Show description

You would have laughed if you could have seen the way I spent my time. I was so angry with my ill‐health that I liked to keep on reminding myself of the days when I had been at the top of my form. I remember I made out a complete record of my mountaineering exploits, working them out with diagrams from maps and old diaries, and telling myself furiously that what I had once done I could do again. .  I turned up the cram books for the Bar exams, and the notes I had taken in my early days in chambers, and the reports of my first cases.

My life was rather feverish during the last weeks of the campaign, for I was chief staff‐officer to my division, and we were never much out of the line. Then, as you know, I nearly came by my end in September, when the Boche made quite a good effort in the way of a gas attack.  Luckily it didn‘t do me any permanent harm, but my complexion will be greenery‐yallery till the day of my death.  It took me some days to get my head clear and take notice, and then, one morning, I observed the man in the bed next to me.

Folliot returned to his Times. “Shelley has died in his bed, which is perhaps more than he deserved.  After that the subject passed from my mind.  It would have been a difficult job to select, and I daresay I should have slipped into overwork, had I not been made a Law Officer.  In May I was my normal self, and when Vernon returned to England in June he found me eating, sleeping, and working as in the old days—a fitter man, indeed, than in 1914, for the war seemed to have drawn off the grosser humours of middle life.