them — an inner section, built of stout, dark brick, more nearly recalling, save that there were no trees, part of some college or close than the center of a palace: this haven they were not allowed to leave, except for tours of duty and inspection, when they visited the sentries at Buckingham Palace and Marlborough House, and except for a few minutes in the afternoon when they were permitted, if they wished, to walk across to the Guards’ Club or the Marlborough Club, then both situated within a stone’s throw, in Pall Mall. (All officers serving in the Brigade joined automatically the Guards’ Club, though not the Marlborough.)

As the Ensign had to go out on a tour of inspection at 2 A.M., it made a long day for him, and life in the Guardroom with its view of lead fiats and dingy crenelations, though it possessed an air and seemed the very core of St. James’s, became a little monotonous and might, indeed, have grown insupportably to resemble a prison, had it not been for the munificence of King George IV , who had directed that, after his death, an annual sum should be paid to the officers on guard. It was not enough to defray the whole of the expense, but it certainly enabled them to entertain their friends at dinner in a handsome manner, and in consequence the long room, in the evening, with its table arranged with silver trophies, and its food, celebrated for its excellence as no doubt that gourmet, King George IV, would have wished, became a place where many distinguished — and undistinguished — people could pass a most pleasant evening. The quality of the company depended chiefly on the Captain of the King’s Guard and his range of friends: certainly I passed many delightful hours in congenial company there; and among my own friends who dined with me in later years, when from time to time I was Captain, were Sir Edmund Gosse, Sickert, and Robert Ross.

The Guard at the Bank of England, on the other hand, provided a very different existence. The Ensign was the only officer on duty, and he had to start from Wellington or Chelsea Barracks, without drums or fifes to support the faltering rhythm of his footsteps and those of his small detachment of men, on a long march through the hard, endless streets of the city, about five or six o’clock in the evening, and to remain at the Bank till nine-thirty or ten the next morning. The Brigade of Guards had first been called in the year 1780, at the time of the Gordon Riots, to protect the original building — before Sir John Soane’s edifice was in being— when the Government had thought it to be in danger from the drunken mob. And though cries of “No Popery!” no longer rent the air of Threadneedle Street, day by day the Guard was still posted there. For, just as tricks of speech lingered, relating to past times, so did many obsolete customs survive.

And in this connection I must record that a year or two subsequently, when the shortage of manpower first evinced itself after the great slaughter of 1914 and '15, and forced the authorities to examine the placing of sentries, with a view to abolishing all those not strictly necessary, I was told how it was discovered that two Guardsmen were always on duty at a certain spot in Whitehall where the reason for their presence was not immediately obvious. On inquiries being made, and the records inspected, it became plain that when Sir Robert Walpole had been Prime Minister, he had formed a habit of walking from Downing Street, near-by, and of sitting on a garden bench there for a while to rest and take the air, and that, because his life had been threatened, sentries had eventually been posted on each side, at the suggestion of Queen Caroline, to ensure his safety. Walpole had resigned in 1742, the bench had crumbled to dust over a century ago, but the duties of the men, and their successors, had continued.

5

DUTY in the Tower provided a brief winter’s walk, a brisk turn of a special kind, against a background familiar to me, because my sister and I, when we were children, had visited it, and I had never forgotten its wintry vastness, solemnity, and gloom. At times the place seemed a toy fort that had become real, and swollen stonily to enormous proportions, its walls and castellations assuming ample material substance, just as the toy soldiers in their scarlet tunics had acquired life; at others, it appeared to be a terrace leveled among stone mountains or, again, a piazza in a small hill town, high up, but under a smoky sky. It was ten minutes to eight in the morning — and when I say eight, I mean eight, and not, as in these lying times, six or seven; a fact which, owing to the relative degrees of light, makes a difference to my scene: it was ten minutes to eight, and, swinging our arms smartly, six of us had to walk up and down in twos, at a pace full of winter’s zest.

