Sir Walter criticized his own work pretty freely. In his final letters before he went on his luckless journey to Baghdad he gives an occasional amusing summary of the book. “The whole book is like Blindman’s Buff,” he wrote just before he sailed. “You catch some one and feel his face and guess at him. No doubt you are sometimes too complimentary to an ugly fellow, and then the others who are not blinded laugh in their sleeves. Sometimes you say what every one else had thought without saying it.” Or this:

“The book, especially in the parts that have given us trouble, is like a schoolboy’s cake—too rich in facts and not suited for quantitative reading. Still it’s better than soothing syrup or thin gruel.” And finally in his letter to me forwarding Chapter VI heavily corrected, “Some authors seem to expect fame. I shall be satisfied with forgiveness.”

II

I shall remember him best pushing open the door. He always came in in the same way. A gentle tap, a slight fumbling with the handle, and the door would open and he would be there, slightly bent, because of his great height, a smile of welcome on his fine face, the collar of his inside coat sticking out above his outer coat. He would pause for just a moment as if to take in the occupants of the room, and then he would come quickly forward to shake hands, and at once his rapid, witty, bubbling conversation would flow. His conversation was brilliant. You listened amazed. Barely had you caught one choice bit of wisdom before he was off on another. It was bewildering. When he was gone you sometimes tried to recall them. Impossible! He seemed to await with you his next effort. As it shaped itself in his mind and fell almost at once from his lips he would sometimes look at you, hold you with his eyes for a second as if to say, “Are you getting that?—I’m getting it,” and then when he saw you had, you would both break into laughter. He stood, it almost seemed, on one side and enjoyed with you his other self.

It would be vain to attempt to reconstruct his conversation. His gestures, the moods which passed across his face as he spoke, the play with his enormous pipe—all these are essential to a true appreciation of his talk. He would be talking. The pipe is out. Out comes a box of matches. He strikes one and applies it to his pipe. As the flame touches the bowl, a thought strikes him. The thought will not keep. Off he goes into conversation, holding the match until he is reminded of its presence when it burns down to his fingers. He strikes another and the same thing happens again. After he had sat smoking and talking in the office for a morning, the grate would be full of charred match-ends, silent, derelict victims of his bubbling thoughts. He might want to illustrate his anecdotes. Before one realized the fact he was off up and down the room in martial stride showing his idea of the goose step, or else he would dive for his hat to show a type of headgear that his wife considered to be inadequate to the dignity of a professor about to visit Egypt. Through his eyes one could understand most things. His vision, his judgment, his sympathy and his experience were all at your service. He touched all the emotions and left you bewildered but infinitely grateful for his company. He loved his visits to London because he got talk with all kinds of people. This he could not get at Oxford, where, he jokingly remarked, he saw the War in the Air from a bottle.

Some time in January on one of his visits to London we fell to discussing the lay-out for the second volume. Our conversation ranged over all the various theatres of war. We lingered on the East, because it attracted him. We mutually regretted that the signing of the armistice had stopped a visit which he was to have made to the flying fronts of the Middle East. He felt he ought to see it. The first volume was out of the way. The Easter vacation was coming. Why not go then? I told him I thought there would be every service help for him once he got there. The thing was tentatively fixed. I telephoned the steamship company and retained a passage in the S.S. Egypt—ill-fated vessel. We discussed the itinerary and then passed to other subjects. I had misgivings. Not that I thought he was too old to undertake the journey, but because I knew how tireless and conscientious he was. I felt that he might be too vigorous, that it might take too much out of him and so leave him weak for disease. But I knew also that his visit would be enormously useful because it would make all the difference to the spirit of the history of the Middle East. The journey to France had supplied the cream of his first volume. The journey East would do the same for the rest of the work. Not that it was any good pointing out the difficulties and drawbacks of the journey. I did try something of that sort. “Adventures must be done, my boy,” was his reply. He had gone to India soon after leaving Cambridge. In India he had been attracted to Baghdad. He tried to get there by caravan. He had to wait until he could get there by aeroplane.

Every facility was given him by the Air Ministry (although he paid for the journey himself). He wrote to tell me that the thing was fixed. “I had a letter from the General, enclosing a copy of a letter he has sent to W. G. Salmond, asking for every facility for me—beyond anything I should have asked or hoped.

“So I wired you for the bunk—a complete room at the extra charge (of £18 I think)....

“When I come up I hope you may be able to fit me out with maps to use from the air, and with some things to read preparatory.

“It’s a good (mild) adventure. Thank you immensely for the dates, etc.