"Let's go and play the new golf," said James.

Now as I understand it there are four kinds of golf. First, the ordinary
golf, as played by all people who are not quite right in their heads;
second, the ideal golf, to be played by me (but not till I get to
heaven) on a bowling-green with a croquet-mallet, the holes being
sixty-six feet apart and both cutting-in and going-through strictly
prohibited; third, the absurd golf, as played by James in pre-war days
on his private nine-hole course; and fourth, it seemed, the new golf,
such as James would be liable to create during a recovery from
shell-shock.

James is one of those people who, possessing what _Country Life_ would
call one of the lesser country-houses of England, has an indeterminate
bit of ground beyond the garden, called, according to choice of costume,
"the rock-garden," "the home-farm," "the grouse moor," or "no rubbish
may be shot here." James calls his own particular nettle-bed (or slag
heap) "the golf-course."

When anyone went to stay with James, he was adjured to
"bring-your-golf-clubs-old-man-as-I-can-give
-you-a-bit-of-a-game-on-my-own-course-only-a-nine-hole-one-you
understand." And when James went--far more willingly--to stay opposite
the Germans, until an interesting visit was short-circuited by
shell-shock, he showed himself so wonderfully at home in dug-outs and
shell-holes and mine-craters, so completely undisturbed by the weariful
lack of any green on the course over which his battalion was playing,
that he rose from Second-Lieutenant to Lieutenant with almost unheard-of
celerity in the space of two years and nine months. And now the absurd
figure-of-eight nine-hole course, the third hole of which was also the