The stone mountains which framed this stage gave evidence in their texture, a few of them, of extreme antiquity, but most, on the other hand, displayed a Victorian primness and hard precision, seeming to be the realization in stone of a drill sergeant’s dream. Everything was spick-and-span, and even the roughest, oldest of these mountains, even the most uncouth in bulk, even Julius Caesar’s Tower itself, had been trimmed and clipped, as it were to make a fitting background for parades. One or two old trees alone, though they too had been pruned and pared, made for this place some obstinate claim to kinship with nature and the world outside. And occasionally, a very large old raven would croak loudly and walk across the frosty ground in front of us, lifting its claws high, as if the stone burned them. I should have liked to stop and watch this bird, because it had an air of immense age, of being, indeed, although it carried its years so well, as old as anything in this setting — a living representative of the collection of beasts and birds which, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had drawn hither, to the side of the now destroyed Lion Tower, all visitors to London.

The raven still stalked slowly and at its will, flapping and croaking, but we had to walk rapidly up and down in a straight line, our swords knocking a little and clanking as we moved. We would glance from time to time at the ranks of men, clad in long gray coats, and now standing at ease. They were drawn up facing the White Tower, and we paced up and down between this massive building and the men. Inside that tower, among much else to be seen, was King Henry VIII’s steel suit — feared yet, the custodian once told me, by tourists; these peering crowds of little men still scrupled to touch it, in case some morbid influence from the tomb should communicate to them the maladies of the dead giant.

It was a very clear morning, with a berry-bright frost iness which matched the rooster’s music of the bugles, sounding their calls, and the stones crackled as we walked over them. But, at this season and this hour, more often fog enclosed us and the whole of the vast area of city stretching round us, beyond these towers and bounding walls — for this, the Tower of London, was the very citadel of the fog. Here night could reign for forty-eight, hours at a stretch. Then the naked electric-light globes which, as part of the traditional, pipe-clayed bareness of barrack rooms, swung in the draft from open windows of a winter’s evening, burned all day, yet seemed to have no more power than a match would have, if it were lighted in this elephantine and engulfing darkness. For these hours, the barrack rooms themselves became mysterious.

There are — or were — so many different varieties of fog, and all of them lived here, and crept out when occasion offered. There was the night darkness, or prevalence of a perpetual dusk, black but clear, in which figures could still be seen moving, and ordinary life could still be carried on; there was the transparent yellow fog, the most boding of all, which turned the world sullen and filled it with a gloomy, suppressed excitement, seeming to make the clatter of the men’s rifles on the ground more pronounced, and the raven’s croakings more frequent and more cracked; there were the thick yellow fogs, made of yellow wool, and the white, made of white wool, when every activity came to a standstill, and everyone choked, and eyes and cars ached, and nothing could be seen; and a great number of less deleterious fogs in chalk-gray and dove-gray and amber.

6

AT ANY moment of day or night, though, and even when swathed in layers of fog, the Tower of London remained a place of mystery, beautiful and, at the same time, because of its stoniness and crenelation, ugly. The neatness that recent centuries had striven to impose upon these shapes that appeared to have been hacked out of primeval chaos, the accretions, only served to make it more tremendous. After the manner of Maiden Castle or Stonehenge, its origins stretched so far back that no glimpse of them could be obtained.

The Tower remains the place beyond all others, except Windsor, where the local color of every age in English history lingers, and has still a meaning. Outside these walls, the Beefeaters, perhaps, may look obsolete, an anachronism, but here, within, they are plainly the warders of t he Tower of London, faithful to Tudor masters. At eleven each night the Ceremony of the Keys, when their royal ownership is challenged and declared, brings back the memory of many monarchs, and relates especially to the epoch when the Pretenders threatened the English throne; just as the Crown Jewels, near-by, in their tower, epitomize our history. In the fires of ruby, sapphire, and emerald, you can perceive, as though portrayed by the monks illuminating their missals with the pure tones and pigments of Norman and Gothic times, the early marriages of our kings with members of the royal houses of France and Spain. Dead princesses, whose effigies lie in the Abbey beside those of their husbands — princesses with the slender necks, oval faces, and long-fingered hands of the Gothic Age, with its delicate features, and narrow eyes filled with wonder, as though they opened and shut them upon a world full of inspired marvels and transcendent beauty— brought with them as their dowry these splendid jewels. In certain gems, again, is yet reflected the Renaissance magnificence of the Tudor princes, while the Koh-i-noor focuses in the brilliant strangeness of its light the romance of the English conquest of India, in the same way that the more material fires of the Cullinan diamond symbolize and recall the war in South Africa. These stone cliffs which surround them are nearly a millennium old; but how much more ancient was the original fortification, the palisade on this sacred mount; what Saxon kings, what Roman warriors, what British princes and chieftains of the Neolithic Age may have lived here, are buried here, or on Tower Hill, the exhalation from their bones adding their impalpable contribution to the general atmosphere of the Tower!

