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‘You can’t get there without a special military permit – you can’t get anywhere in fact.’
    â€˜How do you get, old boy?’ queried one more quietly than the rest.
    â€˜White pass – on business,’ came the curt reply, with a wink to help it out.
    â€˜He is one of the chiefs,’ concluded my guide. ‘His car can go anywhere.’ I made a mental note that it was desirable to cultivate chiefs with white passes, if I wanted to see life. This one paid not the slightest attention to me – next-door neighbour and newcomer though I was – so I gave him up.
    In a few minutes I was on my way along the sea front to the lesser glory of the local headquarters, my new home. In happier days an artist from Paris had built it for himself, with its wide windows looking far across the English Channel and its red roof snugly sheltered by warm wooden gables. He had left his tapestries and his old Norman china for us, plus the minimum of furniture and that of a highly artistic and rather uncomfortable kind. 1 We called it ‘The School’ out of compliment to the work we did in it and our motto was ‘We live and learn.’ Never was a truer device for the next – all too short – six months we had the luck to stay in it. What a merry life it was and what a gay one, and what strange wisdom we learned in the ‘best school of all’.
    The Chief, tall, dark with twinkling brown eyes, awaited me in his study. 2 ‘So glad you have come,’ he remarked to me over a litter of papers on his desk. ‘You are the star turn allotted to this area. I understand you are capable of teaching up to the Greats standard in Oxford. I shall put it in Base Routine Orders straight away. English and French I suppose, up to any standard you like.’
    By this time the 24-hours’ journey, the cross-questionings and the lunch were beginning to take effect on me, and I wanted nothing but sleep, and up to now nobody had ever mentioned where I was going to do that. Perhaps it was like London, I reflected, and it hadn’t occurred to anyone I would need to. Anyway, the recital of my qualifications now ‘put the lid on!’ I conjured up a vision of rows and rows of troops, all athirst for knowledge and finding out what a fraud I was. But the Chief was finishing. ‘Miss Mordaunt will take you now to the Coq d’Or. I have engaged a room for you there.’
    The Lady of the Lovely Hair – for so we always called her – was before me. Showers and showers of golden hair neatly tucked away, keen blue eyes, and capability in every inch of her figure, characterised Miss Mordaunt. Ability to get what she wanted under every possible circumstance, was one of her lesser charms. The landlady of the Coq d’Or was firm and uncompromising. ‘ Pas d’eau chaude. Que voulez-vous? C’est la guerre .’ [‘There’s no hot water. What do you want? There’s a war on.’]
    I began to think we should be beaten. But not so Miss Mordaunt. ‘Get into bed,’ she said. ‘I have a Tommy cooker and we’ll get a hot-water bottle straight away.’ 3 I needed no second bidding and, grimy, tired, travel worn, anything but a star turn, I fell sound asleep with Miss Mordaunt’s hot-water bottle clasped in my arms. Time and again since then it has been her fate to find me ‘down and out’ as on that first day and to send me straight to bed. Across the world as she is today, I doubt it never can happen again.
    And then work began in real earnest. At least, it would have, if within a week the Armistice had not stepped in. I knew it first by the bonne bursting into my bedroom with the shrill cry ‘1870 is avenged!’ The tumult in the street outside was an echo of her words. A statue of France with a broken sword stood there down in the public square below me, in memory of 1870, and round it all day long surged cheering