In himself he was the ordinary normal man about town, no prude,
but straight as a man can be in his debts, his love affairs, his
friendships, and his sport. Then came the war. He did brilliantly at
Mons, was wounded twice, went out to Gallipoli, had a touch of
Palestine, and returned to France again to share in Foch's final
triumph.
No man can possibly have had more of the war than he had, and it is my
own belief that he had just a little too much of it.
He had been always perhaps a little "queer," as we are most of us
"queer" somewhere, and the horrors of that horrible war undoubtedly
affected him. Finally he lost, just a week before the armistice, one of
his best friends, Ross McLean, a loss from which he certainly never
recovered.
I have now, I think, brought together all the incidents that can throw
any kind of light upon the final scene. In the middle of 1919 he
retired from the army, and it was from this time to his death that I
saw something of him. He went back to his old home at Horton's in Duke
street, and as I was living at that time in Marlborough Chambers in
Jermyn street we were in easy reach of one another.
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