When we returned to the Tower after an evening’s pleasure, its majesty cooled youthful blood. False and obvious as sounded by daylight the story that at night you could sometimes see in an open space the shadow, thrown by the moon, of the Axe, it was impossible on a moonlit night not to look for it, as you passed under vast arches, along the dark green alleys carved by the icy light among these stony ways. All round, the stout and buttressed walls showed their crenelated circuit. And the half hour’s drive in a taxicab through a deserted City, that led up to arrival at the Tower, aided the impression; the drive through length upon illumined length of emptiness, where only from time to time a cat howled, and never a human being stirred, past towers and spires and monuments, past Wren churches that are now a memory (though it may be we still breathe their dust), through streets and past buildings the names of which men will never allow to die, so that they will rise again, as did the great monuments of Rome, with each succeeding age — and of these names the most famous is the Tower of London.

When we reached it, if the time was past two o’clock in the morning, before we could enter under the portcullis to find ourselves in this castle of the Dark Ages — a place now deserted as the streets through which we had just driven — we had to make an effort to recollect the password, which was changed every night, and though usually typical of the military mind in the simplicity of choice it displayed, yet the later the hour, the greater the effort necessary to recollect something that, hours before, had seemed so easy to memorize. I was just twenty years of age, this was January, 1913, and London was in carnival throughout the following nineteen months, except for the brief festivals of the banks and churches; then theaters, ballrooms, and restaurants shut and all those who could leave London fled from it with an eagerness and speed they never showed some thirty years later, when it was bombed day and night. Sometimes, therefore, after late hours, one was tired of a morning; and for that reason, of the kinds of fog already catalogued, I preferred the thick yellow when, temporarily, all parades had to be canceled, and one could rest.

Today, however, was clear, with the clearness that dwells on hilltops and the tops of the highest towers — and this was fortunate, for we must show no fatigue. That was not permitted us. So, wearing long, dark-blue coats, with a cascade of tabs flowing down the front, under our gray greatcoats, in blue trousers with a broad red stripe, and dark-blue hats peaked with gold thread, we walked sharply up and down, waiting for the clock to strike, and for the Adjutant to come on parade. At the last stroke of eight, he would appear, accompanied by the Battalion Sergeant Major. In his impressive stride, in the bold, severe, critical, yet tolerant, and even amused, ferocity of his glance, he appeared to sum up a tradition, to he the very embodiment of the Brigade of Guards. Meanwhile, we waited for him, and to be told to fall in, at the head of the men. I rather dreaded, however, the lesson to come, for the Adjutant used to complain loudly of ray personal version of the ritual voice that regimental tradition obliges the young officer to adopt for words of command — conventional sounds that none but initiates can interpret — declaring that he could not distinguish it from the croaking of t he Tower ravens.

Looking back, I suppose that the friends I made then — nearly all of them, alas, destined to be killed before two years had passed — were not those, necessarily, who would have chosen me or whom I should have chosen, had the range been unlimited. Our interests were different — theirs, sporting; mine, mainly esthetic — but this did not in the least mar our friendship. Their great qualities, their character and generosity of mind, completely won me over, and banished the fact from my consciousness, so that I am able to hope that, similarly, my affection for them prevented them from guessing that I was not the sort of friend, either, whom they would have selected.

Alas (left hand, right hand!), I should have resembled them — but I did not; or my way in general would have been simpler. At least we shared one thing in common — the highest and most fantastic spirits. They possessed shrewd powers of judgment, just as did the ranks under them. The guardsmen could arrive at a fair estimate of an officer’s character very quickly. And, though I must confess to being by nat ure a minority partisan, I must own also that if my companions on occasion took a violent dislike to a brother officer, it was usually justified: though not always the manner of showing it. In addition, they were supremely courageous — some of them, in a sense, fierce as young animals — and sure of themselves with the superb assurance that belonged to those who were young at this time, and came of their class and country. These young men were splendid, and died in their full splendor, which never knew modification.

(To be continued)