e-room fire
in the South Western Hotel. We were all talking about the war, and all
wishing that we were out in the thick of it. In the midst of this chorus
of aspiration a telegram was handed to me inviting me to go to South
Africa as a war correspondent for the _Manchester Guardian_. The chorus
continued while I read, but it sounded far away; I was trying to realise
what acquiescence in the request contained on the pink paper might mean.
When I had decided I handed the telegram to my neighbour, and in a
moment it had made the circuit of the group, trailing exclamations in
its wake and changing the melancholy chorus to one of whole-hearted
envy. I went to bed in some doubt as to whether I had received
congratulations or condolences. In a few hours I was on my way to
London; in a few days the flying wheels had carried me back to
Southampton; but I thought that the busy docks wore a different face.

PART II

IN THE WAKE OF THE ARMY

IV

THE LONG SEA ROAD

In the terms of the street, you make for Madeira from the Needles as
straight as Ushant and Finisterre will permit, keep to the left until
you catch the flare of the solitary light on Cape Verde, go on past that
for about ten days, and Cape Town is the last place on the left. In the
terms of the sea, your course is west-south-west until the Bay is open,
then south-south-west, then south, and then south by east a half-east
for the long stretch. But for most of us the way to the war lay through
a stranger region than that. Years ago (as it seems) on a rainy winter
evening, we watched the buoys of the Solent Channel streaming past us
all aslope on the strong ebb-tide, and as the Trinity Brothers began to
open their eyes for an all-night watch on the south coast, we closed
ours to the world behind.

A day and night of dust and tumble in the Bay, and we awoke on a summer
morning to find the wind blowing softly through the open ports and the
water chiming on the ship's side. After that we lived in a world all our
own; ourselves the sum and centre of it; a blue world that slid through
degrees of latitude and longitude, but held us, its inhabitants, at ever
the same distance from realities. The past was miles away at the end of
the white path astern; the future did not yet so much as smudge the
forward horizon; we were adrift, lost in the present.

Since we were, for the most part, Englishmen, we played games. At first
we had walked about eyeing one anothe