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retired to the ranks of the Royal Air Force in time of peace to write
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, but it was no eccentricity to me. I know of no mode of life that permits such mental leisure, such time for reflection, except perhaps the monastery or prison. Looking back on it, I think that those months spent in the ranks were better for me ultimately than if I had spent the last months of the war mentally strained by the responsibilities of an officer who takes his job seriously.
    I was a cheerful, competent young soldier in the Isle of Grain when to our wonder the war ended, on November11th 1918. I had not then acquired a taste for beer but practically everyone else in my hut had, and I had a busy time looking after my friends on that Armistice night. I remember leading one of them outside to micturate and vomit, and the words he used to celebrate the coming of Peace. He said,
    “If my wife was to see me now, do you know what she’d say?”
    “You’re all right,” I told him. “Anyhow, what
would
she say?”
    There was a long pause. Then he pronounced portentously, “She’d say, ‘You blackguard!’ ”

2
    WITH THE ENDING OF THE WAR, considerable mental readjustments were necessary for all young men. For four years of my adolescence I had lived in a world that was growing steadily bleaker and grimmer, and in that four years I had grown to accept the fact that in a very short time I should probably be dead. I cannot remember any particular resentment at this prospect; indeed, in some ways it was even stimulating. It has puzzled many people to imagine how the Japanese produced their Kamikazes, or suicide pilots, in the last war. It has never been much of a puzzle to me, however; in 1918 anybody could have made a Kamikaze pilot out of me.
    In the Isle of Grain after the Armistice, therefore, I had to readjust my ideas considerably, and readjust them to the fact that there was a strange stuff called fun to be got out of life. Whatever capricious Fate decides the course of one’s life was careful in my case to see that the transition to fun didn’t come too suddenly, because my introduction to the merry new world opening before me was by way of a series of funerals. At that time there was a terrible epidemic of influenza ravaging the country, and men and women were dying of it all over England. Deaths in the army became so numerous that my battalion was ordered to provide a permanent funeral party to tour round Kent with a gun carriage and a dozen specially drilled men to conduct military funerals. I was drafted into this party and became proficient in the grand, sweeping motion ofreversing arms, and in the moving collapse that follows on the only order in the army that is not given in a tone of command—“Rest on your arms reversed.” The Dead March still brings back memories to me of pleasant excursions through Kent by train or truck, freed from the pressure of military training and with a new, unknown, and glamorous world opening before me.
    At the end of that war demobilisation was in order of jobs and not on length of service, and in that unjust system students were the first to be demobilised. My father was anxious that I should go to Oxford and I was willing enough, only stipulating that I should take Engineering, since my mind was firmly upon aeroplanes. My father canvassed opinion amongst his friends on the prospects for Oxford or Cambridge engineers. Somebody who must have been particularly well informed told him that he had never known one of them to fail to succeed in life, but not as an engineer. I think that there may be some truth in that still.
    Accordingly two or three weeks after the Armistice I got leave from my funeral party and travelled up to Oxford to be interviewed by the Master of Balliol, A. L. Smith. My military service totalled just over a year, which excused me from matriculation, ‘Divers’, or any examination whatsoever till my Finals at the close of my university career, and this