Dr. Sanford hunted in his desk and found a telegraph blank, and rapidly in his fine, small hand which was suggestive of his mental self-possession when he had a pen between his fingers, he wrote:
"Yes, by Jehovah, fight if your heart is in the cause and you are not fighting for fighting's sake."
After Mrs. Sanford, who had been sitting very still, had read it she nodded. The decision was made. It takes such occasions as this to prove that fortitude still survives in quiet people who live on quiet village streets.
Before going to bed Dr. Sanford wrote to the vicar of Truckleford:
"It has been our aim to teach Phil self-reliance and to decide for himself. He is going to fight for the same kind of a cause that the ancestor fought for, this time with the British. He is very far away from us, but we are happy to think that he will have a second home with you."
He showed the letter to Mrs. Sanford, who approved it.
As soon as Phil received the cable he moved on the War Office. As he approached that enormous pile of stone he felt his inconsequence and quizzically wondered if anybody had ever laughed inside its solemn halls. Would the General whom Phil had met on the train see him? An august person who attended at the door allowed him to write his name on a slip of paper, and after a while a messenger conducted him to the General's office, through the long, gloomy corridors, which seemed to protest against the activity which the war had brought.
The General was doing the work of five men because there were so few officers who knew how to do that kind of work and trying, English fashion, not to make any show of it, in order to preserve his appearance of poise and leisureliness. He asked Phil what his training had been and then stepped into an adjoining room, where he spoke to another general. The door had been left open, so that the other general could look over the slim figure, with its well-moulded features, which stood awaiting the result.
"Rather got me, his wanting to fight, so different from the usual soldier of fortune type," he said. "Nice chap, well set up, from one of the great American colleges. Just the man for the guns. That attaché fellow said he came from good old stock, which you can see for yourself."
He returned, after the other general had written the name of Philip Sanford on a sheet of paper, to say that Philip Sanford would be gazetted a second lieutenant of artillery. They were making second lieutenants rapidly at the War Office in those days. Phil did not know anything about guns, but, then, he knew as much as many other second lieutenants of artillery.